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Veteran environmental activist Sylvia McLaughlin listens as Berkeley developer James D. Levine pitches his project to build a casino at Richmond’s Point Molate.
By Richard Brenneman
Veteran environmental activist Sylvia McLaughlin listens as Berkeley developer James D. Levine pitches his project to build a casino at Richmond’s Point Molate.
 

News

Downtown Plan, West Berkeley Top Commissioners’ Agenda

By Richard Brenneman
Monday December 01, 2008 - 04:20:00 PM

Planning commissioners meet Wednesday night to take up agenda items sidelined at their Nov. 19 by debate over proposed revisions to Berkeley’s cell phone antenna regulations. 

The special session, which begins at 7 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave., will focus on West Berkeley and the Downtown Area Plan’s key chapter—Land Use. 

The downtown plan, first drafted over the course of two years by a 21-member citizen panel augmented by three members of the commission, is being rewritten by a commission much friendlier to taller buildings than the majority of the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee (DAPAC). 

Both the DAPAC and commission drafts will go the to city council for consideration and adoption before the end of May—a deadline imposed by the settlement of a city lawsuit challenging UC Berkeley’s extensive off-campus building plans for the city center. 

The land use chapter was the most controversial during DAPAC’s deliberations, with the majority calling for a lower profile than that favored by members of the planning commission majority. 

Commissioners will also review potential conflicts between the Downtown and Southside plans for a small part of downtown Berkeley that is included in both area plans. The section is at the southeastern corner of the Downtown planning area and the westernmost tip of the Southside planning area. City planning staff proposes that it be divided, with the larger section regulated by the Southside Plan and the smaller by the Downtown Plan.  

Another politically charged issue is the set of revisions to zoning that have been sought by developers to ease restrictions in the west Berkeley Area Plan. 

City staff had initially dubbed the project to revise the zoning ordinance “West Berkeley Flexibility,” but tossed the term after it proved a lightning rod for concerns of small industrial companies and artists who fear being displaced from their last affordable haven in the city. 

Wednesday night’s agenda calls for commissioners to discuss the latest staff report and give their directions for further action. 

The agenda, with links to staff reports and the land use chapter, is available online at: http://www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ContentDisplay.aspx?id=30350 


Planners Won’t Approve Cell Tower Revisions

By Richard Brenneman
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:30:00 AM

Planning commissioners have refused to endorse a staff-prepared set of amendments to the city statutes governing placement of cell phone antennas. 

A motion made by David Stoloff at their Nov. 19 meeting to recommend that the City Council should adopt a 13-page revised ordinance died for lack of a second. 

Stoloff, Mayor Tom Bates’ appointee to the commission, then voted with an 8-1 majority to approve commission Chair James Samuel’s motion for the commission simply to forward the document to the council, with the recommendation that when they finish their examination, they should send it back to the commission for further work. 

Only Roia Ferrazares voted in opposition. 

The proposed revisions were drafted by Deputy Planning Director Wendy Cosin and acting City Attorney Zack Cowan. 

Cosin said she is obliged to present amendments to the city’s Wireless Telecommunications Facilities Ordinance to the City Council so that they can consider them by Jan. 20. 

That date was imposed in a so-called “secret settlement agreement” reached in May that ended a Verizon Wireless lawsuit against the city filed by cell phone carriers after the city rejected applications to install more of the controversial facilities on three sites on Shattuck Avenue. 

Commissioners Patti Dacey and Gene Poschman had pushed for disclosure of the document, which dealt mostly with the three cell tower sites and only devoted two lines to the agreement that the council would “consider” revisions. 

Much of the Wednesday night hearing was devoted to testimony from neighbors who have been critical of concentrating cell phone antennas on single sites, such as those located at the UC Storage building and planned for the French Hotel on opposite ends of Shattuck Avenue. 

“We had a long discussion, and we concluded that, in terms of the amount of time already spent and the knowledge of detail already developed, the Planning Commission was the knowledgeable place to examine the proposal,” said Poschman. “The 8-1 decision was a good outcome.” 

Cosin had cited the settlement agreement and a district court decision as key reasons for adopting a proposal before sending it to the council, but the language of the agreement once it had been produced as well as a subsequent federal appeals court ruling overturning the decision she had cited apparently convinced the commission majority to rejection Stoloff’s motion. 

One of the key provisions of a San Diego cell phone law upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals but rejected by the lower court allows city government to decide on antenna placement. 

That decision upholds one of the key issues raised by neighbors and the Berkeley Neighborhood Antenna-Free Union, which has sued the city seeking to overturn the decision that allowed placement of 11 antennas atop the UC Storage building. 

That lawsuit continues in Alameda County Superior Court.


City’s Verizon Settlement Proves a Minor Embarrassment

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:31:00 AM

While the City of Berkeley-Verizon Wireless “secret settlement agreement” is hardly likely to reach the notoriety of the infamous City of Berkeley-UC Berkeley “secret deal” of 2006, confusion over the Verizon settlement—if, in fact, it is actually a legal settlement—appears to be causing some momentary embarrassment among Berkeley City officials. 

The Verizon settlement agreement came to general public attention during a Nov. 18 City Council meeting in which the council considered hearing an appeal of a Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) approval of a ten antenna cell phone facility at 1540 Shattuck Ave. 

The council eventually voted to hold a hearing on the appeal. 

In the background section of the staff report on the issue, Planning and Development Director Daniel Marks wrote, “On August 8, 2007, Verizon filed a lawsuit challenging the city’s processing of applications for three wireless telecommunications, including (1540 Shattuck). As a part of a stipulation to stay and potentially dismiss this litigation, the City of Berkeley and Verizon agreed that the City would act on the Verizon application at 1540 Shattuck Avenue within eight (8) months of Verizon paying the remaining deposit fees for the noise and engineering analysis. The settlement does not dictate how the City must act, but requires final action (including all appeals), and provides that if the City does not act by the deadline, it would be considered an unreasonable delay under the Telecommunications Act. Verizon paid the required deposits on May 8, 2008, so the deadline for final City action is January 8, 2009.” 

Acting City Attorney Zach Cowan told councilmembers at the Nov. 18 meeting that the proposed agreement was brought to council in a special Monday evening closed session on May 12. A review last week of the online agenda for that closed meeting shows that discussion of the Verizon-City of Berkeley lawsuit was one of two items agendized. 

A review of the online videotape of the public portion of that meeting shows that while three Councilmembers were not in attendance—Laurie Capitelli, Betty Olds, and Kriss Worthington—a quorum was present. 

A copy of the Stipulation Regarding Stay Of Action in the Verizon-Berkeley case was included in a packet of information submitted by city staff to the Planning Commission for the Nov. 5 meeting in which the commission was considering amendments to the city’s Wireless Telecommunication Facilities Ordinance. The text of that stay of action, which was signed by attorneys for Verizon and the City of Berkeley on May 20 and placed into order by the U.S. District Court of Northern California the following day, agrees with the background information submitted to the Nov. 18 council meeting by Marks. 

To this point, the agreement and subsequent ZAB and City Council actions all seemed fairly straightforward. 

But during the Nov. 18 meeting, Worthington complained that city officials had never seen any minutes from the May 12 closed City Council meeting, which presumably would have included any report on ratification of the settlement agreement that showed up eight days later in the Stipulation Regarding Stay Of Action in federal court in the case. Worthington requested copies of the minutes of the meeting including a the resulting vote on the settlement agreement, adding that failure to report out such results was a violation of California’s open government Brown Act. 

In response, Cowan told Worthington that the minutes of the May 12 meeting were online on the city’s website, and that they “indicate that you [Worthington] were not at that meeting.” Cowan added that because “there was no reportable action at that meeting with respect to this case … there’s nothing in the publicly available minutes about it.” 

When Worthington protested that the city routinely reports out the ratification of settlement agreements from closed sessions, Cowan said that “settlement agreements are only reportable if that’s the last action to be taken. That was not the case here.”  

He would not elaborate, only telling Worthington that “had you been at the closed council session, you’d understand what I was talking about.” 

The Brown Act allows a public body to withhold information on closed door ratification of a settlement if the opposing party has not yet signed off on the settlement. It may have been the case here that Verizon had not yet signed off on the settlement as of the May 12 closed Council meeting. However, Cowan did not explain to councilmembers why the Verizon-City of Berkeley settlement was not formally and publicly disclosed to the City Council until the Nov. 18 meeting, six months after both Verizon and attorneys representing the City of Berkeley formally entered into the settlement. 

But here the issue becomes a little more confusing, as city officials have been massaging the public record of the May 12 meeting over the last two weeks. 

In a telephone interview this week, Worthington said that after he saw the background material for the Nov. 18 meeting, both he and his two council staff members checked the city website for the results of the May 12 closed council meeting. There was a second council meeting held on May 12, a special open meeting on the Helios EIR certification held following the closed session meeting. Worthington said that when he checked on the minutes for the closed session meeting prior to Nov. 18, those minutes were a copy of the following open meeting, and not of the closed session. 

Following the Nov. 18 council meeting, a Daily Planet reporter working on a story for that meeting accessed the May 12 online closed session minutes. At that point, the reporter noted that the online minutes were identical to the posted agenda, listing only the items to be discussed in the closed session, but not the result. 

This week, in preparation for this story, the reporter called the Berkeley City Clerk’s office to obtain minutes from the May 12 closed session council meeting. When told the May 12 date, an unidentified office worker answering the telephone at the clerk’s office said “there’s something about that date that’s familiar. I think they [the online minutes] are being worked on now.” 

A half hour later, a review of the online minutes on the City of Berkeley website for the May 12 closed session meeting showed that they now state “no reportable action taken” in the “Action” section following the discussion on the Verizon-City of Berkeley litigation. The minutes, however, mistakenly list all of the Councilmembers as present at that closed session, although the accompanying online video shows three councilmembers absent. And to date, city officials have never formally reported out council approval of the agreement, including the actual listing of the Councilmember votes. 

In the end, the confusion over public release the Verizon-City of Berkeley settlement agreement will probably cause little stir, largely because the agreement did not require City Council to take a specific action—yes or no—on the Verizon cell phone tower application, only to take such action within an eight-month period. 

With a hearing on the Verizon application for 1540 Shattuck Ave. scheduled for next month, and a Council decision mandatory for the night of that hearing, the council and the city will be in compliance with that agreement. Still, the incident has proven to be an embarrassment to city officials, at least for the time being. 


Levine Pitches Casino Plan To East Bay Park Supporters

By Richard Brenneman
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:31:00 AM
Veteran environmental activist Sylvia McLaughlin listens as Berkeley developer James D. Levine pitches his project to build a casino at Richmond’s Point Molate.
By Richard Brenneman
Veteran environmental activist Sylvia McLaughlin listens as Berkeley developer James D. Levine pitches his project to build a casino at Richmond’s Point Molate.

“Bob said that for us, this is like walking into a lion’s den,” said the man who hopes to become the casino czar of Richmond. 

And last Wednesday night’s meeting of Citizens for Eastshore Parks (CESP) did feature some growling and snapping, though none by Robert Cheasty, the group’s president and the “Bob” mentioned by James D. Levine. 

But in the end, Levine had presented park advocates with an offer he hopes they can’t refuse: Give us your support, and we’ll give you something you want in return. 

That something, he said, just might be the acquisition of more open space for parkland “within 10 miles” of the existing park, “and some of these opportunities will not be available afterwards.” 

Besides, he said, “Being progressive is about doing things, not just saying them.” 

The Richmond City Council picked Levine to develop the former naval refueling station at Point Molate, where he plans a billion-dollar casino-centered resort that, he promises, will herald the economic salvation of one of the Bay Area’s most troubled cities. 

A former state environmental regulator turned private consultant and now reincarnated as a developer, Levine has been promising to revitalize Richmond’s struggling economy, provide jobs for its job-starved youth and build California’s greenest-ever development—a $1.68 billion dollar project designed to lure Asian tourists, especially the bet-a-million “whales” so coveted by the gaming palaces across the Nevada border. 

Levine said the plans he and the Guidivilles were proposing would fulfill Richmond’s mandate for “the one opportunity they were given to transform the economy of the city itself,” spinning off hundreds of million in new revenues and creating hundreds of new jobs for the city’s poorest youth. 

But some, like Richmond activist Charles T. Smith and Carol Fall, were not convinced. 

“I don’t care if it’s the greenest thing in the world,” Smith said. “The real issue here is that it’s about robbing people of their hard-earned money in that casino.” 

Smith, a long-time community activist, said he and 300 others had just worked for months to create another source of revenue for the city by their successful campaign to pass Measure T in the Nov. 4 general election, imposing a new business tax he said will generate up to $26 million in new revenues for the city, $16 million from Chevron alone. 

Smith said he was also worried because tribes possess sovereign immunity, and can simply order critics off their property “if they don’t like what you’re doing.” 

“I’ve heard you do a lot of these presentations,” said Carol Fall to Levine. “You’re always telling people this is going to save Richmond, but studies always show that casinos are very detrimental to the community.” 

But Levine said detrimental effects were limited to casinos that don’t rely on high rollers, the clientele he and his partners are targeting.  

To CESP, he was making his pitch to his staunchest opponents, environmental activists who had long hoped to transform one of the Bay Area’s last relatively undeveloped stretches of urban shoreline into a park and wildlife haven. 

While Levine promised them both, some skepticism was evident in questions that followed his pitch. 

 

Twice green 

In order “to create a draw strong enough to create thousands of jobs” and revive the city’s economy, Levine said, “we determined that in fact if we were to create a five-star-standard resort like Pebble Beach, we would draw enough world tourism so that it would enhance the economy.” 

Besides the green that flows over the blackjack tables, Levine promised another kind of green, one more suited to his audience. 

He promised green building technology, complete with biofuel-powered ferries, solar-roofed condos and solar-heated water, recycled rainwater and the plight of a landless and long-exploited tribe whose women had been reduced to mopping the floors and cleaning the kitchens of East Bay homeowners. 

The casino would also become a mechanism for creating social justice, a vehicle for ending “150 years of despair” for a long-neglected tribe. 

Deprived of recognition in 1859 in a deal in which they were promised but never paid $254,000, the Guidivilles sued for restoration of their tribal status in 1987, winning recognition in a settlement four years later. 

And to reestablish their reservation, Levine said, “Congress gave them one mechanism, Indian gaming.” 

Approval of the tribe’s application to have the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs take the land into trust to build a casino could come as soon as late next year, Levine said. 

(Levine, like most casino advocates dating back to the founding of the Nevada Gaming Association, always uses the word “gaming” to define the business, a semantic equation of slot machines with PlayStations and Xboxes, rather than the more precise but grittier “gambling” to describe what goes on in casinos.) 

The other sort of green will come, he said from payments to the city of $450 million over 20 years to cover the costs of the site and public service mitigation costs, while the casino, hotels, shopping center and planned green condos would be churning out up to $275 million annually in state compact fees, state and federal income taxes on new jobs and sales and real estate taxes generated by new employees. 

Another set of beneficiaries, he said, would be “people who are killing each other in the Iron Triangle,” young African American men “whose grandparents won World War II.” 

Only his project would offer them jobs, as well as support for programs like RichmondWORKS [CQ] that trained them in their new skills, he claimed. 

 

Preservation 

The casino is a preservationist’s delight, restoring 34 of the 35 buildings that won the site a place on the National Register of Historic Places. The resort’s 2,500-seat performance hall, “the equivalent of Zellerbach Hall” at UC Berkeley, would provide Richmond its only live entertainment venue. 

The casino itself would be housed in the centerpiece of the historic district, the Winehaven Building, a stately brick edifice adorned with crenelated faux battlements that once housed the largest single wine enterprise in the state until Prohibition came along. 

But while he predicted Richmond’s residents would flock to the resort for entertainment, he promised the less affluent “won’t gamble their milk money” because the targeted clientele for the green felt tables and the gleaming banks of slot machines are all folks who make upwards of $100,000 a year. 

For CESP and others in the environmental community, he promises 145 acres of open space, all placed in a binding conservation easement, including 55 acres of shoreline park, with protected habitat for threatened species, along with “perpetual funding for all the park and open space.” 

The project’s budget includes $10 million just to clear out invasive plant species and restore the site to its native habitat, Levine said. 

More greening would come from a donation to the city which would fund and plant 2,000 trees a year for a decade. 

There was still more greening for public transit advocates, including a plan to use empty seats on the Marin County and Vallejo ferries to transport 5,000 resort visitors a day “for no additional fuel for greenhouse gas.” 

Even the room keys are to be green, with the card system automatically dousing the lights when guests leave the quarters to go out to play. Much of the electricity they do burn will come from the two to three megawatts of solar power generated at the site. 

Another voltage killer will be found in the casino, which unlike all but one other “gaming” spa, will be daylit—as will all other parts of the resort. Casinos typically lack both windows and clock, both reminders of the passage of time. 

Even the Point Molate bedrock will assist in the greening, he said, through “a system of passive heating and cooling using rock storage.” 

Shuttles will transfer gamblers and other visitors to and from BART, and Levine said he has talked with AC Transit about increased service to bring Richmond residents to and from their jobs at Point Molate. 

 

Harrah’s ungreen? 

Levine said, “We fired Harrah’s,” their earlier partner in the project, “because when we said we wanted to make this the greenest project ever” and use it to create jobs for Richmond’s jobless, “they looked at us as though we were crazy.” 

Their new bankroll comes from another tribe, the Rumsey Band of Wintun Indians, which owns and runs the Cache Creek casino in Yolo County. 

“We have a $300 million joint venture agreement with Rumsey,” he said, and the tribe has signed onto the green agenda. The remainder of the billion dollar budget will come from construction loans which could be raised “within a month or two” once federal regulators greenlight the project. 

Levine said his green vision was shared by the priests of Richmond’s two major Catholic parishes, who he said have endorsed his vision, “and the Baptist churches have endorsed—and that’s not what they teach in Sunday School.” 

Levine also said he’d also won support from the East Bay Regional Parks District, “because we all felt we had more to get by working together,” with the district to be given a role in managing both the parkland on the reservation and the Bay Trail extension through the site. 

“That may be overstating the case,” said another individual close to the negotiations who spoke on condition of anonymity. 

And should CESP chose to negotiate for their share in the casino riches, Levine said, “I could come with a team of people, and we could come up with a whole palette of things that could be extracted.” 

He didn’t get a firm rejection, but veteran park activists like Sylvia McLaughlin weren’t smiling during his presentation. 

“If we didn’t have a whole lot of people like you running around opposing us, a lot of things would be possible,” said Levine. “Sorry for being so direct.” 

In the end, CESP Chair Robert Cheasty appointed CESP Executive Director Patricia Dawn Smith and board member and Sierra Club attorney Norman LaForce to consider any proposal from Levine and his colleagues. 

The 110 Guidivilles and their already wealthy partners at Cache Creek will be watching closely, as will Levine. 


Richmond Casino Could Reject Lawsuits by Claiming Immunity

By Richard Brenneman
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:32:00 AM

Will Richmond allow a sovereign nation to build an enclave in their city, a state-within-a-city that possesses diplomatic immunity from California’s civil courts? 

Asked that question, neither developer James D. Levine nor a representative of the Guidiville Rancheria band of Pomos offered any reassurances that the tribe would give anyone injured as a result of activities at the casino or actions by casino employees recourse to any legal forum. 

Michael Derry, the tribe’s economic development specialist, would only allow that injured parties might have recourse to tribal courts—in other words, courts comprised of individuals with a direct, personal financial interest in the casino itself, something that would bar a judge or a juror from deciding a case in state court. 

That the question is more than merely hypothetical was raised in a precedent-setting decision handed down Nov. 14 by federal appellate justices in San Francisco. 

Their decision dismissed a case brought by Christopher Cook, who lost a leg and suffered other near-fatal injuries when he was hit early on the morning of May 25, 2003, by an intoxicated casino employee as she drove into the oncoming lane on the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation. 

She had been drinking at the casino with a supervisor’s blessing and had been taken to a parking lot shuttle by another casino worker. 

The driver’s blood alcohol was measured at 0.247 percent more than two hours after the collision—putting her at more than three times the legal limit.  

Maimed for life and suffering from what a three-member panel of judges of the U.S. Ninth District Court of Appeals called “catastrophic injuries,” Cook sued for damages and the costs of his care. 

The case was dismissed by the judges in a decision filed Nov. 14 in San Francisco. 

The reason was precisely the same legal rationale that allows nations to ban prosecution of accredited diplomats charged with crimes in countries where they are stationed: Sovereign immunity. 

“An Indian tribe or an unincorporated arm of a tribe is not a citizen of any state,” the justices wrote. So too under federal law, “a corporation is a citizen of the state by which it has been incorporated.” And if that “state” is a sovereign tribe, then “a sovereign can assert immunity” from litigation—just as did the Avi Casino Enterprises, Inc., in Cook’s lawsuit. 

The only limitation the court acknowledged was that a tribe must invoke immunity early in the legal process, before the plaintiffs “have invested substantial resources in a case.” 

The only way tribes can be sued is either through an immunity waiver by the tribe itself or through an act of Congress, the justices ruled. 

“The Supreme Court has somewhat grudgingly accepted tribal immunity in a commercial context,” the jurists noted, while leaving Congress the sole option to impose limits. 

The same immunity provisions apply to tribal employees, the justices wrote. 

And even while upholding the tribe’s right to invoke immunity, Justice Ronald M. Gould wrote: “I question whether that doctrine can be sensibly applied to actions wholly commercial in the gaming area where the tribe has undertaken to compete and provide services for the general public. In this sphere our law can be modified to ensure that the needs for justice for injured individuals limit the scope of the sovereign immunity doctrine engaged in commercial gaming activities.” 

While Levine’s initial proposal had Nevada-based corporate gambling giant Harrah’s as a partner to run casino operations, under a later agreement, the Point Molate casino will be run by another tribe, the Rumsey Band of Wintun Indians—which already owns and operates the Cache Creek Casino in Yolo County. 

They too would be immune from civil actions any time they choose to invoke their immunity. 

In his opinion concurring with the decision, Gould wrote, “I am sorry to say that the austerity of our jurisprudence concerning tribal sovereign immunity leaves me with the conclusion that an unjust result is reached which our law might better preclude.” 

The same legal standard would apply to the Sugar Bowl casino planned for North Richmond and at the already existing Casino San Pablo. 

The decision is available online at http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/ca9/newopinions.nsf/3F0291337F3AB4BE8825750100001B73/$file/0715088.pdf?openelement 

 

 


New Guidelines for Addison Windows Gallery

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:32:00 AM

The Berkeley Civic Arts Commission voted last Wednesday to approve new guidelines for the city-owned Addison Street Windows Gallery and introduced changes to the city’s contract with the gallery’s curator, Carol Brighton, following the public outcry that ensued when she rejected four posters from the national Art of Democracy series, citing curatorial judgment. 

The commission also discussed the possibility of hosting the show in the future. 

The political artwork was originally scheduled to be mounted on the gallery walls during election week but was canceled after the artists took offense at Brighton’s decision to not allow certain works and decided that the show would only go up in its entirety. 

Free speech supporters cried censorship, but Brighton and the city’s Civic Arts Coordinator Mary Ann Merker called it curatorial judgment, explaining that the decision was particular to the site, which was in the middle of an open downtown art district. 

The Planet reported on Nov. 6 that Brighton had informed Art Hazelwood, the organizer of the Art of Democracy series, in January that she would not show explicit sex or violence or images of guns since the gallery was open to the street and in the possible pathway of children. 

According to Merker, Hazelwood had agreed to Brighton’s guidelines, but when it was time to put up the work, he brought different work, including the four posters depicting guns, violence and weaponry which he had agreed not to show.  

Hazelwood said that although Brighton had told him of the guidelines prohibiting violence, he had assumed at the time he presented the completed set of posters to her that she would judge them on their merit instead of some “arbitrary guidelines.” 

Until last Wednesday, the city did not have any formal guidelines for the Addison Street Windows Gallery, which was started by the late Brenda Prager more than 10 years ago. 

“At the beginning I thought I was dealing with a curator who would look at work,” Hazelwood said. “At the end it turned out to be a simple act of censorship ... I am just the organizer. I left it to the artists to do whatever they wanted.” 

Brighton said Wednesday that Hazelwood had stated at a Civic Arts Commission meeting that he had deliberately misled her to make his point of censorship. Hazelwood said his actions had been more of an act of civil disobedience, and that the accusation had been taken out of context. He told the commission that his action in submitting the work was comparable to what Rosa Parks did in a public bus in Montgomery, Ala. 43 years ago. 

The National Coalition Against Censorship and the American Civil Liberties Union wrote to Mayor Tom Bates and the Berkeley City Council urging them to defend free expression and uphold Berkeley’s proud tradition of free speech. 

“While we sympathize with the city’s desire for a world without guns or violence, the decision to put a blanket ban on all art including guns is not only unproductive, it threatens to silence important political speech,” wrote Svetlana Mintcheva, director of NCAC’s arts program, in a Nov. 7 letter to Bates. “The recent incident involving the four Art of Democracy posters, which express strong views on U.S. foreign policy, is a clear example of the type of serious political expression that the ban can suppress. To suppress political speech, which enjoys the highest constitutional protection, a government venue has to have a significant interest—in security, public safety or the like.” 

Mintcheva went on to say that it was hard to see how the city could demonstrate such an interest given the guns and weaponry in war memorials, murals and film posters which anyone could see on streets all over the country, including one of Berkeley’s most iconic murals, the People’s History of Telegraph Avenue, which contains guns. 

“We all want to see fewer guns and less violence in the world, suppressing a discussion of violence just because it graphically refers to violence, would not accomplish that goal,” she said. 

Art of Democtacy organizers said that none of its more than 50 shows all over the country had faced any problem except in Berkeley. 

The ACLU warned city officials that by creating a gallery without any “explicit limitations on what topics or images may be displayed, the city had designated the space as a public forum, where the First Amendment strictly limits a curator’s authority to exclude art based on its content.” 

“Although the curator of a government-sponsored art show necessarily exercises broad discretion in determining what will or will not be displayed, that discretion cannot be used to suppress ideas or points of view with which the curator disagrees,” wrote Michael T. Risher, an attorney for ACLU. “Banning all depictions of firearms constitutes content-based censorship. Moreover, it works to suppress the view that guns, whatever one’s opinion of them, are a part of our history and our current world ... The proper role of firearms in our society is one that evokes strong feelings on all sides of the debate.” 

Citing the city’s press release for the display of Art of Democracy, which promised it would address “immigration raids, police surveillance, lost liberty and war,” Risher said that to invite artists to address war, but insist that they do so without depicting a gun, was not curatorial discretion. 

“It is censorship,” he wrote. “Lost liberty indeed.” 

Following ACLU’s letter, the Acting City Attorney Zach Cowan called on the city’s Economic Development Mananger Michael Caplan and Civic Art commissioners Dave Blake and David Snippen to discuss the curation of the windows. 

“We were advised by the city attorney that if we were actually going to have curated space, we need to have guidelines,” Caplan said. “The problem is that there had never been a standard. We learnt a lot from the whole thing and we ended up better.” 

The new guidelines state that artwork would be selected on its aesthetic merits and that art would be chosen with appropriate regard for the nature of the space and the audience. It articulates that the gallery is on the public right of way and that art displayed there “must exhibit a high degree of consideration for citizen’s sensitivities to violence, sexual expression and negative portrayals of diverse populations.” 

Additionally, artists and community members will now be able to appeal to the commission if they have concerns about curatorial judgment at the gallery. 

Caplan said that the entire incident had raised important issues on curatorial judgment. 

“We realized that there was need for the curator to not just select the artists but also the artwork,” he said. 

“So it was important that her contract be amended because it wasn’t specific enough and wasn’t set up for curation. She was just selecting artists based on their quality of work. Real curatorial function involves looking at the art work and making aesthetic decisions. 

Brighton’s amended contract calls upon her to select and review art work chosen to be installed and review and select work according to the new guidelines in sufficient time for review by the commission if necessary. 

Brighton said that she was happy with the new guidelines and the changes to her contract. “As a contractor with the City of Berkeley I appreciate having city guidelines,” she said. “I think it’s great.” 

 

 


Grant Creates Wider Reach for Hesperian Foundation

By Kristin McFarland
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:38:00 AM

Despite the holiday trouble for emergency food and shelter programs, the Hesperian Foundation, the Berkeley-based non-profit publisher of community-oriented medical books, including the internationally known Where There Is No Doctor, can report an exciting new grant that will carry the organization to many more people in need of its aid. 

Hesperian is the new recipient of a three-year, $2.7 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, intended to help the organization expand and update Where There Is No Doctor. 

“It’s enough to begin expanding the book and to expand our reach to people who wouldn’t otherwise have access,” said Jennifer Ward, Hesperian’s communications and marketing coordinator. 

Where There Is No Doctor is a general primary healthcare manual widely used in developing countries. The book has been translated into 80 languages, sold at least 300 million copies and has seen use in over 108 countries. 

The grant will allow Hesperian to conduct a market study of the book’s use and potential, to refresh the book’s content, to explore sharing the book’s content online, and to revitalize its production and distribution.  

The grant does not cover any of Hesperian’s operating expenses, but according to Karen Susag, the organization’s fundraising director, Hesperian is on target for its financial goals, and on pace with last year, which was a record fundraising year for the organization. 

But why is Hesperian flourishing while local agencies are struggling? 

“I think people are still giving to Hesperian because of its mission,” Susag said. “Healthcare is on everyone’s mind and global health is going to come to the forefront.” 

However, the foundation is concerned about the economy, Susag said, and has started an 18-month planning program to watch out for its funds. Susag expects to receive more donations at the end of the year, when people typically make charitable gifts. 

“Our goal is to ask people to give more because fewer people can.” 

 


Holidays Bring to Light the Need of NonProfits

By Kristin McFarland
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:37:00 AM

Thanksgiving can easily be a family’s most expensive meal of the year. 

But imagine buying turkey and side dishes for 400 people in a time when prices are up, incomes are down, and donations scarce. Non-profits across the Bay Area are facing increases in need, even as they are suffering from a tumble in donation revenues, and the pinch is felt hardest at the holidays. 

“Our feeding program use is up 30 percent versus a year ago,” said Terrie Light, executive director of the Berkeley Food and Housing Project (BFHP). “Our shelter has no vacancies, ever.” 

BFHP will serve a traditional Thanksgiving dinner in a community setting to the homeless, former transitional services clients, and any other community members who cannot afford the year’s most extravagant meal. The project has discovered that the local food banks simply don’t have enough to meet their needs, and much of this year’s holiday food expenditures will come out of the organization’s (shallow) pockets. 

Light sent an e-mail Wednesday afternoon saying that this year the Berkeley Food and Housing Project had so far managed to fill only 30 of the 60 requests for food boxes for clients who were permanently housed and in need of assistance to cook a Thanksgiving meal. Those willing to help can contact Light at 649-4965 ext. 307 or at 2140 Dwight Way. 

In its annual price survey, the American Farm Bureau Federation reports that Thanksgiving dinner is “still affordable,” but while a 6 percent ($2.35) increase for a meal serving 10 may not hurt an affluent family, that price smarts when multiplied by 40 or more. The price of turkey alone has increased by 8 percent, and Light said that they simply aren’t receiving as many donations. With food banks also struggling, BFHP must make up the difference. 

“We’re in uncharted waters in terms of need,” said Brian Higgins, media contact for the Alameda County Food Bank. Higgins reports that use of the food bank’s food helpline, which connects callers with emergency food programs in their area, is up 39 percent from last year and 59 percent from the year before. The helpline now sees hundreds of first-time callers every week. 

That’s on top of the 40,000 people in Alameda County already receiving aid from the food bank on a weekly basis. 

“We’re hearing from people who have never made that call before, households where both parents are working,” Higgins said. “It’s a choice between rent and food.” 

In addition to increased need, the food bank is “in critical need of monetary donations,” Higgins said. Over the past few years, the number of donations has been going down. 

“But donations are only a little piece of the puzzle; it’s how many people need food that really makes a difference,” Higgins said. 

The holidays make a family’s lack of funds hurt far more keenly and place a greater toll on food service agencies than the rest of the year. 

“We get a lot of requests for help in the holiday seasons, and this year we will probably have to tell people that we can’t help,” Light said. 

Monetary donations can be made to the Alameda County Food Bank online at www.accfb.org/how_to_help.html and the Berkeley Food and Housing Project at http://bfhp.org. 

 


School Board Bids Adieu to Rivera

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:34:00 AM

The Berkeley Unified School District bade farewell to the longest-serving member on the current Berkeley Board of Education amidst a lot of happy memories, applause and laughter at a public meeting in the City Hall chambers last Wednesday. 

Joaquin Rivera stepped down from his role as a school board director after 12 years, following his decision earlier this year not to run for re-election. 

Community leader and activist Beatriz Leyva-Cutler—who won one of the two school board seats in the Nov. 4 election—will replace Rivera at the board’s next meeting on Dec. 10. 

Rivera, who teaches chemistry at Skyline College, was first elected to the board in November 1996 and went on to be reelected in 2000 and 2004, serving a total of three terms on the board. 

A graduate of the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez, Rivera received his masters in chemistry from UC Berkeley in 1990. 

He has served as school board president on three occasions, the most recent being last year, and has also been a delegate to the California School Boards Association. 

School board members and Berkeley Unified Superintendent Bill Huyett thanked Rivera at the meeting for his work on improving student achievement in the Berkeley public schools and for leaving the district in better shape financially and fiscally than before. 

School board President John Selawsky described him as a “solid” board director who always steered his peers toward the right track. 

“I prefer to stay in denial that this is going to be your last meeting,” said fellow board member Shirley Issel, who has served along with Rivera since 1998. “You have taught me a lot about how to be a good board member and have made enormous contributions. I will miss you.” 

Rivera said that although he had debated running for a fourth term, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s decision to cut state education funds made him change his mind. 

“I thought, I have been there, done that. Maybe again in the future, but right now I want to enjoy,” he said, thanking his colleagues and all three superintendents he had worked with over the last decade. 

“It’s been 12 good years,” he said. “During my tenure I have had the opportunity to work with some great people and three wonderful superintendents, Jack McLaughlin, Michele Lawrence and Bill Huyett. I know Bill is going to be great for Berkeley. I have had the opportunity to work with great school board members such as Pamela Doolan, Lloyd Lee and Miriam Rokeach and members of this board.” 

McLaughlin was present at the meeting Wednesday when the board presented Rivera with a resolution honoring his achievements. 

Rivera said that during his time on the school board, he had been successful in his efforts to create a single plan for student achievement and desegregating the district. 

“I am not going to be watching the school board meetings on TV but I might turn up in my robe with a wine glass in hand to watch you guys in action,” he said, smiling, adding that he would be chipping in to help when the district was ready to introduce bond measures to Berkeley voters in a couple of years. 

“I have some regrets that I didn’t have a better relationship with the unions. I think it’s a two-way thing. Since I am leaving now, I can tell the unions that this is a very good board. We have to play with the cards given to us by Sacramento. Sacramento doesn’t give us a lot of money and we should be screaming at them more often.” 

Rivera also thanked his family for standing behind him like a rock during his stint in the district, especially his husband, and his former partner, who had been with him for most of his 12 years on the board. 

At the last school board meeting on Nov. 12, Rivera expressed his disappointment at the passing of Prop. 8 in California, which took away the right for gay couples to marry. 

“Personally it touches me very closely,” he said at the meeting last Wednesday. 

“At this point my marriage may or may not be valid. This is really a civil rights struggle. It is like having to sit at the back of the bus or having to drink water from a different fountain because of who you are. I know the board has always been very supportive and hopefully it will be supportive of these struggles.”


Mixed Reactions for Berkeley High Development Plan

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:33:00 AM

Berkeley High School’s proposal to develop a new small school, create advisory programs and block schedules following a $1 million federal grant in July received mixed reactions from the community during a public forum on Monday. 

The plan, crafted by the Berkeley High School Design Committee—comprised of Berkeley High teachers, principal Jim Slemp and a parent and a student—was presented to the School Governance Council last week and to the Berkeley Board of Education on Nov. 19. At Monday’s meeting in the school’s library, Slemp stressed that the time was right for Berkeley High to ride the wave of change. 

“Berkeley High is a great school. I can say it’s one of the best 10 large urban high schools in the country,” he said. “Our attendance rate is going up and our discipline and drop-out rates are going down. We have an excellent faculty of any high school of our size, but, we still have an achievement gap. Our black and Latino students are not achieving as well as our white students. Most of the people in this room—your children are succeeding, but I need you to think about all children.” 

Slemp said that the high school had been debating the prospect of introducing some kind of reform on campus through block schedules and advisories, which received momentum through the Smaller Learning Communities Grant from the U.S. Department of Education, something that supports the expansion of small school programs, advisories and alternate schedules. 

Under the grant, the high school would also train its teachers to use the advisory program to help students develop individual learning plans. 

“Advisories will personalize the BHS experience by providing a safe, caring and cooperative community that evolves over four years,” Slemp said, adding that the program had been implemented nationwide and had gone on to be successful in some cases and a complete waste of time in others. 

One parent of a ninth-grader said that she liked the idea of an advisory period as long as students didn’t end up fooling around during that time. 

“We want them to be advisories with academic and social content, which will benefit students and help them grow as a person,” said Angela Price, a parent and a college advisor at Berkeley High. Price said she would like to see the new plan include more parental involvement, including those from African American and other minority communities who often feel unwelcome on campus. 

The block schedule would include red and gold alternating days, with student attending periods one through four on “red days” and periods five through eight on “gold days.” 

Classes would last 90 minutes on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and 80 minutes on Tuesday and Thursday in order to include a 30-minute advisory period, something some school board presidents and parents said would deprive students of valuable instructional time. 

Berkeley High PTSA President Mark Van Krieken said that the proposed schedule would mean students get 25 percent less instructional minutes per week than in their current set-up of six periods during a regular school day and a 22 percent loss in overall instructional time when two 30-minute advisories were added. 

“The majority of parents are really interested to help students who are struggling,” he said. “Nobody has been able to explain how this kind of cutback in instruction time is going to lead to improving academic performance for all of our students.” 

Mary McDonald, another parent, said she liked the proposed scheduling because it was freeing up the students’ mornings. 

“A lot of people are concerned about it but I think it’s great,” she said. “Also if you miss class you get an extra day to turn your homework in.” 

School Board President John Selawsky said that he was concerned about the loss of instructional time. 

“Part of it is contractual issues,” he said. “The high school should not be bringing forward all these changes when the school district is negotiating with the Berkeley Federation of Teachers.” 

The Berkeley teachers union is discussing a contract renewal with district officials. 

“These are big ideas that are being put forth,” BFT President Cathy Campbell said of Berkeley High’s proposal. “The school board will have to approve them and authorize district officials to approach the union with the changes. There’s a real momentum in our community for change but the question remains what degree of change do we want. It may be that the current proposal is too much too fast.” 

The next community forum is scheduled for Tuesday at St. Joseph's the Worker Church, 7 to 8 p.m. The School Governance Council is scheduled to review input from the various groups and vote on the proposal on Dec. 9, following which the school board will have the opportunity to review the proposal and judge it in Jan. 2009. The school plans to implement the program in the 2009-2010 school year. 

 

 


East Bay Mayors File Suit to Block LBAM Spraying

By Richard Brenneman
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:39:00 AM

Two East Bay mayors are among the plaintiffs who filed suit in San Francisco Tuesday, taking the battle over Light Brown Apple Moth (LBAM) spraying into federal court. 

Richmond Mayor Gayle McLaughlin and Albany counterpart Robert Lieber joined with Santa Cruz City Councilmember Tony Madrigal and lead plaintiff North Coast Rivers Alliance in a lawsuit seeking to overturn the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) approval of a controversial eradication program. 

Attorney Stephan Volker, representing the plaintiffs, contends that the EPA violated two federal statues when it approved exemptions from registering the ingredients of two moth sprays released in Santa Cruz and Monterey counties. 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) proposed the plan, which was conducted a year ago.  

One of the sprays used contained an attractant designed to disrupt the insect’s mating cycle, while the second contains organophosphates. 

The Albany City Council voted unanimously in January for a resolution urging abandonment of the spraying program, while a court order blocked resumption of the program in Santa Cruz County preparation and certification of an environment impact report. 

A prepared statement form Volker’s office said that “at least 643 citizens were injured and filed reports with CDFA, many documented by physicians,” following last fall’s spraying program in the two counties to the south. 

While the agencies had subsequently dropped plans for more spraying in urban areas, Volker’s statement contends that “USDA and CDFA are threatening to spray these unsafe pesticides again in the San Francisco Bay Area, even though EPA’s own regulations classify these pesticides as unsafe for spraying over residential and agricultural areas.” 

Organophosphates—the same chemicals used in many nerve gases developed for military use—were fingered as the cause of Gulf War Syndrome, an ailment which has afflicted many veterans of the Iraq Wars in a report released last week. The report, prepared by a committee of scientists appointed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to ferret out the ailment’s causes, blames organophosphates both in the form of nerve gas and pesticides, as well as a compound used as a precautionary antidote to nerve gas. 

That document is available at http://sph.bu.edu.


Richmond’s Newest Councilmember Brings Activist Credentials to the Job

By Richard Brenneman
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:34:00 AM
Newly elected Richmond Councilman Jeff Ritterman talks with a constituent during a program held at the city’s RichmondWORKS program.
By Richard Brenneman
Newly elected Richmond Councilman Jeff Ritterman talks with a constituent during a program held at the city’s RichmondWORKS program.

As a heart doctor, it’s probably only natural that Jeff Ritterman has his fingers on the pulse of the community. Wherever he goes in Richmond, he’s certain to recognize someone, often eschewing the traditional handshake for the hug, as befits a long-time activist with a pony tail that reaches well down his back. 

But beneath the jovial exterior is a seriousness of purpose, appropriate both for his professional role as chief of cardiology for the Kaiser Richmond Medical Center and in his newest guise the public’s top pick in the November race for three seats on the Richmond City Council. 

“I’m really gratified to have come out on top,” he said over a heart-healthy breakfast in Point Richmond. “It was largely due to the work of more than 300 volunteers.” 

Ritterman ran as a member of a three-candidate progressive slate, along with incumbent Tom Butt, who came in second, and Jovanka Beckles, who was narrowly edged out for third place by incumbent Nat Bates.  

Two other incumbents, John E. Marquez and Harpreet Sandhu, were defeated. 

“We really changed the political landscape of Richmond with this election,” Ritterman said, “even though we were significantly outspent and opposed by the Democratic Party.” 

Ritterman and his allies had also taken on the biggest power in the city by the active support of Measure T, another winner on Nov. 4. 

That ballot measure imposes a new business tax that reaches into the deep pockets of Chevron, the city’s dominant landowner. 

“Chevron put a lot of money into defeating us,” he said. “But my popularity is based on my work as a doctor, and that cuts across lines of race and class.” 

As for neighborhoods where he didn’t fare so well, “They just show where there’s tremendous work yet to be done.” 

 

Mayoral ally 

The doctor and Mayor Gayle McLaughlin have been allies ever since Ritterman became active in city politics five years ago. He backed the mayor in her runs first for a seat on the council, and then two years later, when she won election as California’s first Green Party mayor. 

The 60-year-old activist has been at the Kaiser’s Richmond center since 1981, and he’s been an activist in national and international political issues for decades. 

Ritterman first came to the Daily Planet’s attention early in 2004, when he joined with other Richmond activists in opposing a plan to build a high-rise housing complex atop a massive mound of buried hazardous waste at Campus Bay. 

Clad in his white lab coat, he marched in several demonstrations at the site, drawing the ire of Chamber of Commerce CEO Judith Morgan, who sent an e-mail to Kaiser administrators complaining about the use of Kaiser’s name in a press release announcing the demonstration. The release, however, didn’t mention Kaiser. 

She later claimed Ritterman had been “called on the carpet” as a result of her complaint, something both the doctor and his employer denied. 

While his ideas may alarm some in the chamber, Ritterman has friends in the business community—with strong allies among Richmond’s growing green entrepreneurs. 

“We need a Green New Deal,” he said. “That’s the only way to address climate change.” 

One of the hopes he has for the millions of new revenues from Measure T is that “we can take oil company profits and use them to transition to alternate forms of energy and a sustainable future.” 

Long active in organizations like Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), he also cofounded the Committee for Health Rights in Central America, the Salvadorean Medical Relief Fund and the South African Medical Funds. 

According to the San Francisco PSR website, “he has personally delivered medical supplies to Salvadorean refugees living in camps in Honduras and Costa Rica during the war in El Salvador in the 1980s” and delivered medical aid to the African National Congress in Lusaka, Zambia, before the fall of the Apartheid regime in South Africa. 

“I’ve done a lot of international work,” he said. He’s even met the Grand Ayatollah in Iran during a trip to the nation last year by a group of activists, and has been supporting the treatment of victims of chemical weapons injured in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. 

Ritterman and his companion Vivien Freyer are also sponsors of an Iraqi paraplegic they met during a trip to Amman, Jordan, in 2005. With their support, he runs a website www.childrenofiran.com and is attending graduate school at San Francisco State. “He’s got a million friends,” Ritterman said. 

The website was momentarily offline when a reporter checked Tuesday. 

 

Reasons to run 

Ritterman said he became interested in running for council “because I was very disappointed with the present city council, especially with the way they handled the Chevron expansion plans.” 

Another issue that raised his level of frustration was the council’s refusal to approve changes plans for the new city hall that would include windows that occupants could open. 

“It was clear that the majority really didn’t represent the interests of the community, and when it became clear who was running this time, I decided to enter the race,” he said. 

And while Beckles’ loss didn’t given the council a progressive majority, he said, “we may not quite be there yet, but we’re at the edge.” 

There are major political struggles ahead, signaled during the campaign by a mailer from the Richmond Police Officers’ Association that attacked the progressive slate and blamed Latinos for Richmond’s drug problems. 

“Their attack was really unfair to the mayor, to Jovanka and to me,” said Ritterman. The POA later repudiated its own mailer, and one of the candidates it backed, Chris Tallerico, withdrew from the campaign because of his inclusion in the political hit piece. 

Ritterman said he was also dismayed by an attack from Bates, an African American, on Beckle’s mixed racial heritage (she has both African and Latino heritage)—a critique he didn’t level at the Afro-Anglo Barack Obama. 

“We have a lot of work ahead,” Ritterman said, with the onset of recession adding to the city’s already complex problems. 

The solution adopted by the old City Council—creation of a major tribal casino and resort complex at Point Molate—also worries the new councilmember. 

“I’m not in favor of urban gambling,” he said. “If you want to gamble, invite some friends over and play poker.” 

Then there are the complex issues raised by race and ethnicity, visible during hearings of the casino plans, which brought out emerging animosities among the city’s black, Latino and Asian communities. 

“There’s a lot of work to do,” he said. “We need to build a truly beloved community, one where no one is excluded.” 

That inclusiveness also applies to gays. 

The Ritterman family activism isn’t confined just to the Richmond heart doctor. His sister was half of the couple that brought the case in Connecticut that ended with the state supreme court decision legalizing gay marriage in the Nutmeg State. 

“They were the first couple to get their license in New Haven,” he said, smiling. 


Cal Prof to Head White House Council of Economic Advisers

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:35:00 AM

President-elect Barack Obama announced Monday that he had chosen Christina Romer, professor of economics at UC Berkeley and a resident of Oakland, to head the White House Council of Economic Advisers. 

Romer will join Timothy F. Geithner—who Obama nominated as Treasury secretary—and former president of Harvard University Lawrence H. Summers —who will head the White House Economic Council—to become one of the key members of the president-elect’s new economic team. 

The Council of Economic Advisers is comprised of three members who recommend policy options to the president. 

As chair of the CEA, Romer, along with the director of the National Economic Council, will play an important role in creating the president’s policy plans. 

Calling the current economic climate a “crisis of historic proportions,” Obama introduced his new economic team at a press conference in Chicago Monday morning, describing Romer as both a leading macroeconomist and a leading economic historian, perhaps best known for her work on America’s recovery from the Great Depression and the robust economic expansion that followed. 

Romer has also served as co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research Monetary Economics program since 2003 and is a member of the Bureau’s Business Cycle Dating Committee, which is responsible for officially determining when a recession has started and ended, experience Obama said would come in handy when she advised him on the challenges of the current economy. 

The president-elect also mentioned Romer’s groundbreaking research on topics the new administration was likely to confront, ranging from tax policy to recessions, and said that her “clear-eyed, independent analyses have received praise from both conservative and liberal thinkers alike.” 

Romer is the Class of 1957-Garff B. Wilson Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, where she teaches economic history and macroeconomics, and has served as vice president and a member of the executive committee of the American Economic Association. 

Before joining the university’s faculty in 1988 and getting promoted to full professor in 1993, Romer received her Ph.D. from M.I.T. in 1985 and was an assistant professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University from 1985 to 1988. 

Her research interests listed on the UC Berkeley website include the effects of fiscal policy, identification of monetary shocks, the determinants of American macroeconomic policy changes in short-run fluctuations over the 20th century and causes of the Great Depression. 

A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award at UC Berkeley, Romer is the recipient of several awards and fellowships, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. 

“This is a superb appointment,” said Maurice Obstfeld, a UC Berkeley economics professor and an expert on monetary and international economics, in a statement released by the university. “Given the economic challenges we are facing, the country needs a top macroeconomist heading the CEA. I can think of no one more qualified than Christy Romer.” 

UC Berkeley professors who have chaired the CEA in previous years include Laura Tyson, who headed the council during the Clinton administration from 1993 to 1996, and Janet Yellen, who served as chair from 1997 to 1999 and is now president of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank. 

In an e-mail to colleagues, Gérard Roland, chair of UC Berkeley’s economics department, wrote: “These are exceptional times where economists can do so much to help protect the livelihoods of millions of people.” 

Romer, along with her husband David, who is the Herman Royer Professor in Political Economy at UC Berkeley, have studied the history of the U.S. monetary policy from the Great Depression to today, and also consulted for the Obama campaign, writing talking points for one of his speeches on the economy.


Troubled Golden Gate Fields Parent Co. Hires Leading Bankruptcy Lawyers

By Richard Brenneman
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:35:00 AM

Magna Entertainment, the endangered parent of Albany’s Golden Gate Fields, has hired a bankruptcy lawyer and is surviving on week-to-week loans. 

But even closure of the track and the subsequent loss of revenues wouldn’t hurt the city as badly as in past years, said Albany Mayor Robert Lieber. 

While track revenues contribute between 2 and 4 percent of the revenues of the city’s general fund, Albany’s Target store contributes an even greater percentage, he said. And while the city’s school district receives an even larger share, those revenues come from parcel tax revenues which are independent of track proceeds, Lieber said. 

Known on the stock tickers as MECA, the Magna Entertainment is a spinoff of Canadian Frank Stronach’s auto parts firm Magna International and is the nation’s largest owner and operator of horse racing tracks. 

In addition to the Albany track, Magna owns Santa Anita Park in Southern California, Portland Meadows in Oregon, Laurel Park and Pimlico in Maryland, Lone Star Park in Texas, Remington Park in Oklahoma, The Meadows in Pennsylvania, Gulfstream Park in Florida and the Magna Racino in Stronach’s native Austria. 

The company also owns an off-track betting system, and holds major interests in a television distribution system and a horse racing network as well as AmTote International, which provides number-crunching services for tracks. 

The entertainment spinoff, created at the demand of shareholders of the parent company because of its consistent losses, has fallen on hard times that reflect trends in the horse-racing industry, which is slowly transforming from the Sport of Kings to plaything of paupers. In February, NASDAQ told the company to take action or it would delist the shares by summer since they had fallen below the market’s dollar-a-share minimum. 

Magna complied, and in early July announced a reverse stock split, with each new share formed from 20 shares of the old issue. By that time, prices of the older shares had dropped to as low as 41 cents. 

The newly consolidated shares continued to follow the decline of their predecessors, and by the close of the market Tuesday were trading at $1.41, a fraction of their one-time high of $35.20 and once again approaching NASDAQ’s delisting price. 

The company did receive one bit of good news this month when Maryland voters approved a ballot measure that would allow installation of 15,000 slot machines at five still-undetermined locations in that state. But the Maryland election was the only glimmer of good news on Magna’s horizon. After a brief surge in stock prices before the election, shares resumed their steady descent. 

Magna’s efforts to use some of the land surrounding its tracks have also come up short, with voters in nearby Dixon dealing a fatal blow 19 months ago when they voted down MECA’s plan to build a high-tech television-friendly track adjacent to the rural Sacramento Valley farm town that would have featured what Magna CEO Michael Neuman described as a “California fair type facility ... together with mixed use retail.” 

The company took a $5 million write-down on the Dixon site in their six-month financial report released in August. The property remains on the market. 

More bad news came this month, starting with Magna’s Nov. 3 announcement that a deal to sell land it bought in 2002 as a site for a subsequently abandoned planned race track had fallen through after the buyer backed out of a $16.5 million deal. 

Two days later, MECA announced third quarter losses of $48.4 million, bring the year’s total losses through Sept. 30 to $116.1 million, compared to $70.8 million for the same period in 2007. 

One major source of losses was the discontinuation of the company’s Magna Racino operations—MECA’s first venture to combine tracks and slot machines. The company took a $29.2 million loss on the Racinos. 

“Although MECA has a strong asset base, we remain burdened with far too much debt and interest expense,” Stronach said in a statement released with the report. The only bright spot for Stronach’s California operations is an increase in revenues of $3.1 million from Golden Gate Fields—but only because of a 10-day expansion of the track’s racing schedule. Average daily revenues at the track actually declined slightly. 

That same report included the announcement that Magna “has engaged Miller Buckfire & Co., LLC ... to review and evaluate various strategic alternatives including additional asset sales, financing and balancing sheet restructuring opportunities.” 

In other words, Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection—the firm’s specialty. 

Even more bad news came Monday, when Magna announced that it had only been able to obtain an 11-day extension of the company’s revolving credit line with the Bank of Montreal. 

Horse racing has fallen on hard times, and attendance at tracks has dwindled—another concern for Albany, which collects revenues from bets placed at the track itself but not from the far larger number of wagers off-track. 

As one solution to Magna’s declining revenues, Stronach’s company has partnered with Los Angeles mall developer Rick Caruso. 

A proposal to build one of Caruso’s “lifestyle centers” at Golden Gate was torpedoed by Albany voters, despite Caruso’s promises that the venture would bring at least $2 million a year of new revenues into city coffers. 

While the Albany plan foundered, the Santa Anita mall had been moving forward with what Caruso’s company calls “825,000 square feet of one-of-a-kind shopping, dining and community space” located in “24 acres of richly landscaped plazas.” 

According to Caruso’s web site, that opening is now slated for fall 2010. 

But Lieber said that date is now in dispute, given a July ruling by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge James C. Chalfant. 

“Their whole EIR was thrown out,” he said, referring to the environmental impact report required by state law which must examine a whole spectrum of physical and cultural impacts arising from creation of major construction-related projects. 

Chalfant’s 59-page ruling was slightly narrower than an outright dismissal of the document. He found the EIR deficient on 11 specific grounds, including traffic mitigation and air quality, and ordered the Arcadia City Council to set aside its earlier approval of the document and recirculate a revised document that addresses the deficiencies he cited. 


Battle Over BRT Continues

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:36:00 AM

The overwhelming defeat of Berkeley Measure KK in the Nov. 4 election has resulted in a dramatic—and completely understandable—reversal of opinion about the meaning of the measure by at least some of its proponents and opponents. 

Measure KK proponents said at an AC Transit Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) workshop Wednesday night that despite the defeat of the measure, they would continue their opposition to BRT’s bus-lane set-aside along Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, in part because they did not believe defeat of Measure KK meant that Berkeley residents support BRT. 

The AC Transit District is proposing to establish bus-only lanes along Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley as part of the district’s ambitious proposal to set up a Bus Rapid Transit line from downtown San Leandro through downtown Oakland to downtown Berkeley, along the route currently taken by the district’s 1 and 1R lines. 

Meanwhile, AC Transit officials have released a proposed timeline that has completion of the environmental impact report process by the third quarter of 2010, final design for BRT by the first quarter of 2011, beginning of construction by the second quarter of 2012, with completion of the project tentatively scheduled for the spring of 2015. But the project still has to complete a complicated approval process involving winning federal funding grants, approval by city councils in Berkeley, San Leandro, and Oakland and final project approval by the AC Transit board. 

On Wednesday night, AC Transit Board President Chris Peeples said several times that the board should not be considered a “rubber stamp” for the BRT project, which was begun in the planning process by AC Transit before any current member was elected to the board. 

Two weeks ago, Berkeley voters defeated on a 76.7 percent no to 23.3 percent yes vote a citizen-sponsored measure to create an ordinance requiring voter approval for any proposal in Berkeley to establish transit-only street lanes within the city. 

In practical terms, while passage of Measure KK would have effectively dealt a death blow to the bus-lane set-aside portion of BRT, defeat of the measure only ensures that AC Transit can go forward with negotiations with the City of Berkeley over the proposal. AC Transit officials say that while BRT is an AC Transit proposal, “the cities own the streets,” and must give approval for any substantial alteration of street right-of-ways. 

During the campaign, many Measure KK proponents said that the measure was specifically designed to halt AC Transit District’s proposal to establish bus-only lanes along Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, part of the district’s ambitious proposal to set up a Bus Rapid Transit line between downtown San Leandro, downtown Oakland, and downtown Berkeley. 

While some Measure KK opponents said during the campaign that the measure was a referendum on BRT, many others said their opposition was based on their belief that the measure would set bad governing policy. In the “Why Vote No On Measure KK” page of the No On Measure KK committee website, BRT is never mentioned, in fact, with the organization instead charging that the measure would block Berkeley’s advancement towards reducing greenhouse emissions. The site also points out Measure KK’s added costs, charging that “each new ballot measure mandated by Measure KK could cost the city up to $1.2 million, including the cost of an additional required planning study. That’s a lot of money in a city our size, money that could be better spent on things like education, healthcare, public safety, or actually improving transit and protecting our environment.” 

But during presentations at a special AC Transit Board BRT workshop on Wednesday, proponents and opponents abruptly switched fields, with Measure KK proponents now telling AC Transit officials that the Measure KK defeat was no indication of BRT sentiment in Berkeley because the defeat was caused solely by deceptive advertising fueled by campaign money brought in by outside interests. 

“I wanted to come tonight so that (AC Transit) did not think you had a mandate from that election that went on in Berkeley,” Berkeley resident Martha Jones said during the meeting’s public comment section. Jones then held up a blown-up version of one of the more famous campaign mailers of the November 2008 season, a “No On KK” brochure that featured a poignant full-color photo of a polar bear stranded on a small ice-floe in the middle of an ocean, an attempt to link Measure KK with anti-public-transit sentiments leading to global warming. 

“People voted [against Measure KK] because they thought they were saving the polar bears,” she said. “Only 28 people gave money to ‘No On KK’ and you will find that it is mostly people who have contracts with you.” 

Noting that one large “No On KK” donation came from New York and another from Cambridge, Massachusetts, she added “it’s not nice to have these interlopers coming into my city and dropping this big money to influence elections.” 

And another KK proponent, resident and community activist Gail Garcia, added that “despite the failure of Measure KK, there is huge opposition to BRT in Berkeley. The money [to oppose KK] largely came from the ABC Company, the U.S. distributor of the hated Van Hool buses, and falsehoods. Falsehoods, falsehoods that the local branch of the Sierra Club was willing to propagate. So money and lies defeated Measure KK.” The Sierra Club was one of Measure KK’s opponents. 

Garcia added that “opposition to BRT in Berkeley will continue to grow because the more they learn about it, the less they like it.” 

And Mary Oram, treasurer of the Advocates for Voter Approved Transit, a pro KK committee, said that the financial contributions for the two sides was a good estimate of the relative level of local feeling about BRT and KK. Oram estimated that “7 percent of the [anti-KK money] came from individuals, the rest came from special interest groups and companies that would benefit from BRT if it was ever put in. All of the [pro KK] money came from individuals and community associations in Berkeley.” 

Oram’s husband, George Oram, added that the BRT proposal does not provide along Telegraph Avenue “any service that has been asked for or endorsed by the bus riders on Telegraph Avenue or the residents on Telegraph Avenue or the merchants on Telegraph Avenue, and we believe we’re going to stop you.” 

Meanwhile, some Measure KK opponents are now saying that AC Transit should move forward with the planning and approval process for BRT in Berkeley because of the overwhelming support for the project demonstrated in the Measure KK vote. 

Berkeley resident Alan Tobey, treasurer of the No On KK campaign, who describes himself as “unapologetically responsible for the polar bear,” said that even though KK “literally didn’t [propose opposition to BRT], its campaign was pitched as the way to stop BRT on Telegraph Avenue. So the campaign literature and the many meetings I attended, the pitch was to vote for KK was to vote against the BRT project. We’ve learned that 77 percent of Berkeley residents disagreed with that proposition and said at this point we have no problem with BRT so far.” 


Remembering a ‘Dangerous Man,’ Peter Miguel Camejo 1939-2008

By Sharon Peterson
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:36:00 AM

On Nov. 23, an unseasonably sunny Sunday afternoon, over 400 family members, friends, colleagues and occasional opponents packed UC Berkeley’s International House auditorium. They came to remember and celebrate the life of activist, politician, financial manager and family man, Peter Miguel Camejo, a man whom then-Gov. Ronald Reagan called one of the “10 most dangerous men in California.” Camejo died from a recurrence of lymphoma on Sept. 13, at the age of 68. 

It is deliciously ironic that Camejo would have been a UC Berkeley alumnus had he not been expelled for “unauthorized use of a bullhorn” during an anti-war demonstration in the 1960s. 

Upon learning that his lymphoma had returned, Camejo asked Claudette Begin to create and host his memorial. Begin and Camejo’s wife, Morella Camejo, began working together. Soon the team grew to include Camejo’s brother, Dan Ratner, Begin’s husband, Alex Chis, longtime friend Carol Reed and Mike Wyman, close friend and veteran Green. 

Claudette Begin opened the event, and served as host throughout. Peter Camejo’s family took the stage, then Morella Camejo and brother Antonio Camejo welcomed the crowd and shared their personal memories. Dan Ratner produced a slideshow of Peter Camejo’s life, which played against the stage backdrop. Mementos from political campaigns and copies of his books lined the back wall of the large Spanish-style hall. 

Morella Camejo said, “He couldn’t stop coming up with ideas. His mind was restless, forever making plans for the future.” 

Antonio Camejo said of his brother, “He firmly believed that we would rally the American people around just causes.” 

Peter Camejo was perhaps best known for his runs for president on the Socialist Workers Party, Green Party and independent tickets, and for Governor of California on the Green Party ticket. In the 2003 gubernatorial recall election campaign, Camejo’s incisive remarks during the debates received national attention and brought higher measures of visibility and respectability to progressive thought. 

He was a friend of Malcolm X, and he marched in Selma with the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was a pioneer advocate for immigrant rights and, after 9/11, worked for civil rights and freedom from hate for Muslim citizens. 

Camejo wrote books on political activism, American history and socially responsible investing. He founded or co-founded progressive political action groups such as the North Star Network (1983) and IDEA PAC (2005), and he sparked growth in many others, such as the Green Party. 

The family also remembered the devoted husband, father and grandfather. Colleagues remembered the financial planner who was obsessed with the stock market game, but left lucrative positions at Merrill Lynch, and then Prudential to create his own firm, Progressive Asset Management, because neither institution would promote socially-responsible investing. Everyone remembered the quick wit of a born comedian scholar. 

Among the speakers were such progressive political luminaries as Ralph Nader and his 2008 presidential running mate, former San Francisco Supervisor Matt Gonzalez, Cindy Sheehan, who ran against Rep. Nancy Pelosi in 2008 and plans to do so again in 2010, Donna Warren, Camejo’s running mate in his 2002 and 2004 gubernatorial bids, Mayor Gayle McLaughlin of Richmond, and Jo Chamberlain, former candidate for State Assembly and Camejo’s 2006 gubernatorial campaign manager. Jason West, former Green mayor of New Paltz, NY and brand-new Bay Area resident as of that day, was a surprise guest. 

Ralph Nader said that Camejo “always renewed himself. Some people learn until they’re about 30, and then run on fumes for 30 or 40 years. Peter was always learning.” 

Dr. Agha Saeed, of the American Muslim Alliance, and Miguel Araujo, leader of Centro Azteca, praised Camejo’s civil rights advocacy and urged progressives to keep on working. 

Kalman Stein, CEO of the environmental charity organization EarthShare, flew in from Washington, D.C. to speak. Visibly moved by previous speakers, Stein observed that “it’s a joy to find out about all the parts of Peter I didn’t know.” 

Peter Miguel Camejo was a first-generation American, born to Venezuelan parents in the Borough of Queens in New York City. Venezuelan Consul General Martin Sanchez read a statement from the Venezuelan Ambassador, Bernardo Alvarez Herrera. Sanchez apologized for Herrera’s absence, noting that the Ambassador had recently been expelled from the United States. 

In his final months, Camejo focused on writing his autobiography. He had barely enough time to finish it. His editor, Leslie Evans, reported that he is working on the final chapters and that the book, with the working title, “North Star,” has been approved for publication by Haymarket Publishing. 

All who attended the memorial came away with the same knowledge of great loss that brought them together. But they also took with them a strengthened determination to continue Peter Miguel Camejo’s work.


Rae Imamura 1945-2008

Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:37:00 AM

Rae Imamura passed away on Saturday, Nov. 22 at her Berkeley home. Daughter of Rev. Kanmo and Jane Imamura, Rae is survived by her mother, her siblings, Hiro, Ryo and Mari, and her dog Brandy. Rae graduated from UC Berkeley, and went on to receive her M.F.A. in piano at Mills College, where she found her voice in contemporary music.  

In 1975, she co-founded a new music ensemble whose repertoire included such composers as John Cage, Robert Ashley, Lou Harrison, Terry Riley, John Adams and Paul Dresher. She later joined the Arch Ensemble for Experimental Music, and partnered in a two-piano team with Michael Orland.  

Touring the East Coast, Europe and Asia numerous times. she premiered/commissioned works of many composers including Lou Harrison, Paul Drescher, George Lewis, and Mamoru Fujieda. Her favorite projects over the last years involved her collaboration with pianist Aki Takahashi—including in late 2006 new works by Andrew Imbrie and Hi-Kyung Kim. A CD of their performance has just been released. 

Rae taught at the East Bay Center for Performing Arts in Richmond and was the center’s assistant director at its founding in the early ’70s. She would often tell people that she found her most rewarding moments working with the young students at the center.  

She also worked with the Oakland-East Bay Symphony’s MUSE program, the Berkeley Symphony, the Oakland Ballet Orchestra, the Santa Cruz Symphony and the Santa Rosa Symphony. She was the accompanist for the choir at St. Theresa’s for many years and continued on with the Rockridge Chorale.  

A memorial for Rae will be held Saturday at 4 p.m. at the Berkeley Buddhist Temple, 2121 Channing Way.


Fire Dept. Log

By RICHARD BRENNEMAN
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:40:00 AM

Smokin’ 

Berkeley firefighters rushed to the Gaia Building last Nov. 19, responding to reports of smoke pouring out of an apartment. Since firefighters always worry about fires in high rises, they quickly responded to the unit in question, discovering on their arrival that the highly pungent smoke in question was coming from the broiler. 

Opening the broiler they discovered the source—a quantity of a certain popular medicinal herb recently blessed by Berkeley voters. 

“They extinguished it with a glass of water,” said Deputy Fire Chief Gil Dong. 

 

Seasonal warning 

With winter’s arrival and the first of the seasonal holidays this week, the deputy chief had two warnings to issue. 

First, he warned Berkeley residents to keep an eye on the Bay Area Air Quality Management District www.sparetheair.-org website, where every day officials post a “Check Before You Burn Update.” Starting a fire in the in the fireplace can lead to a citation and fine on spare the air days. Violations can be reported at (415) 749-4979. 

His second warning concerned Thanksgiving chefs, especially those which cook their birds in deep fat fryers. 

“Always have a fire extinguisher on hand,” he said, because grease fires can be very tricky and can quickly spread. 

Fires that burst out on stop tops should be immediately covered to smother the flames, and with oven fires the first step is shutting off the heat—something to do with stove top and fryer blazes as well.


You Write the Daily Planet

Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:33:00 AM

It’s time to submit your essays, poems, stories, artwork and photographs for the Planet’s annual holiday reader contribution issue, which will be published on Dec. 23 (that’s right—a Tuesday!). Send your submissions, no longer than 1,000 words, to holiday@berkeleydailyplanet.com. Deadline is 5 p.m. on Mon., Dec. 15.  


UC Berkeley Professor to Head White House Council of Economic Advisers

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Monday November 24, 2008 - 04:11:00 PM

President-elect Barack Obama announced Monday that he had chosen Christina Romer, a professor of economics at UC Berkeley and a resident of Oakland, to head the White House Council of Economic Advisers.  

Romer will join Timothy F. Geithner—whom Obama nominated as Treasury secretary—and former president of Harvard University Lawrence H. Summers —who will head the White House Economic Council—to become one of the key members of the president-elect’s new economic team. 

The Council of Economic Advisers is comprised of three members who recommend policy options to the president. 

As chair of the CEA, Romer, along with the director of the National Economic Council, will play an important role in creating the president’s policy plans. 

Calling the current economic climate a “crisis of historic proportions,” Obama introduced his new economic team at a press conference in Chicago Monday morning, describing Romer as both a leading macroeconomist and a leading economic historian, "perhaps best known for her work on America’s recovery from the Great Depression and the robust economic expansion that followed.” 

Romer has also served as co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research Monetary Economics program since 2003 and is a member of the Bureau’s Business Cycle Dating Committee, which is responsible for officially determining when a recession has started and ended, experience Obama said would come in handy when she advised him on the challenges of the current economy. 

The president-elect also mentioned Romer’s groundbreaking research on topics the new administration was likely to confront, ranging from tax policy to recessions, and said that her “clear-eyed, independent analyses have received praise from both conservative and liberal thinkers alike.” 

Romer is the Class of 1957-Garff B. Wilson Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, where she teaches economic history and macroeconomics, and has served as vice president and a member of the executive committee of the American Economic Association. 

Before joining the university’s faculty in 1988 and getting promoted to full professor in 1993, Romer received her Ph.D from M.I.T. in 1985 and was an assistant professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University from 1985 to 1988. 

Her research interests listed on the UC Berkeley website include the effects of fiscal policy, identification of monetary shocks, the determinants of American macroeconomic policy changes in short-run fluctuations over the 20th century and causes of the Great Depression. 

A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award at the UC Berkeley, Romer is the recipient of several awards and fellowships, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship.  

“This is a superb appointment,” said Maurice Obstfeld, a UC Berkeley economics professor and an expert on monetary and international economics, in a statement released by the university. “Given the economic challenges we are facing, the country need a top macroeconomist heading the CEA. I can think of no one more qualified than Christy Romer.” 

UC Berkeley professors who have chaired the CEA in previous years include Laura Tyson who headed the council during the Clinton administration from 1993 to 1996 and Janet Yellen, who served as chair from 1997 to 1999, and is now president of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank. 

In an e-mail to colleagues, Gérard Roland, chair of UC Berkeley’s economics department, wrote: “These are exceptional times where economists can do so much to help protect the livelihoods of millions of people.”  

Romer, along with her husband David, who is the Herman Royer Professor in Political Economy at UC Berkeley, have studied the history of the U.S. monetary policy from the Great Depression to today and have also provided consultation for the Obama campaign, including writing talking points for one of his speeches on the economy. 


Troubled Golden Gate Fields Owner Hires Leading Bankruptcy Lawyers

By Richard Brenneman
Monday November 24, 2008 - 01:06:00 PM

Magna Entertainment, the endangered parent of Albany’s Golden Gate Fields, has hired a bankruptcy lawyer and is surviving on week-to-week loans. 

But even closure of the track and the subsequent loss of revenues wouldn’t hurt the city as badly as in past years, said Albany Mayor Robert Lieber. 

While track revenues contribute between 2 and 4 percent of the revenues of the city’s general fund, Albany’s Target store contributes an even greater percentage, he said. And while the city’s school district receives an even larger share, those revenues come from parcel tax revenues which are independent of track proceeds, Lieber said. 

Known on the stock tickers as MECA, the Magna Entertainment is a spinoff of Canadian Frank Stronach’s auto parts firm Magna International and is the nation’s largest owner and operating of horse racing tracks. 

In addition to the Albany track, Magna owns Santa Anita Park in Southern California, Portland Meadows in Oregon, Laurel Park and Pimlico in Maryland, Lone Star Park in Texas, Remington Park in Oklahoma, The Meadows in Pennsylvania, Gulfstream Park in Florida and the Magna Racino in Stronach’s native Austria. 

The company also owns an off-track betting system, and holds major interests in a television distribution system and a horse racing network as well as AmTote International, which provides number-crunching services for tracks. 

The entertainment spinoff, created at the demand of shareholders of the parent company because of its consistent losses, has fallen on hard times that reflect trends in the horse racing industry, which is slowly transforming from the Sport of Kings to plaything of paupers. 

In February, NASDAQ told the company to take action or it would delist the shares by summer since that had fallen below the market’s dollar-a-share minimum. 

Magna complied, and in early July announced a reverse stock split, with each new share formed from 20 shares of the old issue. By that time, prices of the older shares had dropped to as low as 41 cents. 

The newly consolidated shares continued to follow the decline of their predecessors, and by the close of the market Thursday were trading at $1.39, a fraction of their one-time high of $35.20 and once again approaching NASDAQ’s delisting price. 

The company did receive one bit of good news this month when Maryland voters approved a ballot measure that would allow installation of 15,000 slot machines at five still-undetermined locations in that state. But the Maryland election was the only glimmer of good news on Magna’s horizon, after a brief surge in stock prices before the election, shares resumed their steady descent. 

Magna’s efforts to use some of the land surrounding its tracks have also come up short, with voters in nearby Dixon dealing a fatal blow 19 months ago when they voted down MECA’s plan to build a high tech television-friendly track adjacent to the rural Sacramento Valley farm town that would have featured what Magna CEO Michael Neuman described as a “California fair type facility ... together with mixed use retail.”  

The company took a $5 million write-down on the Dixon site in their six-month financial report released in August. The property remains on the market. 

More bad new came this month, starting with Magna's Nov. 3 announcement that a deal to sell land it bought in 2002 as a site for a subsequently abandoned planned race track had fallen through after the buyer backed out of a $16.5 million deal. 

Two days later, MECA announced third quarter losses of $48.4 million, bring the year’s total losses through Sept. 30 to $116.1 million, compared to $70.8 million for the same period of 2007. 

One major source of losses was the discontinuation of the company’s Magna Racino operations—MECA’s first venture to combine tracks and slot machines. The company took a $29.2 million loss on the Racinos. 

“Although MEC has a strong asset base, we remain burdened with far too much debt and interest expense,” Stronach said in a statement released with the report. The only bright spot for Stronach’s California operations is an increasein revenues of $3.1 million from Golden Gate Fields—but only because of a 10-day expansion of the track’s racing schedule. Average daily revenues at the track actually declined slightly. 

That same report included the announcement that Magna “has engaged Miller Buckfire & Co., LLC ... to review and evaluate various strategic alternatives including additional asset sales, financing and balancing sheet restructuring opportunities.” 

In other words, Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection—the firm’s specialty. 

Even more bad news came Monday, when Magna announced it that it had only been able to obtain an 11-day extension of the company’s revolving credit line with the Bank of Montreal. 

Horse racing has fallen on hard times, and attendance at tracks has dwindled—another concern for Albany, which collects revenues from bets placed at the track itself but not from the far larger number of wagers off-track. 

As one solution to Magna’s declining revenues, Stronach’s company has partnered with Los Angeles mall developer Rick Caruso. 

A proposal to build one of Caruso’s “lifestyle centers” at Golden Gate was torpedoed by Albany voters, despite Caruso’s promises that the venture would bring at least $2 million a year of new revenues into city coffers. 

While the Albany plan foundered, the Santa Anita mall had been moving forward with what Caruso’s company calls “825,000 square feet of one-of-a-kind shopping, dining and community space” located in “24 acres of richly landscaped plazas.” 

According to Caruso’s web site, that opening is now slated for Fall 2010. 

But Lieber said that date is now in dispute, given a July ruling by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge James C. Chalfant. 

“Their whole EIR was thrown out,” he said, referring to the environmental impact report required by state law which must examine a whole spectrum of physical and cultural impacts arising from creation of major construction-related projects. 

Chalfant’s 59-page ruling was slightly narrower than an outright dismissal of the document. He found the EIR deficient on 11 specific grounds, including traffic mitigation and air quality, and ordered the Arcadia City Council to set aside its earlier approval of the document and recirculate a revised document that addresses the deficiencies he cited. 


School Board Bids Adieu To Director Joaquin Rivera

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Monday November 24, 2008 - 01:06:00 PM

The Berkeley Unified School District bade farewell to the longest-serving member on the current Berkeley Board of Education amidst a lot of happy memories, applause and laughter at a public meeting in the City Hall chambers last Wednesday. 

Joaquin Rivera stepped down from his role as a school board director after 12 years, following his decision earlier this year not to run for re-election. 

Community leader and activist Beatriz Leyva-Cutler—who won one of the two school board seats in the Nov. 4 election—will replace Rivera at the next school board meeting on Dec. 10. 

Rivera, who teaches chemistry at Skyline College, was first elected to the board in November 1996 and went on to be reelected in 2000 and 2004, serving a total of three terms on the board. 

A graduate of the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez, Rivera received his masters in Chemistry from UC Berkeley in 1990. 

He has served as school board president on three occasions, the most recent being last year, and has also been a delegate to the California School Boards Association. 

School board members and Berkeley Unified Superintendent Bill Huyett thanked Rivera at the meeting for his work on improving student achievement in the Berkeley public schools and for leaving the district in a better shape financially and fiscally than before. 

School board President John Selawsky described him as a “solid” board director who always steered his peers toward the right track. 

“I prefer to stay in denial that this is going to be your last meeting,” said school board member Shirley Issel, who has served along with Rivera since 1998. “You have taught me a lot about how to be a good board member and have made enormous contributions. I will miss you.” 

Rivera said that although he had debated running for a fourth term, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s decision to cut state education funds made him change his mind. 

“I thought I have been there done that, maybe again in the future, but right now I want to enjoy,” he said, thanking his colleagues and all three superintendents he had worked with over the last decade. 

“It’s been 12 good years,” he said. “During my tenure I have had the opportunity to work with some great people and three wonderful superintendents, Jack McLaughlin, Michele Lawrence and Bill Huyett. I know Bill is going to be great for Berkeley. I have had the opportunity to work with great school board members such as Pamela Doolan, Lloyd Lee and Miriam Rokeach and members of this board.” 

McLaughlin was present at the meeting Wednesday when the board presented Rivera with a resolution honoring his achievements. 

Rivera said that during his time on the school board, he had been successful in his efforts to create a single plan for student achievement and desegregating the district. 

“I am not going to be watching the school board meetings on TV but I might turn up in my robe with a wine glass in hand to watch you guys in action,” he said smiling, adding that he would be chipping in to help when the district was ready to introduce bond measures to Berkeley voters in a couple of years. 

“I have some regrets that I didn’t have a better relationship with the unions. I think it’s a two-way thing. Since I am leaving now, I can tell the unions that this is a very good board. We have to play with the cards given to us by Sacramento. Sacramento doesn’t give us a lot of money and we should be screaming at them more often.” 

Rivera also thanked his family for standing behind him like a rock during his stint in the district, especially his husband, who has been with Rivera for most of the 12 years he was on the board. 

At the last school board meeting on Nov. 12, Rivera expressed his disappointment at the passing of Prop. 8 in California, which took away the right for gay couples to marry. 

“Personally it touches me very closely,” he said at the meeting last Wednesday. 

“At this point my marriage may or may not be valid. This is really a civil rights struggle. It is like having to sit at the back of the bus or having to drink water from a different fountain because of who you are. I know the board has always been very supportive and hopefully it will be supportive of these struggles.” 

 


With Measure KK Defeated, Opponents And Proponents Battle Over Whether It Means Berkeley Residents Endorsed BRT

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Sunday November 23, 2008 - 10:15:00 AM

The overwhelming defeat of Berkeley Measure KK in the November 4 election has resulted in a dramatic--and completely understandable--reversal of opinion about the meaning of the measure by at least some of its proponents and opponents. 

Measure KK proponents said at an AC Transit Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) workshop Wednesday night that despite the defeat of the measure, they would continue their opposition to BRT's bus-lane set-aside along Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, in part because they did not believe defeat of Measure KK meant that Berkeley residents support BRT. 

AC Transit District is proposing to establish bus-only lanes along Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley as part of the district's ambitious proposal to set up a Bus Rapid Transit line from downtown San Leandro through downtown Oakland to downtown Berkeley, along the route currently taken by the district's 1 and 1R lines. 

Meanwhile, AC Transit officials have released a proposed timeline that has completion of the Environmental Impact Report process by the 3rd quarter of 2010, final design for BRT by the 1st quarter of 2011, beginning of construction by the 2nd quarter of 2012, with completion of the project tentatively scheduled for the spring of 2015. But the project still has to complete a complicated approval process involving winning federal funding grants, approval by city councils in Berkeley, San Leandro, and Oakland as and final project approval by the AC Transit board. 

On Wednesday night, AC Transit Board President Chris Peeples said several times that the board should not be considered a "rubber stamp" for the BRT project, which was begun in the planning process by AC Transit before any current member was elected to the board. 

Two weeks ago, Berkeley voters defeated on a 76.7 % No to 23.3 % Yes vote a citizen-sponsored measure to create an ordinance requiring voter approval for any proposal in Berkeley to establish transit-only street lanes within the city. 

In practical terms, while passage of Measure KK would have effectively dealt a death blow to the bus-lane set-aside portion of BRT, defeat of the measure only ensures that AC Transit can go forward with negotiations with the City of Berkeley over the proposal. AC Transit officials say that while BRT is an AC Transit proposal, "the cities own the streets," and must give approval for any substantial alteration of street right-of-ways. 

During the campaign, many Measure KK proponents said that the measure was specifically designed to halt AC Transit District's proposal to establish bus-only lanes along Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, part of the district's ambitious proposal to set up a Bus Rapid Transit line between downtown San Leandro, downtown Oakland, and downtown Berkeley. 

While some Measure KK opponents said during the campaign that the measure was a referendum on BRT, many others said their opposition was based on their belief that the measure would set bad governing policy. In the "Why Vote No On Measure KK" page of the No On Measure KK committee website, BRT is never mentioned, in fact, with the organization instead charging that the measure would block Berkeley's advancement towards reducing greenhouse emissions. The site also points out Measure KK's added costs, charging that "each new ballot measure mandated by Measure KK could cost the city up to $1.2 million, including the cost of an additional required planning study. That's a lot of money in a city our size, money that could be better spent on things like education, healthcare, public safety, or actually improving transit and protecting our environment." 

But during presentations at a special AC Transit Board BRT workshop on Wednesday, proponents and opponents abruptly switched fields, with Measure KK proponents now telling AC Transit officials that the Measure KK defeat was no indication of BRT sentiment in Berkeley because the defeat was caused solely by deceptive advertising fueled by campaign money brought in by outside interests. 

"I wanted to come tonight so that (AC Transit) did not think you had a mandate from that election that went on in Berkeley," Berkeley resident Martha Jones said during the meeting's public comment section. Jones then held up a blown-up version of one of the more famous campaign mailers of the November, 2008 season, a "No On KK" brochure that featured a poignant full-color photo of a polar bear stranded on a small ice-floe in the middle of an ocean, an attempt to link Measure KK with anti-public-transit sentiments leading to global warming. 

"People voted [against Measure KK] because they thought they were saving the polar bears," she said. "Only 28 people gave money to 'No On KK' and you will find that it is mostly people who have contracts with you."  

Noting that one large "No On KK" donation came from New York and another from Cambridge, Massachusetts, she added "it's not nice to have these interlopers coming into my city and dropping this big money to influence elections." 

And another KK proponent, resident and community activist Gail Garcia, added that "despite the failure of Measure KK, there is huge opposition to BRT in Berkeley. The money [to oppose KK] largely came from the ABC Company, the U.S. distributor of the hated Van Hool buses, and falsehoods. Falsehoods, falsehoods that the local branch of the Sierra Club was willing to propagate. So money and lies defeated Measure KK." The Sierra Club was one of Measure KK's opponents. 

Garcia added that "opposition to BRT in Berkeley will continue to grow because the more they learn about it, the less they like it." 

And Mary Oram, treasurer of the Advocates for Voter Approved Transit, a pro KK committee, said that the financial contributions for the two sides was a good estimate of the relative level of local feeling about BRT and KK. Oram estimated that "7 percent of the [anti-KK money] came from individuals, the rest came from special interest groups and companies that would benefit from BRT if it was ever put in. All of the [pro KK] money came from individuals and community associations in Berkeley." 

Oram's husband, George Oram, added that the BRT proposal does not provide along Telegraph Avenue "any service that has been asked for or endorsed by the bus riders on Telegraph Avenue or the residents on Telegraph Avenue or the merchants on Telegraph Avenue, and we believe we're going to stop you." 

Meanwhile, some Measure KK opponents are now saying that AC Transit should move forward with the planning and approval process for BRT in Berkeley because of the overwhelming support for the project demonstrated in the Measure KK vote. 

Berkeley resident Alan Tobey, treasurer of the No On KK campaign, who describes himself as "unapologetically responsible for the polar bear," said that even though KK "literally didn't [propose opposition to BRT], its campaign was pitched as the way to stop BRT on Telegraph Avenue. So the campaign literature and the many meetings I attended, the pitch was to vote for KK was to vote against the BRT project. We've learned that 77 percent of Berkeley residents disagreed with that proposition and said at this point we have no problem with BRT so far." 


City Council Splits on Cell Phone Antennas

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 09:53:00 AM

In the latest round of Berkeley’s battles over cellphone towers, Berkeley City Council split the difference Tuesday night, voting to hold a Dec. 16 hearing on an appeal from Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) approval of a Verizon Wireless application for a 10-antenna facility on top of the French Hotel on Shattuck Avenue, but holding over any action on a similar citizen appeal of ZAB approval of a T-Mobil eight-antenna request for 1725 University Ave. 

More significant, however, was the revelation during Tuesday night’s council deliberations that the city had entered into a written agreement with Verizon over the French Hotel facility last May that at least one councilmember now claims was never approved by council, and that he has never seen. 

As cell phone usage has exploded in the past several years, increasing the number of applications for new cell phone antenna facilities throughout Berkeley, the city has witnessed a number of protests and appeals by citizens opposed to adding new antennas in their neighborhoods. The ability of ZAB and the council to deny such applications has been limited by the federal Telecommunications Act of 1996, but city powers have been changed by a recent United States 9th Circuit Court of Appeal ruling. 

Berkeley is in the process of making alterations to its Wireless Telecommunication Facilities Ordinance to conform to the new circuit court ruling. 

But the big surprise at Tuesday’s meeting was an assertion by acting City Attorney Zach Cowan that failure by the city to act on the Verizon application—one way or another—might jeopardize an existing agreement between the city and Verizon that settled an earlier lawsuit against Berkeley by the telecommunications giant. 

That brought an immediate protest from Councilmember Kriss Worthington, who said, “I’ve never seen” the agreement, and asked for a City Attorney report on any settlement meetings or written agreement between Berkeley and Verizon. 

Cowan said that the agreement came before council during a special closed session meeting last May 19—a Monday meeting that Worthington said he had been unable to attend because of prior commitments—and the agenda for that closed session meeting includes an item listed as “Conference with Legal Counsel-Existing Litigation; Government Code section 54956.9(a):Verizon v. City of Berkeley; USDC Case No. C07 4034 SBA.” 

However, that didn’t clear up the confusion. 

After Worthington said that the Verizon agreement had never been disclosed to the public—a requirement of California’s open government Brown Act—Cowan argued that the agreement came under a Brown Act exception because that precludes the release of closed meeting actions “when no final decision has been made.” Copies of the agreement were not part of the Verizon appeal record for Tuesday’s Council meeting. The problem with that argument, as Worthington later pointed out to constituents and reporters following the meeting, is that if no final decision was made on the agreement, it has no legal standing, and can’t be used as a reason for speeding up a Council decision on the Verizon application. 

Worthington said he was opposed to the concept of the city having “secret agreements” that were not later made available to the public. 

Cowan told councilmembers that the Verizon agreement had already been released to the Berkeley Planning Commission (reported in the Planet on November 13.) He added following the council debate that he now believed public disclosure in this matter was proper, and would make the agreement available to the public. 

The two appeals sparked a heated debate between Councilmembers Max Anderson--who is opposed to the approval of new mobile antennas--and Gordon Wozniak, who is in support. There is currently a citizen lawsuit challenging approval of an antenna installation on South Shattuck in Anderson’s district. 

Anderson told councilmembers that the applications and appeals “continue to put us in the awkward situation of trying to adhere to pressures to uphold federal laws that protect the most greedy elements of our society” referring to the telecommunications companies “while trying to uphold our own precautionary principle. It makes us look like flakes who don’t believe in our own principles.” 

Wozniak countered that “while I’m sure the companies want to maximize their profits, the reason they are putting up these new facilities is because there’s a growing demand for cellphones. If you want to get rid of cellphones, you should convince people to burn them.”  

Worthington added that he believed the legal issues over the federal Telecommunications Act have generally been settled, and that he didn’t “want to spend tens of thousands of public dollars on quixotic legal challenges.” 

If the council does not act on the T-Mobil University Avenue appeal by the first meeting in January, the ZAB approval of the application will automatically go into effect. Cowan also said that while any changes in Berkeley’s Wireless Telecommunication Facilities Ordinance would apply to the two applications and appeals if the law is passed before the council rules on the appeals—something which appears impossible for the Verizon Dec. 16 hearing and possible only if council eventually calls for a hearing on the T-Mobil appeal—Cowan said he did not believe the proposed ordinance changes would have any effect on the merits of the two applications. 


Berkeley Says Goodbye to Betty Olds, Arreguin to be Sworn in Wednesday

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 09:54:00 AM

Betty Olds, Berkeley’s oldest and prickliest City councilmember, served at her last City Council meeting Tuesday night, entering to a standing ovation in a packed council chambers amid cheers of “Yay, Betty!” A mayoral proclamation set aside the day in her honor, and a long string of friends and constituents came to the microphone to pay tribute before the meeting was ceremonially gaveled to a close.  

Olds’ term technically ends on Nov. 30, but the next council meeting won’t be until Dec. 8. 

Jesse Arreguin, who at 24 will be Berkeley’s youngest councilmember, is scheduled to be sworn in on Wednesday, November 26, to fill deceased Councilmember Dona Spring’s expired term, and is expected to take his seat for the first time at the December 8 meeting.  

“I’m sad to be leaving,” Olds said in her final words from the City Council dais, “but if anyone thinks it’s easy to sit up here to make decisions, they don’t know anything about it.” 

The 88-year-old outgoing Olds was elected to her District 6 Council seat in 1992 after stints on the Zoning Adjustments Board and Rent Stabilization Board. She told Councilmembers and audience members Tuesday night that she had “outlasted four mayors and five city managers. Only Linda [Maio] was here [on the council] when I got here. That shows you women are the strongest.”  

Maio was first elected to Berkeley City Council the same year as Olds. 

Olds is being replaced in her District 6 seat by longtime aide Susan Wengraf, who was elected in this month’s voting. Her term will start on December 1. 

Two years ago, Olds made national headlines when she was one of three older women (also including Save the Bay founder Sylvia McLaughlin and former Berkeley Mayor Shirley Dean) to climb into the branches of an 80 foot tree to join protesters trying to save a grove of live oaks near the UC Berkeley stadium. 

The action was indicative of Olds’ championing of environmental causes during her time on Council. She was also a tireless protector of Berkeley’s animals, whether they were domestic or wildlife. 

Olds was also famous for what have come to be known as “Bettyisms,” pithy, quotable statements that delighted reporters and council spectators but often skewered political opponents. 

One audience member Tuesday night offered one of the more memorable, recalling that once during a council discussion about an overpopulation of deer in the city hills, Olds suggested solving the problem by “starting with sterilizing all of the males.” The audience member said it was never apparent whether Olds was talking about deer or some of the male opponents to thinning out the deer population, but added that as a protective measure, “half of the audience that night crossed their legs.” 

Olds offered no new Bettyisms on Tuesday, but instead read from an old Herb Caen column she found while cleaning out her desk. The column described a man running against a woman for a City Council seat who declared that one of the problems in the city he aimed to correct was the fact that “we don’t have enough balls to keep things rolling.” “I don’t have any balls,” Olds quoted the woman candidate retorting in the Caen column, “but I’ve got all my marbles, which obviously you don’t.” Though the Missouri-native Olds didn’t make the anecdote up, it’s clearly something she might have if Caen hadn’t written it down first. 

Councilmembers and several audience members paid brief tribute to Olds, but perhaps the most appropriate words were given by fellow Councilmember Laurie Capitelli. After one audience member said that Olds always answered constituent calls and “never said no,” Capitelli said that if Olds never said no to constituents, “then I guess you saved them all for us [City Councilmembers]”, acknowledging the fact that Olds was famous for speaking her own mind on the council and often taking positions that were contrary to the general flow. But Capitelli added that because Olds “can say no in such a gracious way,” it left no permanent bad feelings. 

Arreguin told the Planet that Alameda County Registrar of Voters Dave McDonald promised him that his election would be certified next Tuesday, or Wednesday at the latest, which would pave the way for the swearing-in ceremony, to take place in the Redwood Room on the 6th floor of the Berkeley City Hall at 5 p.m. He said he’s anxious to take office because his district has been without representation for months since Spring’s death.


Tree-Sitters Get a Day in Court, Cal Bears to Move to Interim Venue

By Richard Brenneman
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 09:55:00 AM
A large metal framework adorned with an image-boosting icon is the only structure erected to date at the site of the now-removed oak grove along the western wall of UC Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium.
Richard Brenneman
A large metal framework adorned with an image-boosting icon is the only structure erected to date at the site of the now-removed oak grove along the western wall of UC Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium.

Berkeley’s tree-sitters faced another day in court this week, and UC Regents were plotting the fate of Memorial Stadium and an interim venue for the Cal Bears. 

UC Berkeley spokesperson Dan Mogulof said Wednesday the work at the stadium will require finding a temporary home for the Cal Bears, with the only question being whether the move will be for one season or two. 

“Based on current planning, it looks now like no more than one year,” he said. 

While construction of the new high-tech gym and office complex now under way immediately west of the stadium will provide new quarters for facilities now housed inside the stadium, work on the stadium itself means at least one season in an alternate venue. 

Meanwhile, an appeal challenging the stadium plans is still under way. 

On a second legal front, three of the activists who occupied the now-vanished grove outside the Berkeley stadium appeared before Alameda County Superior Court Judge Marshall Whitley. Six others avoided trial by entering guilty pleas to contempt-of-court charges after reaching a deal with the university and prosecutors. 

In exchange for the pleas, the university agreed not to seek legal costs or jail time from the six, while the defendants agreed to perform 50 hours each of community service, said attorney William Simpich. 

Among the six who had their fees waived were two of the last three tree sitters to surrender to campus police when the university completed its demolition of the grove Sept. 9. 

They are Armando Resendez, also known as Mando, 20, and Ernesto Trevino (Droog) who was the youngest tree-sitter at 18. Others who made the no-fees deal were Gabrielle Silverman (Millipede), Matthew Marks, Tristan Anderson (Cricket) and Amanda Tierney, otherwise known as “Dumpster Muffin.” 

Three defendants decided to argue their cases, but Judge Whitley found them all guilty during trials Monday. 

Zachary RunningWolf, the first treesitter to ascend the branches outside the grove on Big Game Day 2006, and Kingman Lim, who was arrested after hanging a protest banner from the stadium walls, were given five day jail sentences along with Michael Schuck (better known by his treesitter names Fresh and Shem), but the judge allowed them to be considered as served concurrently with jail terms previously imposed. 

The last treesitter to descend, Raul Colocho, 27, otherwise known as Huck or Huckleberry, and fellow treesitter Drew Beres still have pending legal issues, which may be resolved in a court hearing in March. 

Beres contends he shouldn’t be charged in the case, since he was already convicted on another charge arising from the same incident. 

Simpich said it was unlikely any of the three would do additional jail time, considering that all three have spent previous time behind bars for their actions at the grove. Most of the treesitters had been arrested multiple times, and RunningWolf still faces another criminal case in the near future, the attorney added said. 

“We’re are going to fight over attorney fees, though,” Simpich said. 

Michael R. Goldstein, who has been handling the cases for the UC Office of the President, said the university has already won judgments of between $5,000 and $10,000 against defendants in other grove cases to help recoup some of the legal fees the university has spent. 

Five more cases are pending where the university is seeking fees, he said.  

 

Regents to decide 

The Grounds and Buildings Committee of the UC Board of Regents was meeting in secret session Wednesday afternoon at the Daily Planet’s deadline, considering what the agenda described only as “Discussion of Seismic Plans for Individual Structures Subject to Litigation.” 

A lawsuit initially filed by the City of Berkeley, stadium neighbors and environmentalists had challenged sought to stop construction at the stadium, including the Student Athlete High Performance Center now being built where the grove once stood. 

A ruling by Superior Court Judge Barbara J. Miller largely sided with the university, and her earlier order barring construction at the grove expired, allowing the university’s contract arborists to level the grove and evict the last of the treesitters. 

The four-level high tech gym and office complex is the first of three planned construction phases at the stadium itself, and those projects are in turn part of a large set of construction plans collectively known as SCIP, the Southeast Campus Integrated Projects. 

Mogulof said he had no information about a report published in Wednesday’s San Francisco Chronicle which said regents would discuss the use of Candlestick Park as a venue for the Bears’ “away” season. 

Once the home of both the San Francisco Giants baseball teams and the 49ers football teams, the Giants have since moved on, leaving Saturdays potentially open for college games while the NFL pro team plays on Sundays. A city official quoted by the Chronicle acknowledged that negotiations have been held with the school. 

Meanwhile, the lawsuit challenging the SCIP plans is still on appeal, though the city has dropped out. 

A retrofit is needed, university officials say, both to bring the aging stadium up to modern earthquake codes and to provide locker rooms for women athletes. 

University plans also call for upgrading seating and adding exclusive new amenities in an elevated section to be built over the stadium’s western wall.  

In another stadium-related move, university officials finally agreed to give a group of Native Americans the stump of Grandmother Oak, the largest and most venerable of the trees chainsawed at the site of the former grove. 

The hand-over was made Monday, said Matthew Taylor, an activist who was himself arrested at the grove and who has been documenting the history of the protest.


Software Problems Leave Thousands of Peralta Students Without Financial Aid

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 09:55:00 AM

A serious glitch in the Peralta Community College District’s new student financial aid software has caused checks for thousands of students to be delayed, with a resolution of the problem apparently not yet in sight. 

Peralta students have held demonstrations at several district board meetings concerning the situation, and district trustees have declared the continuing problem a “financial crisis” and “unacceptable.” 

There have been estimates by some district officials that the problem could affect as many as 5,000 financial aid checks that are due to students but not yet paid for the fall semester. And some students have not been paid on applications they put in as early as last spring. 

Because Peralta’s community colleges cater in part to an older demographic than state universities or the UC system, many of the district’s students are working adults and parents who rely upon financial aid to supplement their income. 

The problem is affecting students at all four of Peralta’s colleges: Berkeley City, Laney, Merritt, and College of Alameda. 

The problem may have been exacerbated by the fact that Peralta failed to renew the contract of Internet Technology head Gary Perkins last July, leaving the district’s IT department to be run by Chief Financial Officer Tom Smith, with no one overseeing the problem with a specific computer technology background. 

“I’m very disappointed with the district’s plan for conversion to the new software system and our lack of foresight in foreseeing possible problems,” board president Cy Gulassa said by telephone this week. “And I’m concerned for the welfare of our students as well as the reputation of the district’s four colleges.” 

And trustee Linda Handy, who served as chair of the board’s Internet Technology Committee before it was disbanded this year, called it a “horrible situation that is putting tremendous stress on students. I’ve been saying for the last six years that ‘the sky is falling’ (concerning Peralta’s internet technology problems). Well, now it’s down on our heads.” 

District officials say the problem began when Peralta moved from its old Legacy financial aid computer software this fall to the Regent system. The system is designed not just to issue checks, but to cross-check student applications to verify the identity of the student and to ensure that the student is actually enrolled in class and is financially eligible for aid. In addition, Peralta’s system is complicated by the fact that students apply for aid at individual colleges rather than districtwide--legally allowing for a larger amount of federal and state aid--and that the computer system must reconcile slight differences between the processes of the colleges. 

With the Regent software unable to handle the applications, Peralta staff has been reduced to manually doing the cross-checking and verification and handwriting the checks, a time-consuming process which has allowed some 3,000 checks to be written this semester, but which has not been fast enough to completely reduce the backlog. 

Gulassa said the old Legacy system that Regent replaced “was at least satisfactory. We had problems, but never of this magnitude.” 

“We keep being told that the problem is resolved and the system is now working,” Handy said. “Last Thursday in the Student Services meeting we were told that it was fixed, and we thought the checks would go out by computer the next day. They didn’t. It’s really distressing.”


Phoenix Project Seeks Democratization of UC Regents

By Kristin McFarland
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 09:56:00 AM

At the Phoenix Project for UC Democracy kickoff Tuesday night, panelists discussed the possibilities for democratizing of the UC Regents and creating a powerful enough constituency to effect changes. 

The Phoenix Project was created as a statewide coalition of student activist organizations and community members working together to create transparency, accountability and democracy within the university administration. 

“We are such an enormous, diverse system that I think it’s necessary for our regents to be elected in order to accurately represent the UC community,” Associated Students of UC (ASUC) Senator Christina Oatfield said. 

Eighteen of the 26 regents are now appointed by the governor for 12-year terms. The regents appoint one student representative who serves a one-year term. The remaining seats are filled by ex officio members, including the governor, lieutenant governor, speaker of the Assembly, superintendent of public instruction, president and vice president of the Alumni Associations of UC, and the UC president. 

Democratization efforts—which will require a constitutional amendment—began shortly after the university’s inception in 1868, revived in the 1960s, when the senate ratification became a requirement, and started again in the 1990s, when the Committee for a Responsible University sought a democratization initiative on the 1994 ballot. 

Tuesday night’s panel focused not only on the need for democratization, but also on the logistics of how to accomplish that goal. Student panelists pointed to the decisions made behind closed doors and the university’s unwillingness to even converse with activists or opponents. 

“The issue isn’t that we’re not doing enough to be heard,” said panelist and Berkeley City Councilmember-elect Jesse Arreguin. “The issue is that the university isn’t listening.” 

Oatfield told the audience about the university’s role in closed-session student government meetings, in which administrators discuss the need to “frame” issues so that people will be less upset by a controversial decision. According to Oatfield, the university works harder to frame an issue than to deal with an issue itself.  

“It’s a constant battle to deal with the UC administration,” Arreguin said, recalling his own student committee days at UC Berkeley, when the university refused to listen to opponents of its parking and transportation policies. 

“The question that I still don’t know the answer to is whether we have the chance to succeed,” said panelist Charles Schwartz, professor emeritus of the Department of Physics, and an active leader of the 1994 ballot initiative. 

Schwartz pointed out that the movement needs not only to propose a democratic model, but also to organize a constituency of voters. 

The current system was justified by the source of the money, Schwartz said. When the university was created, the state provided most of the money and therefore appointed the people to manage that money. 

But now, according to Schwartz, citing his independent research, the ever-increasing student fees now cover 100 percent of actual undergraduate education costs. The university claims that fees cover only 30 percent of the “cost of education,” but under its model, that cost includes not only undergraduate education, but also graduate education and faculty research.  

In reality, Schwartz says, no state money now goes to undergraduate education: The students pay for that themselves. 

Schwartz proposes that the regents be appointed or elected in proportion to the sources of the money. He calculates that eight regents should be elected by the students and parents who pay the fees. 

“We can succeed to the extent that we can project this to the world,” said Ignacio Chapela, associate professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management. 

Chapela pointed to the controversial 1998 $25 million deal between Novartis and his college, of which he was an active critic. According to Chapela, faculty was notified of the deal 30 minutes before it was announced and had no say in the decision. Although Chapela and other faculty challenged the deal and drew national attention to it, no changes were made to the original agreement. 

“People don’t realize that what we did was open a tiny little window into the oppression that happens at the university every day,” Chapela said. “What’s happening here that one must open an expensive lawsuit and risk one’s career just to open the books a little bit?” 

Chapela argued that the university has absolutely no transparency, is completely shielded from public scrutiny and answerable to no one. To overcome that, the project must gain significant public support and force the university to listen. 

“It has to be a systematic change, a really big picture change,” said student panelist and activist Marcela Sadlowski. “It needs to be taken from the students and the community to the streets of California so we can change the constitution.” 

The Phoenix Project will hold a statewide summit in Berkeley Jan. 19-20, concurrent with UC Regents’ meeting on the Berkeley campus. 


BP Lab Building On Hold, Computer Lab Funds Revised

By Richard Brenneman
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 09:57:00 AM

Plans for a $159 million biofuel and alternative energy lab in the Berkeley hills have been put on hold by UC President Mark Yudoff while the project is sent back to the drawing board. 

Yudoff and UC Regents Committee on Grounds and Buildings (CGB) Chair Leslie Tang Schilling have signed a letter which decertifies the environmental impact report and rescinds the regents’ approval of architectural plans for the Helios Building. 

That high-tech structure at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) is to be the site of much of the research conducted under the $500 million Energy Biosciences Institute, a controversial crops-into-fuel program funded by British petroleum giant BP. 

The CGB is scheduled to vote Tuesday on funding for a second new building planned for the lab, covering interest costs during construction of the already approved Computational Research and Theory (CRT) building. 

Yudoff’s letter on the Helios Building said that a redesign is needed “to address geotechnical issues identified subsequent to ... approval of the project.” 

But Stephan Volker, the attorney who represents Berkeley preservationists who have sued to block the project, said the university’s approval of the project before thorough engineering tests were conducted shows that “once again, the university has put the project approval cart before the environmental horse.” 

LBNL spokesperson Lynn Yarris said that new plans currently under way will call for a lower-profile design than the one regents had approved, one that “would be better matched to the topography” of the site overlooking Strawberry Canyon. 

“It will be shorter but longer,” he said, and less visible from most viewpoints. 

Yarris said conceptual drawings will be presented to the public at a scoping session to gather comments for a new environmental impact report (EIR), with the meeting to be held sometime next month. 

The target date for a new draft EIR is sometime in March, with construction to start in Spring 2009. “It will take three years to complete,” Yarris said. 

The new design is expected to cost more than the $198.2 million approved by the regents in May—though how much is uncertain, given the current volatility of the construction materials market, the lab official said. 

Yarris said cost increases would be offset by long-term benefits arising from a more cost-effective design. 

 

Computer building 

A second LBNL project also facing a legal challenge is up for reconsideration at Tuesday’s meeting of the UC Board of Regents in San Francisco. 

The CGB is scheduled to vote for a second time on approving external funds for the CRT building, which will be built at the opposite, northwestern end of the lab complex from the Helios Building. 

An action opposing that project has been filed by Alameda attorney Michael Lozeau. 

Approval of the $113 million building in May included a provision that costs of funding debt incurred to cover construction costs would come from lab operating funds. 

The revised approval before the CGB Tuesday added a proviso declaring that “LBNL operating funds are not guaranteed funds, and that their availability depends on Congressional appropriations” and federal Department of Energy (DOE) decisions. 

The revisions would allow the UC president to arrange for loans with interest-only payments during construction and allow the executive to ”create a contingency funding strategy to pay the debt service for the external funding” in event the cash isn’t available from lab operating funds. 

One unresolved issue is whether or not the DOE will house a supercomputer facility inside the new structure, calling into question a major potential funding source. 

Relocating the federal department’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center from its current location in a former bank building in downtown Oakland had been cited as a major reason for building the CRT facility. 

But while the DOE professes “great interest” in relocating to the CRT, in a March memorandum, federal officials “made clear that DOE was not making any present commitment,” according to the proposal CGB is set to vote on Tuesday. 

The proposal before the committee creates a plan to cover the $8.7 million in debt service costs during construction. 

The plaintiff in both lawsuits is Save Strawberry Canyon, a non-profit whose members includes Berkeley residents Sylvia McLaughlin, Lesley Emmington, Janice Thomas and Hank Gehman. Former mayor Shirley Dean is listed as the group’s legal agent on its filings with the California Secretary of State. 

Both actions contend that the regents acted improperly when they certified environmental impact reports on the projects and approved funding for buildings critics contend are located in an environmentally sensitive landscape that contains threatened species and faces the risk of serious damage from earthquakes along the Hayward Fault. 


UC Police Investigate Campus Israeli-Palestinian Altercation

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 09:57:00 AM

The UC Berkeley Police Department is investigating a fight that erupted Thursday evening between a group of current and former UC Berkeley students after a Palestinian flag was hung over a balcony overlooking a pro-Israel concert on campus. 

Lt. Adan Tejada of the UC police said that the UCPD received a report of an altercation on the second-floor balcony of Eshelman Hall, above Lower Sproul Plaza, at 5:45 p.m. on Nov. 13, but by the time the officers responded, the fight had already stopped. 

He said that a number of witnesses identified at least five students involved in a fight, which he said broke out, according to eyewitness testimony, when some Palestinian students hung a Palestinian flag over the railing of the balcony to protest what they alleged were anti-Palestinian lyrics performed during a concert for Israeli Liberation Week. 

According to Tejada, some of the people attending the concert went up to get the flag off the balcony, which led to pushing and shoving. The exact details of what happened at that point are still under investigation, he said. 

“We were not able to make any arrests because no one was fighting when the police arrived,” he said, adding that supporters on both sides asked police to charge members from the opposing side with battery. 

Two students and one former student were cited for battery, authorities said, and several witness statements were taken. UCPD has not released the names of the students involved in the incident pending investigation. Once the investigation is complete, the case will be referred to the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office. 

“We are looking at things that were said during the investigation right now,” Tejada said, adding that this could provide clues as to whether the incident was a hate crime or not. 

He said that the alleged statements made during the incident were still under investigation and could not be released. 

Tejada said that there was little possibility that the incident was connected to acts of vandalism that occurred on campus last month, when pro-Israel posters at a UC Berkeley bus stop outside Eshelman Hall were defaced with anti-Israel graffiti. 

Although UC police have not stepped up security measures on campus after the incident, he said, university officials and student groups were doing extensive outreach to unite students across campus. 

“I think it’s safe to say that over many years we have seen flare-ups between Israeli and Palestinian students on campus and we have always encouraged them to resolve ongoing disagreements in a non-violent way and will continue to ask them to do so,” he said. 

Two student groups on campus—the Zionist Freedom Alliance and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)— sent out press releases following Thursday’s events which contained conflicting accounts of the incident and statements defending their actions. 

The e-mail from the Zionist Freedom Alliance stated that the group was “deeply concerned by the latest in a series of attacks on Jewish and pro-Israel students at UC Berkeley perpetrated by members of Students for Justice in Palestine.” 

It charged that around 6 p.m. on Thursday, members of Students for Justice in Palestine disrupted a hip-hop concert organized by the alliance celebrating the Jewish connection to Israel and attacked students who had asked them to stop the disturbance. 

According to the e-mail, three members of Students for Justice in Palestine “illegally draped large Palestinian flags behind the stage of the concert, a part of Israel Liberation Week,” which was followed by Yehuda De Sa, one of the performers, UC Berkeley alumnus Gabe Weiner, and current Associated Students of the University of California Senator John Moghtader “walking to the balcony from which the flags were hanging" and asking "the students to remove the flags as they misrepresented the concert’s message.” 

The e-mail charged that members of SJP reacted with hostility to the request and that current SJP leader Husam Zakharia “instigated a physical altercation by striking Weiner on the head,” which was followed by Weiner and De Sa trying to defend themselves” and Moghtader—who was standing away from the scuffle—making a successful effort to break up the fight. 

The alliance also wrote that members of SJP shouted “anti-Semitic epithets referencing the Holocaust throughout the ordeal.” 

In their press release, the Students for Justice in Palestine dismissed all the allegations put forward by the Zionist Freedom Alliance. 

Calling the incident “a violent attack on three Arab Palestinian students,” the e-mail said that dozens of witnesses had testified that “three organizers for the Zionist Freedom Alliance attacked one male and two female Arab students who stood nearby the event holding a Palestinian flag,” which according to the SJP had been a “silent statement” against offensive anti-Arab remarks at the concert. 

The e-mail further alleged that shortly after the flags were displayed, the “assailants” angrily rushed into Eshelman Hall disturbing several meetings to reach the second floor balcony and upon arriving, pushed the protesters aside and took their flags away. 

It claimed that in the process, one of the protesters was knocked against the balcony railing, which was followed by a scuffle leading to one male and one female Arab student being hit several times, within minutes of which the perpetrators began to rush away. 

The group also wrote that throughout the incident the “assailants and their supporters” were overheard making remarks such as “we’re about to take care of some f***ing Palestinians,” and “you Arab dogs, we will kill you.” 

UC Berkeley spokesperson Dan Mogulof said Monday that university officials had written an open letter to the campus community outlining how the campus was responding to the incident and laying out possible resources for students in the event something similar happened in the future. 

Signed by Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, ASUC President Roxanne Winston and vice chancellors Gibor Basri and Harry LeGrande, the letter condemns Thursday’s actions, acknowledging that it was the result of a “dispute between students with differing views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” It states that although Berkeley is passionate about embracing debate, free speech and political activism, it was important to hold them in a reasoned and civil way. 

“Physical assault and violence are never acceptable,” the officials wrote, adding that the campus administration was making attempts to address the current situation along with student groups, who were holding forums, town halls and other civil dialogue—including this week’s Peace Not Prejudice events—to alleviate tensions. 

The letter also directed students to turn to resources such as the ASUC Student Advocate, the Office of Campus Climate and Compliance, Office of the Dean of Students and the Gender Equity Resource Center when provoked. 

An Equity and Inclusion division, headed by Basri, will be part of a long-term strategy for improving campus climate, authorities said. 

“The vibrancy of Berkeley’s intellectual environment is made possible by our rich diversity,” the letter concluded. “Let us use this opportunity to help lead the way away from bigotry and hate towards a flourishing multicultural society.” 


New Ruling Offers Brighter Future For Oakland’s California Hotel

By Kristin McFarland
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 09:58:00 AM

A new court ruling granting further independence to the California Hotel has given its residents hope for a bright future. 

On Oct. 29, Alameda County Superior Court judge Richard Keller upheld an injunction in place since late July. The restraining order prevents building owner Oakland Community Housing Inc. (OCHI) from shutting off the hotel’s utilities and evicting the tenants. 

In an even greater victory for tenants, Judge Keller granted many new powers to court-appointed trustee Anne Omura, executive director of the Eviction Defense Center in Oakland. Omura, named trustee in September, has been collecting the tenants’ rent to pay the utility bills and keep the hotel running.  

Omura now has the power to hire a management company that will provide security, repairs and a business plan for the hotel. Additionally, Omura will be able to rent out all 150 rooms in the hotel once they are up to code, creating the potential for the hotel to generate enough money to stand on its own. 

“I’m going to do everything in my power to help the tenants out,” Omura said. 

As a first step toward improving the hotel, Omura has used the money left over from paying the utility bills to hire the Jay-Phares Corporation (JPC), an Oakland-based property management and consulting firm, to run and rehabilitate the hotel. 

“This is a good victory for the tenants because they’ve been running the place themselves,” said John Murcko, attorney for the hotel’s residents. Since July, the residents of the hotel have been working security shifts, cleaning the hotel and self-organizing to keep their home intact. The management company will relieve the tenants of those responsibilities. 

“Our business is to create safe, habitable properties,” said John Jay, executive vice president and chief operating officer of JPC. The company specializes in the “rehabilitation and redevelopment of core urban properties, typically in communities with high percentages of minority populations, and often with significant social problems.” 

JPC’s first action was the implementation of professional nighttime security, provided by an affiliate company of JPC. 

“Currently, the building has not been secured, and as a result, there has been a lot of illicit activity,” Jay said. “We’ve quieted it down now and there have been no further incidents.” 

Jay, Omura and Murcko all stress that 24-hour security is an imperative need for the hotel’s future, both to keep the residents safe and to keep the neighborhood’s troubles on the streets and out of the hotel. For now, however, the hotel can only afford nighttime security, which is an improvement, but not the optimal situation. 

JPC has also brought in contractors, plumbers and a property manager to ensure that the building is safe for the existing residents. Jay said the company will work to make the occupied rooms pest-free and in good repair before improving the rest of the hotel. 

“Our first priority is the existing tenants, getting them in clean, safe apartments,” Omura said.  

In the future, the release of the unrented apartments, many empty and unprofitable since 2007, could allow the hotel to generate enough money from rent to support itself independently. But the unoccupied rooms must meet safety codes before they can be leased out, and the occupied rooms must receive the first attention. 

Funds remain a prime concern for the maintenance of the hotel and could prohibit the recovery of the empty rooms. Estimates have been made for the repair of broken windows, plumbing, elevators and sprinklers. The ‘wishlist’ of improvements also includes 24-hour security, repairs to all of the rooms and improvement of the retail spaces on the building’s ground floor. 

“There’s been a lot of skepticism that it can be turned around, but we’re going to give it our best shot,” Jay said. 

To ensure that the building is receiving sufficient funds, JPC will conduct a ‘census’ of existing tenants to make sure that all are eligible for low-income housing, have signed a lease and are paying their rent. 

Additionally, JPC hopes to lease retail space on the ground floor of the hotel to independent, women- or minority-owned, and non-profit businesses to generate further income. The company is willing to support low-capital ventures run by dedicated people who are willing to work hard, Jay said. 

“Make it up, believe in it, do it,” Jay said. “That’s what life is all about.” 

In that spirit, the advocates of the hotel continue working to keep it alive. 

Jay points to the original building of Merritt College in Oakland, a building in “far worse shape” than the California Hotel and managed by JPC during its transitional stage, as an example of potential rejuvenation. The Merritt College building now houses the north campus of the Children’s Hospital and Research Center of Oakland and the North Oakland Senior Center. 

“Predecessors say it’s impossible, but I don’t believe it,” Jay said. “If we are frugal and patient, we can generate enough income to rehabilitate [the hotel] and rejuvenate it and sustain it as low-income housing.” 

For John Murcko, the primary goal for the hotel is to keep it operating for the 12 years that remain of the 30 agreed upon when grants were given to make the hotel into low-income housing. 

“Right now, we want to ensure that the people who are there can stay for another 12 years,” Murcko said. 

“The hotel needs to be supported because it’s the right thing to do and it’s the legally required thing to do,” Jay said. 

The next hearing on the California Hotel will be held in the Alameda Superior Courthouse in Hayward on Monday, Jan. 12. 


New Analysis: Why the Prop. 8 Protests Matter

By By Paul Hogarth
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 10:52:00 AM

I didn’t join the street protests against Proposition 8 right after it passed. My gut reaction was: “Where were all these people when we had the chance to defeat it?” But “No on 8” ran a terrible campaign that would not have effectively used more volunteers, and it’s possible that many had tried to get involved. Now the state Supreme Court will decide what to do about Prop. 8, and City Attorney Dennis Herrera has put on a strong case to have it overruled. But that doesn’t mean the court will do the right thing; even the best legal arguments can lose. A mass movement of peaceful protest is crucial at building the political momentum to attain marriage equality—which can convince the Court it’s okay to overturn the “will of the voters.” Social movements rely too much on lawyers and politicians to make progress—without effectively using the masses of people who want to help. Now people are angry, and this weekend we saw mass protests across the country. It’s now time for everyday people to get involved. 

As Barbara Ehrenreich once argued, Roe v. Wade didn’t just happen because a majority of Supreme Court justices decided women have the right to choose. It was after a mass movement worked hard for many years to make that politically possible. While we like to believe the best legal arguments always win in court, judges are—at the end of the day—politically connected lawyers who wear robes. As much as Dennis Herrera’s lawsuit is well written and legally sound, it’s still a leap of faith for the state Supreme Court to override a popular majority in the last election. And citizen action—if done effectively—can go a long way to give them the political courage to do the right thing. 

Public outrage at Prop. 8’s passage has not just been a few angry protests in the Castro, or righteous indignation at churches. People who never thought of themselves as “activists” have suddenly been spurred into action—and they’re using the same tools the Obama campaign used to win the presidency. For example, my friend Trent started a Facebook group called “Californians Ready to Repeal Prop. 8.” He expected a few hundred people to join, but in less than a week the group had over 200,000 members. Efforts are afoot to collect signatures for a statewide proposition—in 2010, or sooner if we have a special election. 

This viral activism is in stark contrast to the “No on 8” campaign—where people relied on political leaders who failed us in waging a statewide effort. My first involvement with “No on 8” was in July, right after the San Francisco Pride parade. The campaign had just collected thousands of postcards at Pride, and our task was to call these people and recruit them to volunteer. But a lot of people come to SF Pride from across the state, and all the volunteer activities were in San Francisco. It was a lot to ask someone who lives in Monterey or Santa Rosa to come table at a farmers’ market in San Francisco for a day. 

I asked the campaign why they couldn’t just get people to do “No on 8” activities in their own communities. They didn’t have to wait until the campaign could afford to open offices in other parts of the state. Online groups like MoveOn have perfected the model of using the Internet to connect like-minded activists to each other—and get them to meet in “offline” locations to push their political cause. My suggestion was ignored. Now we see spontaneous efforts—organized online via social networks, without any “leaders”—to lay the groundwork for a future Proposition campaign to restore marriage equality. 

Nov. 15 was a massive “Day of Protest” against Prop. 8, and we predictably had a huge rally in San Francisco. But we also had nearly 2,000 people in Sacramento, 12,000 in Los Angeles, a whopping 20,000 in San Diego, 2,500 in Santa Rosa, and over 1,000 in Downtown Ventura. And it wasn’t just a statewide action—12,000 took to the streets in Seattle, 5,000 in Boston, thousands in Chicago, 1,000 in Albuquerque and even a rally in Peoria. Prop. 8 hit a nerve felt past California’s boundaries: during a presidential election that gave millions hope, one of our bluest states voted to take away peoples’ fundamental rights. People are upset, and want to get involved. 

Now Prop. 8’s fate is in the hands of our state Supreme Court—who must decide if the greater good (equal protection under law) is worth telling 52 percent of California voters they can’t eliminate marriage rights. Peaceful protests can give the judges the resolve to do the right thing. Unlike George W. Bush—who said he didn’t “listen to focus groups” after 2 million people across the world marched against the Iraq War on a single day—I believe that our justices will take these protests seriously. Which is why they matter so much. 

 

This article was originally posted on BeyondChron.org.


UC Berkeley Students Call on Obama to Enact Dream Act

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 09:58:00 AM

UC Berkeley students joined the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration and Immigrant Rights, and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) last week to launch a national campaign urging President-elect Barack Obama to enact the federal Dream Act, which would legalize federal financial aid and open a path of citizenship for undocumented immigrant college students across the nation, who are otherwise entrapped in complicated paperwork. 

Held at the MLK Student Union on campus, the Nov. 13 event—which was organized by BAMN and co-sponsored by Rising Immigrant Scholars through Education, the Latino Business Students Association, the gender and women’s studies and Spanish and Portuguese studies departments at the university and the Chancellor’s Student Opportunity Fund—started with a group of undocumented students from around the Bay Area testifying about their struggles in the absence of federal financial aid. 

Calls to Chancellor Robert Birgeneau’s office for comment were not returned, but a campus spokesperson confirmed that the chancellor supports the Dream Act. Birgeneau wrote an op-ed piece in support of the act for the UC Berkeley student newspaper, The Daily Californian, on Nov. 5. 

In California, undocumented students have the right to attend a public university but are not allowed to apply for financial aid, something Thursday’s participants said they would aggressively push for once the new president is sworn in. 

BAMN activists also called upon UC Berkeley to become a sanctuary campus and welcome African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and other minority and immigrant communities. 

“We want to make the era of change and hope real,” said BAMN organizer Yuvette Felarca, who also teaches at Malcolm X Elementary School in Berkeley. “When we see the nation elect the first black president and yet we see that the percentage of blacks and Latinos on campuses like UC Berkeley and UCLA is so low, we need to make a change.” 

Shanta Driver, national chairperson for BAMN, asked students to seize this important moment in history to start a new kind of civil rights movement which would oppose racism and bring equal opportunities to all. 

“Over the last few weeks we have seen a real change in America and it has presented us with an opportunity to leave our mark on our nation,” she said to applause from the audience. “If it’s possible for America, with such a strong and deep history of racism to do this, then anything is possible. We need to resolve deep social problems and engage in a real debate and discussion on racism.” 

She said that Obama should enact the Dream Act within his first 100 days in office. 

“If the people who worked for Obama’s victory decide after inauguration day that their work is over, it won’t happen,” Driver said. “We have to continue to be leaders of the movement that put him in power.” 

Driver added that if the Dream Act failed under Obama, then generations of young people would ask, “If a black president couldn’t do it, then who can?” 

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed SB 1301, which incorporates the California Dream Act, on Sept. 30, citing a staggering state economy. Thousands of students who had mobilized in support of the bill were disappointed by his decision. 

“The governor said that although he shared the authors’ goal of making affordable education available to all California students, given the precarious fiscal condition the state is facing right now, it would not be prudent to place additional demands on our limited financial aid resources as specified in this bill,” said Francisco Castillo, a spokesperson for Schwarzenegger. 

Castillo added that the governor supported a local bill which allows undocumented students to pay in-state tuition. 

Gabriella, a UC Berkeley undocumented student from El Salvador who has been in the U.S. since October 2005, said that even with in-state tuition, it is difficult to make ends meet 

“The reason my dad brought me here is because he wanted me to have a better life,” she said. “But my transition to UC Berkeley has been very different than that of the other students. My dad earns less than $10,000 a year. I couldn’t get enough scholarship money to live on campus so I am living with my best friend’s sister in Davis. I have to commute three to four hours every day.” 

Gabriella—who wants to go to law school—said that when she started out as a sophomore at her high school in California, she didn’t speak English and never imagined going to a community college, let alone UC Berkeley. 

“Right now I can’t get a job because I don’t have a Social Security number and residence,” she said. “Sometimes I have to skip meals in order to pay for the shuttle. I had to sacrifice many things to be at UC Berkeley. Usually people have gym, clubs or homework sessions after class, but I can’t go to any of those. My future is pretty uncertain and if the situation doesn’t change I might have to drop out. I have hope that the Dream Act might get passed one day.” 

Zaira, another undocumented student at the university, echoed her thoughts. 

“It’s hard to describe the life of an undocumented student on campus,” she said. “We act the same as the other students but our efforts are not reciprocated by the education system. All undocumented students are equal and deserve the same rights. There’s no reason why we should get the leftovers of education. I want to ask those opposing the Dream Act to give me one reason why it shouldn’t be made a reality.” 


Berkeley Teachers Union Demands Contract Renewal

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 09:59:00 AM

Berkeley teachers rallied at 21 school sites throughout the city Tuesday, citing an urgent desire for an agreement on working hours, wages, health benefits and other contract provisions. 

Called “A Day of Teacher Action,” teachers waved posters and handed out flyers to passersby informing them of the 141-day delay in their contract renewal with the Berkeley Unified School District, something they charged was becoming a big distraction in their teaching and interactions with students. 

Cathy Campbell, president of the Berkeley Federation of Teachers, said that although the union was aware of the economic constraints on the district, it wanted district officials to come to a swift and amiable agreement. 

Berkeley Unified Superintendent Bill Huyett said that although the district had yet to renew its contract with the union, it was still honoring the terms of the old contract. 

“We don’t make comments on on-going negotiations,” he said. “But I want to assure everybody that the old contract is still valid. The Berkeley Federation of Teachers is a very progressive organization and we always want to listen to their ideas. They are an important part of BUSD.” 

BFT’S contract, which was last renewed in May 2005 for three years, expired on June 30. 

“Most of the terms of the contract continue, but there is still a lot of uncertainty,” Campbell said. “We have an agreement for wages for 2008-09 but not for 2009-10. It’s mostly an issue of capacity. The contract has to be productive and timely—the longer it takes the more diversion it creates.” 

Some teachers said they were frustrated with the district’s lack of preparation during bargaining sessions, which they claimed often took time away from classrooms and resulted in unproductive workdays. 

Dale Long, a preschool teacher at King Child Development Center who is also on the union’s negotiating team, said that he often had to sacrifice time that could otherwise be spent with students because of unproductive negotiations. 

“We go prepared on a regular proposal but the district is ill-prepared to make counter proposals,” said Long, who was handing out flyers at the Derby Street farmers market late Tuesday afternoon. “The last session was four and a half hours long. The district spent three of those four and a half hours preparing for something they should have prepared for hours before the negotiations. It’s very frustrating because I have to take off from work sometimes and I feel I am doing the children a disservice.” 

Long acknowledged that although the district had made some progress during the course of their discussions with the union, the negotiations took a step backward when it was time to talk about a revenue-sharing formula, which would ensure that when the district receives a revenue boost, the teachers would be entitled to their fair share. 

“It worked well on our last contract,” he said. Cynthia Allman, a first grade teacher at Malcolm X Elementary School, agreed. 

“We know times are really tough so we are asking for a continuance of the revenue-sharing formula, so that when the district gets its money we can get our fair share,” she said. “We want to make sure the district is protected as well. We don’t want them to commit to something they don’t have.” 

Allman, who stood on Ashby Avenue along with several other teachers waving posters with “141” written on them as early as 8 a.m., said she was encouraged by the way the community had reacted to the demonstrations. 

Everyone is worried about the economy and the state budget,” she said, “but it still makes me wonder if the district really values our work.” 

Mary Wrenn, a teacher at Willard Middle School in Berkeley, said that teachers were beginning to feel the economic pinch as well. 

“We are really anxious to reach an agreement especially because these are such hard economic times,” Wrenn, who rallied before and after school hours, said. 

Berkeley Board of Education member Karen Hemphill said she was hopeful the district would be able to create a multi-year contract. 

“I understand the teachers are a little frustrated but we have the unusual situation of five union agreements opening up at the same time,” she said. “I think that’s a part of the reason why things are a little slow.” 

Hemphill said that more and more unions and school districts were looking at revenue sharing formulas in the face of a fluctuating economic scenario. 

“If we receive more money we will look into sharing with the union but we can’t promise anything now because if we don’t have any money, we can’t possibly share, Hemphill said. “It’s becoming more and more difficult now, especially with the proposed mid-year budget cuts.” 

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently proposed mid-year cuts to education funds which would leave Berkeley Unified with a $3.5 million deficit. 

Campbell said the next bargaining session was set for Monday, and then again a week later. “I don’t know what to expect but I am hopeful it will be a productive session,” she said.


Intervention Sought for Willard Student Involved in Trash Can Fires

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 09:59:00 AM

A student at Willard Middle School in Berkeley has admitted to starting some of the trash can fires at the school more than three weeks ago and will take part in intervention services. 

Berkeley Fire Department Deputy Chief Gil Dong said that the student’s name and age were being withheld since he is a juvenile. 

Berkeley fire officials responded to a fire alarm activation on Oct. 22 and on arrival found a small trash can fire being extinguished by school authorities. 

A total of three small trash can fires were reported, and two of them had started in restrooms located inside the school, Dong said, resulting in smoke but no injuries. 

School authorities interviewed several students in the weeks following the incident to get an idea about who could have been involved in the incident and finally identified one student, Dong said. 

“A fire investigator and a person-in-charge from the Juvenile Firesetter Program met with school officials and learned that the student had admitted to starting several of the fires, not all,” he said. “We don’t know what his motives were. We have recommended that our intervention officers meet with the child’s family to make sure they are willing to participate in the program. The final meeting has not taken place yet. We are trying to use intervention methods to change the student’s behavior.” 

Calls to Willard principal Robert Ithurburn and Berkeley Unified School District spokesperson Mark Coplan for comment were not returned by deadline. 


AC Transit Will Purchase More Van Hools

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 10:01:00 AM
A Van Hool bus runs down Telegraph Avenue where a rapid transit system is proposed.
Michael Howerton
A Van Hool bus runs down Telegraph Avenue where a rapid transit system is proposed.

The AC Transit Board of Directors moved quickly on one of its most controversial projects following this month’s electoral victories, approving a new round of Van Hool bus purchases at last Wednesday’s board meeting. 

In the Nov. 4 voting, Alameda and Contra Costa county voters approved Measure VV—assuring continuation of AC Transit’s $48 per year supplemental parcel tax—while Berkeley voters rejected Measure KK, an attempt to put the brakes on AC Transit’s proposed Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) Telegraph Avenue lane-setaside in that city. In addition, board president Chris Peeples (at large) and Boardmember Greg Harper (Ward 2—Emeryville, Piedmont, and portions of Berkeley and Oakland) fought off electoral challenges, winning new four-year terms on the board. A third board incumbent, Joe Wallace (Ward 1—El Sobrante, San Pablo, Richmond, El Cerrito, Albany, and Kensington and a portion of Berkeley) was unopposed for re-election. 

In a complicated action that left board members at times appearing visibly exasperated and confused, the AC Transit board last week approved General Manager Rick Fernandez’s recommendation to purchase nine more 60-foot “articulated” Van Hool buses as well as authorize a contract for a prototype 45-foot “suburban style” bus from Van Hool that could eventually mean the purchase of as many of 40 new buses from the Belgian manufacturer. The “suburban style” 45-footers are intended to be used primarily on AC Transit’s cross-bay route between the East Bay and San Francisco. 

The purchase of the 60-foot Van Hool double “artix”—probably the most controversial bus in AC Transit’s fleet—had originally come before the board last May in a General Manager request for the purchase of 19 buses. But board members balked at the request at the time, asking that the staff justify the district’s need for that many 60-footers in its fleet. 

AC Transit Special Projects Manager Stuart Thompson and Procurement and Materials Director Charlie Kalb’s memo for Wednesday’s board meeting requesting reconsideration of the 19 bus purchase detailed no justification for the purchase in response to the board’s concerns, instead stating simply that “a compelling need still exists to purchase 19 articulated buses to complete the fleet composition plan and replace aging buses.” 

But by the time the board was meeting on Wednesday, General Manager Fernandez had dropped 10 buses from the request for the 60-foot Van Hools, saying that the district’s needs for higher-capacity buses could be partially met by the proposed new 45-foot “suburban-style” buses Fernandez wants Van Hool to build for AC Transit. Since the 45-foot “suburban” Van Hools are not yet in existence, the district was proposing that Van Hool first produce a prototype of the proposed new buses before final district approval of a contract. 

Fernandez said that AC Transit put out a fequest for proposals (RFP) for the new 45-foot suburban contract last June to 11 domestic and international bus manufacturers, but that only three manufacturers (Van Hool, Motor Coach Industries, and Bluebird) attended a July pre-proposal conference, and only Van Hool ultimately submitted a bid. 

However, the General Manager’s memo on the RFP for last Wednesday’s meeting, which read in part that “in May 2008, the Board authorized the General Manager to issue a Request for Proposals (RFP) for the purchase of 45-foot low entry suburban style commuter buses,” appears to contradict the action actually taken by the board at the May 14 meeting. The online AC Transit minutes for that meeting read “MOTION: HARPER/ORTIZ to approve Resolution No. 08-035 adopting the AC Transit Fleet Composition Plan (2008 Revision) to include 40 45-foot suburban buses.” Staff’s original recommendation had been for 45-foot buses, but the inclusion of a 40-foot option had been put in the board action at the board’s request in order to provide more options for the purchase. 

It is unclear what effect staff’s limiting of the RFP to 45-foot buses alone may have had on the ultimate result of Van Hool being the only company to bid on the suburban RFP. 

Meanwhile, at one confusing point in last Wednesday’s board meeting, Fernandez had board members considering the 60-foot purchase and 45-foot prototype proposal simultaneously, with no exact designation of the number of new suburbans to be eventually requested from Van Hool, as well as a third agenda item in which the district was seeking “between $9 million and $50 million” of special state transportation money which district staff could be used for the purchase of additional buses. The back-and-forth discussion finally became so confusing that it caused an irritated Board President Chris Peeples to declare that the state financial request had nothing to do with the current bus purchases, and called for a separate vote on each issue. 

Eventually, board members approved the purchase of the nine 60-foot Van Hool articulated buses on a 5-1-1 vote (Harper voting no and outgoing board member Rebecca Kaplan—newly elected to the Oakland City Council—abstaining) and authorizing the 45-foot suburban prototype and contract negotiations for up to 40 of the buses on a unanimous vote. 

Late last June, on a 2-4-1 vote (Chris Peeples and Jeff Davis yes, Greg Harper, Elsa Ortiz, Rocky Fernandez, and Rebecca Kaplan no, Joe Wallace abstaining), the seven-member board voted to reject going directly back to Van Hool for the new 60 footers, instead calling for the contract for the 19 new buses to be up for competitive bidding. AC Transit staff apparently never put the 60-foot contract up for bid, and on Wednesday, Fernandez argued against such an action as he had last June, saying that “if we put off the procurement of the buses to do another bid, Van Hool will probably win the contract because their price is lower, but the delay in letting out the contract [to put out the new bid] will ultimately raise that price.”  

In explaining his no vote on the additional 60-footers, Harper explained that “what bothers me is we’re doing this on the fly. What I and Rebecca [Kaplan]had asked for last May was a complete re-evaluation of our fleet plan. We’re not getting that.” 


UC Berkeley Students Become Ambassadors of Peace

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 10:02:00 AM

In Behrampada, a slum in Mumbai, India, the fight for water starts as early as five in the morning. 

Water, if not the source of all problems in this predominantly Muslim community located a stone’s throw away from Bandra West—home to some of the city’s elite and Bollywood’s best—accounts for a major part of it. 

When Ayse Ercumen, a graduate student at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health, landed in Behrampada during the summer to conduct the Safe Water for a Safe World project, she was blown away—not by the squalor, the stench or the staggering expanse of the slums, but by the stark poverty which is so easily associated with India, but cannot be explained until you actually set your eyes upon it. 

Ercumen was one of four students from the International House at UC Berkeley to travel to places as far-flung as Kosovo, India and Cambodia to carry out Davis Projects for Peace, made possible by a $1 million grant from Kathryn Wasserman Davis, who met her late husband Ambassador Shelby Cullom Davis when they were living at the I-House New York in 1931. 

On Oct. 12, I-House residents in Berkeley released four doves to honor each of the four winners and celebrate their efforts to bring peace into the world, whether by bridging the gap between Cambodian and Vietnamese children, teaching computer skills to Romas or simply telling a 5-year-old in one of Asia’s largest slums that dipping a dirty finger in a bucket of drinking water could kill him. 

A 2004 report from the World Health Organization indicates that annually there are 1.8 million deaths from diarrhea, and approximately half a million of these occur in India, a fact which Ercumen, who is originally from Turkey, finds simply astonishing. 

“There is a disproportionately large portion of diarrheal deaths in India,” she said during an interview with the Planet at the I-House on a recent Sunday. “It has one-fourth of the world’s diarrheal deaths, even though its population is not one-fourth of the world’s. The importance of our project lies in the immensity of the problems we chose to tackle. In a world where two million people, mostly children, die every year from easily preventable enteric diseases, any step to try to provide adequate water, sanitation and hygiene to those who do not have access to it is a valuable endeavor.” 

The Safe Water for a Safe World project was modeled on Haath Mein Sehat (health in your hands), an initiative started by UC Berkeley graduate student Ashley Murray to educate slum dwellers about issues such as sanitation, hygiene and water testing. 

Although Ercumen was living in an apartment in Dadar, home to the city’s upper-middle-class, she almost always spent her time inside one of Behrampada’s tiny squatters, learning her way in the dark, wet, narrow, maze-like alleys and witnessing for the first time its hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, heaps of garbage and open sewers, where children often defecate because they don’t know any better. 

“It would not be an exaggeration to say that we were living in the slum,” she said smiling. “You often hear about them, you read about them, and I am from Istanbul, so I am not unfamiliar with them, but I think there’s a difference. What I saw in Mumbai was beyond my expectations just because of its sheer dimensions. The first thing you notice is the abundance of people and the lack of space. The next thing is the sanitation.” 

Private and public latrines dot Behrampada’s square mile-long stretch and are shared by the 175,000 or so people who live there. 

The private ones charge around 1 rupee (around 2 cents), are fairly clean and come with water, and the public restrooms are free. “You don’t pay, you don’t get water and they are dirty,” said Ercumen, wrinkling her nose at the memory. “You bring your own water.” 

Most houses, she said, now have taps in front of their building but at times arguments break out between families who share a tapabout who can get to it first to collect water. 

“Water is not the heart of the problem,” Ercumen said. “The quality of water is.” 

In Behrampada, there is no round-the-clock, water pressure on the pipes, so residents start rationing water in matkas (earthen pots), drums, jugs, mugs, buckets, bottles, cans—pretty much anything they have—between 5 and 9 a.m., which Ercumen said was one of the main problems. 

“Since there is no continuous water pressure in the pipes, you get negative pressure, and you suck up whatever is surrounding the pipe,” she said. “Half of the time it’s stuff from the sewage lines or fecal matter which makes the quality of water bad. Also the fact that the people collect the water so early in the morning and store it the entire day makes it more susceptible to get contaminated inside the container.” 

Most of the samples Ercumen collected from the houses in Behrampada showed contamination in the stored water, she said. 

Teaching a bunch of toddlers and their families—most of them uneducated—about boiling drinking water, disease transmission and personal hygiene was a Herculean task for Ercumen, given the language barrier and the fact that she got diarrhea herself during her stay there, but the experience helped her became a stronger person. 

“It was extremely hot and then the monsoons started, and it was extremely wet, and there were times when I didn’t want to do it anymore, but at other times It was so gratifying that I just wanted to keep doing it,” she said. 

Around the same time Ercumen was battling cultural differences to save the residents of Behrampada from an endemic, UC Berkeley Integrated Biology senior Sina Akhavan was trying to give Roma children in Kosovo a chance to build a career for themselves in the near future. 

A passion for Flamenco music led Akhavan, who is of Iranian descent, to spend his summer in Preoce, working on Project Sastimasa with Voice of Roma, a non-profit based in Sebastapol. 

“I thought to myself, how can I contribute? and I realized that teaching Romas English and computer skills was one way,” he said, sitting inside the historic Great Hall at the I-House right before the dove-release ceremony. 

Arriving in Preoce—a small Roma village near Pristina, Kosovo’s capital—a month after the country declared its independence in February, Akhavan, a native of Redondo Beach, said he was struck by how fast people aged over there. 

“The environment is toxic,” he said. “Some of these communities are built on top of a lead mine. The government doesn’t collect trash in the Roma enclaves of the town. So people just throw trash right outside their houses or burn it.” 

But the garbage and the smoke were nothing compared to the political tension in the air, Akhavan said, which kept the Romas from leaving certain pockets of the village and driving freely on the streets or playing loud music in their cars for fear of attracting the Albanians. 

About 90 percent of Romas are unemployed and most survive on humanitarian aid, he said, which was enough to buy flour, but not adequate to buy sugar or water.  

A lucky few get around 60 euros every month from family members who have migrated to Germany or Italy. 

“It’s a minimum remittance economy,” he said. “That’s where the project came in. We wanted to teach them English and how to use computers, not to work with the Albanians or Serbs but rather the various international organizations such as the United Nations and the European Union.” 

Akhavan said that it angered him when people referred to Romas as gypsies. 

“It’s a myth,” he said. “They have no representation and no support. Nobody supports their cause. I want to demystify the belief that they are magical people. They are people who need international help.” 

Donated laptops, a make-shift classroom and elementary school English texts brought the program to an exciting start. 

However, teaching 3- to 28-year-olds Microsoft Word and Powerpoint proved to be a bit of a challenge for Akhavan and the other volunteers in the project, especially since younger students were often distracted at night after going through a grueling schedule at school the whole day. 

Another problem was the power failures which kept happening every three hours, interrupting lessons and forcing the teachers to hold classes by candle or cellphone light. 

A typical day in Preoce would start with kids screaming, dogs barking and roosters crowing, Akhavan said, followed by lots of Turkish coffee. 

“Everywhere I looked there would be kids running around barefoot,” he said. “I was invited to people’s homes again and again and again. It’s like its own world. A few dozen houses but enough people and enough drama for it to be fun.” 

Project Sastimasa is still alive in Preoce today and Akhavan plans to pay his students a visit soon. 

“When I left I was able to see a sliver of hope appear before my students,” he said. “In a reality of gross unemployment and dire poverty, hopelessness, like a pandemic, spreads and affects almost all. But this opportunity brought, in some small way—a chance at hope, a chance at a better quality of life.” 

For more information on the I-House Davis Projects for Peace visit: ihouse.berkeley.edu/a/news/DavisPeaceProjects.html. 


Police Charge Suspect in Derby Street Murders

By Richard Brenneman
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 10:03:00 AM

Berkeley police Tuesday arrested an already-jailed South Berkeley man for the two Sept. 18 murders in the 1400 block of Derby Street. 

The suspect, 24-year-old Desmen Riashem Lankford, was already in custody following an Oct. 9 arrest on parole violation and weapons possession charges. 

Berkeley Police spokesperson Officer Andrew Frankel said the weapon in that case was subsequently found to have been used to kill Kelvin Earl Davis, a 23-year-old Berkeley man, who was found mortally wounded along the curbside, and 42-year-old Oakland resident Kevin Antoine Parker, whose body was discovered slumped nearby behind the wheel of his wrecked car. 

Tuesday’s arrest was the second time Lankford has been booked on murder charges. On June 24, 2003, he was booked by Berkeley police after leading them on a foot chase that ended in a back yard near his home in the 1400 block of Alcatraz Avenue. 

Lankford was taken into custody then at Berkeley City Jail on suspicion of the murder of Ronald Easiley, a 19-year-old continuation school student who was gunned down on the previous Jan. 14 on Harmon Street in Berkeley. 

Officer Frankel said he didn’t know what had happened to Lankford after the earlier arrest. 

The double murder on Derby Street led to a third shooting, the wounding of a woman who lived across the street from a makeshift shrine erected after the killings. She survived her injuries. 

Frankel declined to give further details about the latest arrest, beyond acknowledging that “we believe that an additional suspect or suspects are outstanding.” 

He asked anyone with information about the crime to call BPD’s Homicide Detail at 981-5741. Those with information who would prefer anonymity may relay it through Bay Area Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477. 


Double Stabbing, Burned Cars

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 10:04:00 AM

An argument over alcohol at the Marina Liquor store on 1265 University Ave. late on the night of Nov. 13 resulted in two Berkeley residents being stabbed, authorities said. 

The Berkeley Police Department received a 911 call from the liquor store’s clerk at 11:49 p.m. who reported a stabbing. 

According to police, the clerk said that, the suspect, Richard Allan Jacobs of Richmond, who is disabled and uses a wheelchair, got “enraged” after the clerk refused to sell him more alcohol since he seemed already intoxicated. 

At that moment, another customer, a 52-year-old Berkeley resident, stepped in to calm the argument and Jacobs unleashed his anger on him, stabbing him in the stomach. 

The man struck Jacobs in the head with a bottle. An acquaintance of Jacobs, a 58-year-old Berkeley woman who also uses a wheelchair, became involved and tried to make peace, but Jacobs stabbed her too. 

Sgt. Mary Kusmiss of the Berkeley Police Department said that Berkeley police officers responded to the scene within seconds of the clerk’s call and arrested Jacobs who was still at the store. 

The Berkeley Fire Department also responded to the incident with three ambulances and a fire engine at 11:50 p.m. 

Kusmiss said that the suspect and the two victims had been drinking at the time the stabbings took place. 

“This incident was clearly fueled by alcohol,” she said. “BPD deals with incidents and crime daily in which there is an alcohol related component—fights and arguments in which suspects or victims or both have been drinking. The clerk was doing the appropriate responsible thing by refusing to sell to an obviously intoxicated Jacobs." 

The male victim underwent emergency surgery but is expected to survive, Kusmiss said. The woman was treated for a stab wound to the leg. 

Jacobs, 55, was booked into Santa Rita County Jail for two counts of assault with a deadly weapon. 

 

Arson fires 

At 12:47 a.m. Nov. 14, the Berkeley Fire Department received a report of vehicles burning close to a building on the 1800 block of Fairview Avenue, Deputy Fire Chief Gil Dong said. 

Dong said that when fire department officials reached the location, they saw that the fire had caused severe damage to three vehicles. 

Two of the vehicles were total losses, he said, and the electrical system had been damaged in the third. 

A large crowd had gathered on the site of the incident by the time authorities arrived, Dong said, adding that the fires seemed extremely suspicious. 

Officer Andrew Frankel of the Berkeley Police Department said Tuesday that investigations had revealed that the burn patterns appeared inconsistent with that of an engine fire which might lead the BPD to believe that it was arson. 

Frankel said that the fire started with a red Ford Mustang and spread to a Nissan parked next to it, from which it expanded to a power line connected to a building on the 1800 block, which melted and landed on a Honda. 

When the power line fell, Frankel said, the building lost power. 

The red Mustang belonged to an Oakland resident, authorities said, and the two other cars belonged to residents of that particular block. 

“The officers did a neighborhood canvas but nobody reported seeing anything suspicious in the area,” Frankel said. “The matter is still being investigated.” 

 


Police Blotter

By Ali Winston
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 10:04:00 AM

Random attack 

A man was attacked without provocation by a stranger on Telegraph Avenue on Nov. 13. Shortly before noon, the victim was punched by a tall man in his 20s, of medium build, with tattooed arms and wearing a white T-shirt and black cap. The assailant fled immediately afterwards, according to Berkeley police spokesman Officer Andrew Frankel. 

 

Phone robbery 

A 34-year-old woman had her phone snatched on Nov. 15 after she was sprayed in the eyes by a young woman Saturday morning, according to Frankel. The woman was standing with a 56-year-old man on the corner of 6th Street and Hearst Avenue when they were approached by three strangers: a woman in her mid-20s, a second assailant of unknown description, and a tall, heavyset man with dreadlocks and wearing eyeglasses, a white shirt and blue jeans.  

The 34-year-old was asked by the other lady if she could use her phone. When she declined, the other woman sprayed her in the eyes with perfume and grabbed her phone. The three robbers ran eastbound on Hearst Avenue.  

 

Arrest after confrontation 

Around 11:16 p.m. on Nov. 16, a woman was approached on the 1400 block of Oregon Street by a man who pulled a handgun and demanded the woman’s money, Frankel said. After she handed over her cash, the woman went into the apartment of her friend and told him of the incident. The man went outside and confronted the robber. The argument turned physical: the man disarmed Romero Butticci, 30, of Berkeley, and called the Berkeley police, who took Butticci into custody. He is charged with counts of armed robbery and battery. 

 

Horse trainer killed 

A horse trainer at Golden Gate Fields was killed on Nov. 17 after a startled horse toppled over and crushed him, according to Berkeley police. Ignacio Ramirez, 58, of Hayward, took the horse out of the barn for exercise when the horse spooked, reared up, and fell, crushing Ramirez beneath it. He was pronounced dead at the scene. 

 

Gunpoint robbery 

An 18-year-old man was robbed at gunpoint by three youths on Milvia and Stuart streets on Nov. 17, according to Frankel. After getting off a bus at Shattuck and Stuart streets around 6:30 p.m., the 18-year old was accosted by three young men, one of them brandishing a weapon.  

The man with the gun ordered the 18-year-old to the ground, while another robber rifled through his pockets, taking cash and a cell phone. The three suspects fled east on Stuart. They are described as being between the age of 18 and 19. One wore a black peacoat and had his hair cut in a fade. Another wore a burgundy nylon jacket, while the last suspect wore a gold grill over his upper teeth, is about 6-feet-1-inch tall and wore a gray hooded sweatshirt.  

 


More Bad News for UCB’s Partner in Ethanol Refinery

By Richard Brenneman
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 10:06:00 AM

Despite a wave of bankruptcies and canceled or stalled refinery construction, the ethanol industry got some good news this week. But there was especially bad news for one company with financial ties to UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 

Pacific Ethanol, which is partnered with the federally funded Joint Bioenergy Institute (JBEI) to build a new ethanol refinery, announced Monday that it had been forced to re-state its financial results for the quarter ending Sept. 30 by claiming an additional $14.3 million “impairment charge” on top of a previously reported $26.6 million sum. 

Both result from the company’s decision to halt construction of a plant in the Imperial Valley. The new costs come on top of other losses caused by high corn prices, and take the company’s quarterly losses to $69.2 million. 

The company had delayed the previously scheduled release of its quarterly statement to recalculate its balance sheet. 

While the company had reported a $28,000 profit for the first nine months of 2007, during the same period this year Pacific Ethanol reports losing $112.7 million. 

The company’s stock was trading at 62 cents a share Wednesday afternoon, its lowest rate for the past year and well below an all-time high in the $32 range three years ago.  

JBEI, which is headed by UC Berkeley/LBNL bioengineer Jay Keasling, is one of two major crops-into-fuel programs now under way under the UC Berkeley banner. Other JBEI partners include other UCB energy labs and UC Davis. 

JBEI was funded by a $135 million grant from the federal Department of Energy, and the federal agency has put up $24.3 million for a Pacific Ethanol plant in Oregon that would transform plant fibers—rather than sugars—into ethanol. 

The second program is the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI), a $500 million program based at the lab and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. EBI’s proposed headquarters, the yet-to-be-built Helios Building at the lab, has been placed on hold by the university pending a redesign. 

The good news for ethanol producers comes in the form of a new federal regulation which raises the amount of ethanol targeted for use in the American gasoline supply from this year’s 7.76 percent requirement to the 2009 figure of 10.21 percent. 

The new requirement will raise ethanol consumption from 9 billion gallons to 11.1 billion. 

But the ethanol industry remains in turmoil, with the Des Moines Register reporting Wednesday that at least 16 plants are in various stages of bankputcy proceedings—including five in Ohio, which has the largest concentration of crop-to-fuel facilities.


Bread Workshop to Re-Open for Dinner Over Christmas

By Riya Bhattacharjee
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 10:07:00 AM

The Bread Workshop on 1398 University Ave. received an approval from the Berkeley Zoning Adjustments Board last week to expand into a quick-service restaurant which will serve wine and beer. 

The bakery, which makes bread and distributes it to local restaurants, caters small events and offers sandwiches in its lunch menu, hopes to start serving dinner as soon as Christmas, owner William Briscoe said. 

Briscoe said that the need to introduce wine and beer arose when the dinner crowd started dwindling about a year ago, the last time he had introduced a dinner menu to his customers. 

“We had previously opened up for dinner but didn’t get enough customers,” he said. “We tried to do it for a year but our customers left when they weren’t able to get any beer or wine. So we had to close down dinner last November. I am looking forward to opening up for dinner again. We have been in the neighborhood for 20 years and know that a lot of customers will enjoy it.” 

After starting out as a wholesale business at 1250 Addison St., the Bread Workshop moved to its University Avenue location four years ago and has always operated as a locally owned community-oriented sustainable business. 

It was ranked as one of the top ten greenest restaurants in the Bay Area by the environmental group Thimmakka, given its penchant for either donating or recycling 95 percent of its waste products. 

The bakery also caters to PTA and school districts. The new permit will allow the restaurant to stay open from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., an hour later than its current schedule. 


You Write the Daily Planet

Thursday November 20, 2008 - 09:56:00 AM

It’s time to submit your essays, poems, stories, artwork and photographs for the Planet’s annual holiday reader contribution issue, which will be published on Dec. 23 (that’s right—a Tuesday!). Send your submissions, no longer than 1,000 words, to holiday@berkeleydailyplanet.com. Deadline is 5 p.m. on Mon., Dec. 15.  

• • • 

Because of the Thanksgiving holiday, the Planet will publish on Wednesday next week.


First Person: Little Lectures Everywhere

By Martha Dickey
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 10:02:00 AM

One day last June I was driving down Shattuck Avenue through Berkeley. Sun splashed through the sycamore trees as I followed the arrows through the University Avenue intersection. 

I was a bit distracted, thinking about the rapist still at large, who, in the previous week had broken into several women’s houses in broad daylight. E-mails on our community listserv had passed along advice from the Berkeley police to close and lock our windows, even when we were home in the daytime, for our own protection. 

One of the victims lived right around here, I was thinking as I absently drove into a parking lane. As I maneuvered back into traffic in the vicinity of the Gratitude Café, I noticed a shape on the median island that appeared to be darting behind a tree. My mind made a wild connection: Could it be the rapist? Had I by some incredible coincidence spotted him running from his latest victim? 

The whirling lights that appeared in my rearview mirror seemed to confirm my suspicion. I pulled over to let the police car pass and to watch the dramatic arrest as it unfolded. But the police car did not pass. It pulled behind me and stopped. Lights still whirling, the policeman got out and walked toward my car, gradually becoming one enormous shiny button in my side-view mirror. Probably he was going to caution me to lock my car doors and keep my window closed even while I was inside my car. I cranked the window down and squinted up at him. “Anything wrong, officer?” I said. 

“You didn’t yield to that pedestrian in the crosswalk,” he said. 

“Are you sure?” I said, confused. Was he referring to the fugitive rapist in the median? 

“Yes,” he said, as the sun splashed off his badge and into my eyes, momentarily blinding me. “We were positioned at the corner watching.” 

We? I thought, turning to look. Sure enough there was a second police cruiser parked near the intersection waiting to trap the next unwitting violator. Apparently they didn’t want to risk missing one transgressor while they were citing another. 

I signed the citation (not admitting guilt, he assured me) and pulled back into traffic. Wisely, he claimed not to know what the amount of the fine would be and said that I would receive that information in the mail. “What Are You Grateful For?” mocked the sign on the Gratitude Café. 

To regain perspective, I went to the Berkeley Marina to observe the world turning on summer solstice expressed by the sundial at Caesar Chavez Park. I noticed that since I’d been up there last, words had mysteriously appeared on the rocks encircling the site where Native Americans had once gathered. Once silent as Stonehenge, the stones now spoke. “Hope,” one said. “Determination” encouraged another. Was this Chavez’s philosophy that some anonymous moralist had distilled for me, I wondered? Or had God done some ten-commandments-style emblazoning while no one was looking? Feeling a little violated, I climbed down from the mountaintop and returned home to wait for the traffic summons to arrive. 

Months passed, and I began to believe that the policeman was just trying to put a good scare into me and that there might not be any further action. Tentatively, I began to feel hope, then determination, and finally, gratitude. 

Also, I had acquired wisdom. I became hyper-respectful of Berkeley’s crosswalks that appear so unpredictably in the middle of selected blocks unrelated to any traffic signal. I began to drive haltingly, braking every few seconds, just in case. 

I graciously yielded the righteous-of-way to everything between the sacred white lines; even those riding bicycles. Why, I thought, maybe that police officer had prevented me from running over a pedestrian, or smashing into that bicyclist weaving through traffic like she was leading a pack of environmentalists. 

Then, sometime before Halloween it appeared innocuously in my mailbox in the jumble of catalogs and credit card offers. The plain slip of paper gave me the choice of appearing in court to present my version of the incident—versus that of possibly four police officers who were positioned at the intersection for the sole purpose of apprehending me—or mailing in a check for $159 to atone for my transgression. 

My gratitude vanished much quicker than it had materialized. Seething, I wrote the check, trying to console myself that my $159 would contribute, along with our incredibly high property taxes, to the maintenance of the ever-vigilant Berkeley police force—protecting the vulnerable, even if they happened to be rapists. 

Halloween’s twilight was appropriately crisp and hazy. My husband and I relished the drive through the streets of Albany that evening on our way to dinner during the hour when miniature ghosts, goblins and Baracks skipped through the darkening streets. Jack-o’-Lanterns simple and elaborate glowed from doorsteps. Under a crimson-leafed maple next to their front door, someone had stacked four pumpkins, each carved with a letter perfect enough for a printer’s font: together they spelled H-O-P-E. 

The next day I received another e-mail message from the Berkeley police reminding me, for my own protection, to keep my windows closed and locked at all times. After a hiatus, it seems the rapist (still at large) is back molesting single women in their homes on sunny afternoons as the earth moves in its weary path toward the winter solstice. I have a message of my own, but it would require too many pumpkins. 

 

.


First Person: Taps for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade

By Don Santina
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 10:07:00 AM

“You fought in Spain.” When the underground leader, Victor Lazlo, spoke this immortal line to Rick Blaine in the 1942 film classic Casablanca, he was acknowledging that the cynical nightclub owner played by Humphrey Bogart had already stood up to the Nazis and could be counted on to stand up again. Rick was one of the good guys. 

On March 21, we squeezed into in the packed Friday night emergency room of Oakland Kaiser Hospital with Ted Veltfort, another one of the good guys. He had fallen earlier in the day and was having trouble breathing. In panic, his wife Leonore had run up to Shattuck Avenue and flagged down a taxi to take him to the hospital instead of calling 911 for an ambulance. Ironically, Ted had driven an ambulance for the Spanish Republic during the civil war. His father never forgave him for following his political beliefs to Spain in 1937. 

After almost two hours, the ER doctor told us that Ted had pneumonia and they were keeping him at least overnight. Before we left, I told the doctor to take special care of him because he was one of the last veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who had fought in Spain before World War II. She looked at me blankly. 

“You have to get well for the monument,” I said to Ted before we left. “It’s a week from Sunday.” He nodded. 

The battle for the Spanish Republic from 1936 to 1939 is regarded by many historians as the first battle of World War II. Five months after free elections, the fledgling democratic government of Spain was attacked by a clique of army officers who had support of troops from Fascist Italy and airpower from Nazi Germany. When the democracies of Europe and the United States declared a policy of nonintervention, the desperate Spanish government put out a call for international volunteers. Young men and women from all over the world poured into Spain to defend the republic. 

Approximately 2,800 of these volunteers came from the United States to form the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, later known as the Lincoln Brigade. They came from all walks of life: seamen, students, dock workers, ranch hands, carpenters, nurses, teachers. They were multi-racial: the Brigade was the first integrated American military unit and the first to have an African-American commander, Oliver Law. They fought major battles with the fascists in the Jarama Valley, at Brunete, Aragon, Teruel, and the Ebro River, often against overwhelming odds and with heavy casualties. Those odds worsened daily as the Nazi air force and fascist artillery pounded the blockaded and beleaguered republic. After three years of bloody battles, the republic was defeated and the international volunteers were withdrawn. 

Eight hundred volunteers of the Lincoln Brigade did not return home. 

“No man ever entered the earth more honorably than those who died in Spain,” Ernest Hemingway proclaimed, but as the war correspondent Martha Gellhorn noted just as accurately, “There were no rewards in Spain. They were fighting for us all, against the combined forces of European fascism. They deserved our thanks and respect, and they got neither.” 

Back home the Lincolns were subjected to years of harassment from their own government. But while they were being blacklisted and hounded out of their jobs during the epoch when Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover were riding roughshod over the Bill of Rights, the veterans stood firm on their political convictions and remained active participants in the struggles for peace and justice—demonstrating that same idealist spirit that drew them to the cause of Spain. 

Richard Bermack, the Berkeley photographer and author of The Frontlines of Social Change: Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, noted that while doing the book, “I realized that you can keep your own ideals, though it’s not an easy thing to do at all. The point of the book is to show that none of them left the struggle.”  

There were about a hundred veterans left in August 2000 when the late San Francisco supervisor, Sue Bierman, introduced a resolution to the board to honor the Abraham Lincoln Brigade with a monument on the waterfront. The waterfront was chosen because it was the site of the historic 1934 Strike which changed labor relations on the West Coast forever. A number of participants in the strike became volunteers in Spain and returned to the Bay Area not only to work on the docks but also to become actively involved in civil rights and antiwar activities, including shutting down the shipment of goods to apartheid South Africa. The monument resolution passed the Board of Supervisors unanimously. 

Eight years later, on Sunday, March 30, 2008, the first American government-sanctioned monument to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was dedicated with much fanfare on San Francisco’s Embarcadero. The monument, designed by Ann Chamberlain and Walter Hood, sits on a grassy area not far from the historic Ferry Building and Harry Bridges Plaza. The dockworkers are gone now, along with the cargo hooks, conveyors, and the low rumble of idling engines of cross-country trucks waiting to be loaded. Stevedores, seamen and strike breakers have been replaced by joggers, bicyclists and tourists. 

“Our monument is to remember a group of people who stood up to take a stand,” Peter Carroll, the historian, stated to the hundreds of people who gathered for the event. Carroll is the author of The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War.  

Eleven veterans were there for the ceremonies. Among them were Abe Osheroff, whose car was firebombed while he was helping rebuild churches in Mississippi during the Klan’s reign of terror in the 1960s; Dave Smith, who survived the Jarama Valley bloodbath, but lost a piece of his shoulder in a later battle—he could not return to his job as a machinist so he became a high school teacher and union activist; Nate Thornton, an out-of-work carpenter who joined the Brigade with his father, and longtime Berkeley resident Hilda Roberts, a combat nurse who also served in the Pacific during WWII and ultimately—as a silent antiwar witness with Women in Black.  

At the dedication, Abe Osheroff said that “the stuff we’re made of never goes away, with or without a monument because the bastards will never cease their evil, and the decent human beings will never stop their struggle.” 

Abe died a week later. Ted Veltfort never made it out of the hospital; he died there on April 7; Dave Smith within a few months at a union hospice in Berkeley. Milt Wolff, the last commander of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain, died in January. There are only about 24 Lincolns left now, and soon they too will pass into history.  

Dolores Ibarruri, the fiery spokesperson of the Republic also know as “La Pasionaria,” spoke these words of farewell as the Lincoln Battalion and the International Brigades left Spain in 1938: 

“You can go with pride. You are history. You are legend. You are the heroic example of the solidarity and the universality of democracy…We will not forget you; and when the olive tree of peace puts forth its leaves, entwined with the laurels of the Spanish Republic’s victory, come back!” 

Salud, brigadistas. 

 

Don Santina is a cultural historian who wrote the monument resolution that Sue Bierman introduced to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He lives in Oakland and can be reached at lindey89@aol.com. 


Opinion

Editorials

Doing Right By Thanksgiving and Afterwards

By Becky O’Malley
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:42:00 AM

The traditional Thanksgiving editorial starts off by remembering the Pilgrim Fathers. You never, for some reason, hear about the Pilgrim Mothers. They have been added parenthetically in the lead of the Wikipedia article about the Pilgrims for the sake of political correctness, but there’s no link to any article about them. There must have been Pilgrim Mothers, of course, because otherwise there wouldn’t have been a Society of Mayflower Descendants. 

It seems unlikely, verging on very improbable, that the Fathers cooked the original turkeys, although if they were barbecued, as they might have been, then perhaps the Fathers did do the honors. More likely the Mothers roasted them (the turkeys, not the Fathers). The latest research on the original menu is revisionist, as the most entertaining historical research always is. 

The online version of the Monitor, the newspaper in Concord, Mass., where some of my ancestors stopped off between Plymouth and California, had an editorial on this topic on Monday. Their conclusion, cribbed from a publication of the Plimouth Plantation, a New England tourist attraction: berries, wild grapes and eels—oh my! Mussels, lobster and geese—oh my! Corn, clams and ducks—oh my! And deer and “wildfowl,” probably those turkeys. And finally, “pompions,” now known as pumpkins.  

The editorial writer thought no cranberry sauce, because the Pilgrims didn’t have sugar. But they probably had some honey, and since they were the original sourpusses they might have had a sugarless version, because wild cranberries did grow in Massachusetts even then.  

Was it a potluck, as modern Thanksgiving dinners increasingly are? Here’s what the Concord cousins say the local Native Americans might have brought to the party:  

“Sobaheg is the Wampanoag word for stew, and there’s a good chance it was on the menu for that first Thanksgiving of 1621. A sobaheg recipe from the period calls for Indian corn, kidney beans, pottage fish and ‘flesh of all sorts’—including venison, beaver, bear, moose, otters, raccoons. Add to that Jerusalem artichokes, ground nuts and other roots, squashes, several types of nuts and pompions...” 

Any Berkeleyan who’s ever planted “a few” Jerusalem artichokes knows that these wildly invasive sunflower-type plants are all too eager to supply an abundance of knobby roots for any occasion. The problem is getting rid of them once you’ve planted them— serving them for Thanksgiving might just work.  

We’ve got plenty of raccoons, too, though they’re seldom seen on Berkeley tables. They’re sometimes found in Berkeley kitchens, of course, sneaking in through the cat door to eat the cat food at night. But few of us eat them. They could become the locavore alternative to farmed turkeys, now that Proposition 2 has passed, but they’d have to compete for menu placement with the flocks of wild turkeys periodically sighted on city streets.  

What else could we try for a genuinely locavorish Thanksgiving? Well, yellow sorrel, also known as sour grass or oxalis, is taking over many a Berkeley garden, and it can be made into soup. It contains too much oxalic acid for people with kidney problems, but is otherwise edible, if sour. 

Proper classic French sorrel soup is usually made from a different plant, a standard culinary herb, but my late mother-in-law, desperate for ideas at the last minute, once served soup made from wild oxalis to Richard Olney, a pre-Panisse echt-foody, with such good results that he lauded it in one of his books, never catching on that he had eaten a common weed that is the bane of northern California gardeners.  

As a substitute for cranberries, most of us careless Berkeley gardeners are sure to have raised a few inadvertent sour blackberries during the summer. If only we’d had the foresight to can them! Perhaps next year...  

When the menu questions have been answered, guests are the next topic. At the First Thanksgiving, multiculturalism traditionally was supposed to have been provided by combining Native Americans with Interloper Brits. Descendants of those two groups have been getting along pretty well in the last couple of decades, so in order to spice up the table talk, maybe we should all invite adherents of the various warring desert religions and/or nations of the Middle East to join us. And those who have difficult in-laws should consider Thanksgiving dinner the perfect opportunity to rub them together and see if sparks fly. 

Finally, let’s consider Giving Thanks. It’s more Berkeley to say “Oh Please!” than to say “Thank You,” but we still have a few common blessings for which we’re all grateful. Those of us who were lucky enough to get Obama lawn signs still have them up, and the rest of us are envious, but we’re almost all thankful for the election results. Not only do we have the first-ever African-American president-elect, we also have a new young city councilperson of Latino heritage and possible Native American ancestry to boot. That’s real progress we can be proud of.  

Not, of course, that there’s not plenty to worry about if you’re so inclined. The prospect of the American auto industry going belly-up is sobering, even for those of us who have mocked Detroit cars for 40 years. Revelations about the deliberate perfidy of financial institutions are more and more shocking every day. From top to bottom, you could choose to obsess about everything from global warming to your own IRA.  

I spent Saturday with two seven-year-olds of my acquaintance. They ended the day in mutual tears, one because she thought she’d heard someone say that we’d all be dead from global warming in 35 years and the other lamenting the visible effects of sudden oak death on her favorite woods.  

Folks, it’s not that bad just yet. We can all be thankful this year that we’ve spotted the major problems on the horizon while there’s still time to do something about them. Arguing about just how we might undertake the solutions will provide entertainment for many a Tuesday night in Berkeley, not to mention the Thanksgiving table, but in the end we’ll probably figure out how to do the right thing, whatever that might turn out to be. Here in Berkeley we’re not as dumb as we sometimes look to the outside world, for which we can be truly thankful. After all, if we can turn weeds into gourmet food, what can’t we accomplish with some hard work and thought? 

 


Party’s Over—Time to Get Back to Work

By Becky O’Malley
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 10:08:00 AM

As the economic news goes daily from bad to worse, Obamamania continues unabated. The explosion of national good humor which started in the East Bay at about 6 o’clock on election night is still resonating in all the small encounters of daily life. When I went to the lab at Kaiser this week, I saw once again a technician whose cubicle was decorated pre-election with the handsome Shepard Fairey portrait of Barack which was everywhere this fall. The last time I saw her, she was cluck-clucking about John McCain’s links to the S&L crisis. This time, she was all smiles and jokes about the outcome, as were all her colleagues in the lab—and the election was a couple of weeks ago. In the waiting room, a stout grandmother with 2-year-old in tow sported an updated version of the ubiquitious Obama T-shirts, this one with the whole new first family on the front. In front of the Paramount on Friday night, a T-shirt vendor was fast selling out his inventory of new and improved post-election Obama models to well-dressed Oakland Symphony patrons. 

I’m barely old enough to remember the similar burst of admiration and euphoria which greeted the arrival of the Kennedy family in the White House. Some of the ingredients were the same. The Kennedys too were handsome and stylish, a welcome change from the more-than-somewhat stodgy Eisenhowers. But the Eisenhower family and his administration were generally civil and approximately literate, seldom accused of being mean or nasty. Jack Kennedy offered change, just as Barack Obama did, but all he needed to promise then was to “get the country moving again,” which he did. 

The difference now, among other things, is that Obama’s election was preceded by at least eight years of a presidency which was a continuing embarrassment from its very first day. We went with similarly crazy friends to G.W. Bush’s first inauguation to protest the way he and his Supreme Court cronies stole that election, and it’s been only downhill since then.  

Many of us were not much happier with the prior Clinton administration. We knew at the time that his much-ballyhooed deregulation was a recipe for disaster, though we didn’t know how long it would take to wreak its havoc. And Bill Clinton’s lurid sex scandals were nothing to be proud of either.  

The Messianic qualities of Barack Obama’s emergence on the national scene are somewhat unnerving. You have to keep reminding yourself that although he’s a graceful, intelligent, articulate and (praise the lord) literate youngish man with a charming family, he’s bound to have some flaws, which will only appear over time.  

World literature and mythology are full of images of death and resurrection: the Golden Bough, the Phoenix and more. The United States of America and its reputation in the world have been so beaten and battered in the last half-century, with just a short break in Jimmy Carter’s mostly honorable single term, that anyone respectable is bound to look like a savior, like the phoenix arising from the ashes.  

If you add Richard Nixon and GHW Bush’s terms to those of Bill and GW, it’s been a long drought around here. In the words of the song (and the title of the book) “Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me.” When the symbolic significance of Obama’s African ancestry is added to the mix, it’s an irresistible combination, bound to induce euphoria. 

That’s why it’s incumbent on those of us who are mightily impressed with Barack Obama and his whole family to keep our critical faculties intact. Despite good intentions and personal integrity, John Kennedy took the country in some unfortunate policy directions. The disastrous Vietnam war had its roots in the Kennedy administration.  

A cloud on this week’s sunny horizon is the lurking presence of Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, two of the villains in the Clinton economic debacle. Bob Scheer in his syndicated column at truthdig.com does a good job of skewering them, and Obama supporters everywhere should suggest to their hero that much better advice is available.  

Rahm Emmanuel, chosen for Obama’s chief of staff, is both good news and bad news. He’s smart and competent, but he used his brains and muscle to push Clinton’s dreadful welfare reform policies. His father seems to have worked with the Israeli terrorist group Irgun in his youth, and just caused a flap with racist-appearing anti-Arab remarks quoted in the Israeli press, though Rahm apologized for him later. Perhaps the son is wiser than the father, but let’s wait and watch. 

On the other hand, the list of excellent advisers that Obama has assembled is very long, so a few bad apples probably won’t spoil the whole bunch. But—to mix in one more metaphor—it’s time for the rose-colored glasses to come off. 

One more good news footnote: For Californians, the passage of Proposition 8 marred an otherwise triumphant election day, but the swift legal response backed by everyone from the NAACP to the ACLU looks like it has an excellent chance of getting that bad vote overturned on constitutional grounds. And for Berkeleyans, more good news seems to be that only four people in our whole city contributed to the Yes on 8 campaign, as compared to hundreds in the No on 8 column. A reader asked us to print the names of the foolish four, but that’s not really needed. They know who they are, and history is not on their side. 

 


Cartoons

Crude Oil Cruiselines Extended Vacation Getaway!

By Justin DeFreitas
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 11:43:00 AM
Reprints: Write to defreitas (at) jfdefreitas.com.
Reprints: Write to defreitas (at) jfdefreitas.com.


Band of Pirates

By Justin DeFreitas
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 10:08:00 AM


I Voted...

By Justin DeFreitas
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 10:07:00 AM


Public Comment

Letters to the Editor

Monday December 01, 2008 - 01:19:00 PM

 

GOLDEN GATE FIELDS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Golden Gate Fields race track may go into bankruptcy; UC Berkeley needs a football stadium. The City of Berkeley needs to reduce autos on its streets. Let's bail out all three by putting the new and bigger football stadium at the Golden Gate Fields track. For a greener environment and for a better quality of life for residents move the stadium to Golden Gate Fields. 

Ray Quan 

 

• 

THANKSGIVING SPIRIT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I didn't go over the river and through the woods to Grandfather's House this Thanksgiving. Instead, I took BART over to San Francisco for my annual visit to St. Anthony's Dining Room, where I helped serve dinner to over 3,000 of the city's homeless, displaced persons. Walking along Golden Gate Avenue, I passed long, long lines of people who had waited for hours in anticipation of a warm holiday meal. What a meal it was—turkey with dressing, cranberries, mashed potatoes, yams, green beans, rolls and butter and pumpkin pie topped with whipped cream. 

The dining room was packed to the gills—all ages, all races, some neatly attired, others unshaven and poorly dressed. They came in wheelchairs, on walkers and crutches, mostly men, but a few women with children who were seated at their own tables in the back of the huge dining room. My job was to carry trays to the row after row of tables, picking up yellow meal tickets, welcoming our guests and, most importantly, treating them with respect. While ill at ease, not conversing with each other at first, as the afternoon wore on the room was alive with laughter and animation, very much a festive holiday occasion. 

This happy scene of friendship and giving was repeated all over the Bay Area. Indeed, I could have helped with dinners here in Berkeley or Oakland, but I have a special place in my heart for the St. Anthony Foundation. I also have respect for the great work of Glide Memorial Church. It's reassuring to know that in these troubled times, with the economy affecting so many, we Americans are a nation of generous and compassionate people, reaching out to those less fortunate. 

Dorothy Snodgrass  

 

• 

'ART OF DEMOCRACY' 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The "Art of Democracy" show was not seen in the Addison Street Windows Gallery but the resulting discussion, as admirably represented in the pages of the Daily Planet, has been a healthy thing. Despite protests by some members of the Arts Commission, the commission seems to have accepted that the First Amendment does indeed apply to art. 

This particular case involved the representation of guns, and those in favor of censorship argued that guns were a special case that could be censored. The argument was not about depictions of violence, or incitement to violence but simply the presence of guns. In this case the images that were censored were portraying opposition to state-sponsored violence. It seems to me that when rules ostensibly made to “protect” us are used to prohibit speech that is critical of the state, then censorship has indeed become a serious issue that rises to the level worthy of opposition. 

I am pleased that the Arts Commission has acknowledged this in principle and I hope that the discussion continues as to the value of protected speech. Restrictions placed on speech by those who claim to protect us from immorality or from indecency do a disservice to art when they claim that it is a special case that cannot be protected by the First Amendment. 

Art Hazelwood 

Organizer for "Art of Democracy" 

 

• 

WINDOWS GALLERY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Considering the reams of bad publicity I've read regarding the Addison Street Window Gallery, I'd like to check in with my two cents regarding this wonderful enterprise. Back in 1993, the great Brenda Prager invited me, and fellow artist B.N. Duncan, to host our own gallery showing in the window, "Berkeley Artists on the Fringe"—a collection of oddball art by Berkeley street people. We couldn't have asked for a more gracious host. In fact, it was the first public acknowledgment that my artwork had ever received from the town of Berkeley (whether this is a good or bad thing I'll leave to you to decide). And it led to several other fruitful collaborations with the magnificent Berkeley Civic Arts program, including the recording of the "Telegraph Avenue Street Music" CD in 1994, with a big assist from Bonnie Hughes. 

  Issues like "free speech" and "censorship" strike deep chords involving high ideals and moral principles, and etc. For that reason, I'm dismayed when I see these terms thrown around in such a sloppy and irresponsible fashion. I haven't seen the artwork that inspired all the "controversy," so I'm in no position to chime in on its merits. But I do find the knee-jerk reaction to all this somewhat repulsive. Certainly, a curator of any public exhibit has to apply standards for what is or isn't presented in a public space. Certainly, pornographic images, or anti-social images, or images that promote criminal behavior would wisely be "censored" from a forum that is accessible to children. Also too, like it or not, the curator has to make aethetic judgments on the artistic merit of the work. For example, I could slop big piles of cow dung onto pedestals and put it in the window. Would that be "art"? Possibly. Would that be "good" or "bad" art? Possibly. Art is in the eye (and the nose) of the beholder. But so what? The point is, whenever you have dozens of artists or performers competing for a limited stage, a gate-keeper (i.e. a curator) has to decide what gets shown and what gets rejected. That's just the reality of this big, cruel world of ours. The point being; there's a big and crucial difference between having standards (and there will always be "arbitrary" standards when evaluating something as ethereal as art) and "censorship." And for this reason, I'm deeply offended by the sloppy way these terms like "free speech" and "censorship" have been bandied around in this case. 

Even a paper such as the Daily Planet, which has a magnificent  record for publishing a wide spectrum of viewpoints, many of which are no doubt repugnant to the editor, nonetheless has editorial standards for what it will or won't publish. Is this "censorship"? I think not. (Unless, of course, Becky refuses to publish this letter, then I'm gong to start crying about how my "free speech" has been denied by these "fascists.") 

In a related aside, we, the merchants and residences of Telegraph Avenue, have recently been dealing with a bunch of obnoxious evangelical Christians from out of town, who subject us to their ear-crunching amplified noise for five hours every Saturday, on a block that is already a cacophony of noise and sensory overload. Predictably, when we try to limit this public nuisance, we get the same old cries of "free speech" and "censorship." Ironic, considering this isn't "free speech"—it's paid speech (you need to buy a permit for amplified sound)—and there are already plenty of legal limitations in place. But, as with the Windows Gallery controversy, all too often you get the knee-jerk blather about high ideals, which obscure the practical reality of a simple issue involving public space that is shared by everyone. 

All too often (maybe not necessarily in this case, but) mediocre artists throw these terms around, simply to get reams of publicity for mediocre artwork that mostly would have been ignored otherwise. "Why, my work is so powerful, it's been banned!" And then, of course, the public has to see what all the fuss was about. 

At any rate, I'd like to express my appreciation for the great work done by the Addison Street Window Gallery over all these years. And to anyone who might disparage it, might I say: Hooey. 

Ace Backwords 

  

• 

POINT MOLATE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Thank you for your recent article outlining the pros and cons of developing the waterfront at Point Molate. I live in Richmond, and I'm still scratching my head at all the purported attributes a casino brings to our community. Crime around the San Pablo casino is dense in relation to other parts of our community. We're grateful to live somewhat far from all the action. 

Mr. Levine's thinking out of the box and contributing a whole list of do-gooding is applauded in my opinion. He's covered every possible argument with a solution that would supposedly counter ill effects in the community. He's offering a lot of green eggs in that basket. But, I stop short of his promise that "undesirable" casino types will not set foot on his resort. I hate to rain on his parade but, Richmond is not a "destination location" and never will be. That particular property is outlying heavy industry, and it smells like industry when you're downwind from it. If it were located across the bay in San Francisco, yacht parking would be a feasible plan for a destination casino. But it's not San Francisco. It's the shipyards of Richmond, and as much as I love our city, let's not get carried away. Just visit all the little towns surrounding each refinery in the East Bay. They're big "non-destinations" (but serve an important purpose, no doubt.) The ole' adage is tried and true when it comes to real estate development - location, location, location. Not that Point Molate can't come of age with a development plan and shed its former shell bit by bit, but, it takes more than casino promises of saving the city (please note: Chevron's already promised that and everyone's still waiting for it to happen) to accomplish a renaissance of a former naval refueling station. Many converging elements are needed to drag an area out of the dull drums and promising huge bags of money will not make Richmond a more desirable place to live. 

So what happens when the rich and famous don't pull up in fancy limos and spend fun money as hoped for? After all, it is Mr. Levine's first casino venture and he lacks experience (he just fired Harrah's for the folks up in Yolo County). How does he pay for the hundreds of millions in loans? Invite undesirables? If Plan A doesn't exactly work (and my gut says that Plan A is not realistic), then here come our country cousins and all their low-wage gambling, drunken shenanigans, theft, and other ill effects on our community. After all the glossy, green lipstick, it's still a pig, and a huge business risk like any other. 

So, a question for Mr. Levine: With all due respect for thinking out of the box, what's Plan B? We need to hear your thoughts and scenarios about how the operation will sustain itself and its promises to the good people of Richmond if Plan A doesn't go as planned.  

Natalie McNamara 

Richmond 

 

• 

WHAT IRONY! 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

On Saturday, Nov. 22, an event took place in Colorado that says something about present-day America. A farm couple decided to do something for their neighbors. They opened their farm fields after the harvest to allow people to glean the fields. Gleaning is the ancient practice of picking up farm crops after the regular harvest. Typically some of the crops are left in the fields by machines or harvesters and this gleaning eliminates waste, while feeding people at the same time. I grew up in Iowa and some of my relatives that lived on farms would do this each year. Usually a hundred people or less would show up at the gleaning on my relatives’ farms. 

But at this gleaning, 40,000 people appeared at the 600 acre farm 37 miles outside of Denver. Think of it! Forty thousand people had the need to pick up leftover crops. The United States is the richest nation in the world and yet 40,000 people in one area showed up to get the free food. What does this say about the economy? Granted not everyone probably needed the food because they were too poor to afford it. But I am sure thousands of them did. 

It was estimated that the 40,000 people arrived in about 11,000 vehicles. Because of this, many people who came were not able to park legally. The Colorado State Patrol then issued citations to the illegally parked cars. Neighbors helped neighbors and then the state gave out tickets. This also says a lot about the government’s role in the present financial crisis. Hundreds of billions are provided to the wealthy and corporations and the poor are given tickets when they try to pick their own food. What irony! 

Kenneth J. Theisen 

Oakland 

 

• 

ZIONISM 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

John Gertz’s letter in the Nov. 26-Dec. 3 issue exemplifies Ashkenazi supremacism. Not every person at a demonstration needs to be a member of the sponsoring organization(s). Surely stereotypical, “classically [white/Eastern European ] Jewish,” Zionists accept the presence of non-Jewish supporters at their pro-Israel events. For racist Ashkenazim like Gertz, white people don’t have to establish their Jewish credentials; the massive influx into Israel of white people from the former Soviet bloc was welcomed wholeheartedly, despite the highly questionable Jewish pedigree of many of the new immigrants.  

Compare that to the bigoted treatment of Jews from North Africa and the Middle East (my forebears) who were welcomed to the newly formed state of Israel with DDT delousing, then shunted off to underdeveloped border towns. Gertz’s own racist prejudices are clearly in line with this dominant shtetl-derived and pernicious strain of Zionism, with its insular sub-tribal xenophobia. 

The unthinking parochial racism of Zionists like Gertz is part of what helped lead me away from the Zionism into which I was indoctrinated in my youth. Smug Ashkenazi supremacism in general, however, has been the hallmark of just about every policy of the pre-state Jewish establishment and of the state of Israel since 1948: domestically this is reflected in the various ways non-Ashkenazi Jews (Mizrahim, Ethiopians, and Indians for example) and Arab citizens suffer from discrimination; externally it is reflected in the oppressive policies directed at Palestinians and other Arabs.  

Zionists have pretended to speak for all Jews everywhere since the founding of their movement, incorporating the worst aspects of 19th-century European nationalism: territorial expansionism, ethnic fealty, and racism. Unfortunately Gertz isn’t the only Zionist to epitomize this tendency. It’s high time an organization like IJAM was formed to call into question the facile and false equation, Jews = Zionists. 

Dunash Labrat  

 

• 

MUMBAI 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

What is the motivating force behind the killing spree in the financial district of Mumbai? There is never good reason to hurt innocent people. What can the thrill of being a world famous terrorist be? Even if these young killers experienced injustice at the hands of their parents or in their schools or from their governments, they are not justified in raining bullets on ordinary civilians going about their lives. What does it take to make a human being blank and mechanical as he slaughters fellow human beings? 

Romila Khanna 

Albany 

 

 

 


Letters to the Editor

Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:43:00 AM

COMMON DECENCY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I really don’t relish being the crabby old woman who sits on the bus up near the driver and tells student-age people that by federal law they should be yielding seats in front to seniors and the disabled, but most of the seniors and disabled I know are simply too polite to kick up a fuss, so I guess I’m stuck with the role. 

Recently I saw a very pregnant woman get on the bus and not one person offered her a seat. The same thing happened with a blind man not long ago who was left to stand uncertainly. (Not that pregnancy is a disability, of course; I’m just talking about common decency.) Was I ever really that dumb or insensitive? Well...maybe. And if so, I as for forgiveness. If only we could all just be “a bit...a blot...a crumb...a fragment” kinder to one another. 

Susan Leonard 

 

• 

FINANCIAL AID 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am a student at Berkeley City College and I am trying to get the word out that the financial aid department of my school is not holding up to their end of the deal. I was told that the second week of school I would receive my financial aid check, so I rushed to turn in all my paper work so that the problems could be worked out early; unfortunately that wasn’t the case. The financial aid office continues to make claims that we will have out checks within “the next couple weeks.” The first time I heard them tell me this was more then a month ago. We are now in the 13th week of school and I still have not received any money from the financial aid department. I have been building up debt and now I am no longer able to pay for rent and other bills. I would not suggest anybody go to this school with the idea that they can rely on the financial aid department. I know this may not affect many people, but I am hoping that if I get the word out I might be able to force my school into giving not only me but all the other struggling students the money they have been expecting as well. 

Jonathan Forbes Heaton 

• 

ARSON FIRE — NEED ACTION ON  

PROBLEM PROPERTIES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Last week an apparent arson fire in the parking lot of city-owned Section 8 housing at 1812 Fairview totaled two vehicles and damaged a third as power lines melted and dropped to the street. Vigorous, high flames from two totaled cars under a tree could have ignited the multi-unit building and spread to other buildings in the densely populated area. I went to view the burnt-out shell of a car days later, and spoke to a woman in the parking lot. “That’s my car,” she said.” “What happened?” I asked. “Gang activity,” she replied.  

At the Oct. 28 Berkeley City Council meeting, city and police agencies gave their plans to deal with alarming murders, violence and crime in southwest Berkeley. While residents appreciate tree trimming, working streetlights, and pickup of dumped items, these are basic duties the city owes the taxpayers and not exceptional efforts. We were told the city is “identifying problem properties.”  

We know we have problem properties such as the city-owned Section 8 housing at 1812 Fairview. My question is: When will you take definitive action against problem properties? I invite you to view the dramatic video of the fire on YouTube, entitled “Fire on Fairview St.” and ask yourself what you would do if an arson fire of this magnitude happened in your neighborhood.  

Recently a meth lab was discovered at a BOSS transitional housing unit inhabited by a man wanted for questioning in connection with a recent drive-by shooting and other serious offenses. The residence has little supervision. The meth lab put many West Berkeley residents in danger and could cost the city a great deal to cleanup. I expect the insurance costs for these properties will soar and rightly so, once the arson fires and meth lab are disclosed to the insurers.  

It’s time for real, not imagined or promised concerted action on problem properties and responsible supervision of transitional and subsidized housing to keep neighborhoods safe.  

Robin Wright 

 

• 

B-TECH TEACHER’S RESPONSE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Any given person’s mind is infinitely complex, denying any label or measure. The only avenue towards “knowing” a person is through an intimate relationship over a long period of time. And yet, even parents, who one could argue would most fulfill these qualifications, often do not really “know” their son or daughter—especially at the age of adolescence, when our bodies, and minds are constantly changing. 

Thus the problem for college admissions: They want a student who will succeed in their programs and contribute to the community. Yet how to predict such a winning combination?  

It is true that grades, and test scores of the past will most likely predict grade and test scores of the future. But I remember college as being more than just grades and test scores. Discussions, activism, leadership and networking were other dimensions that were just as important—if not more. These are the college experiences that carry on and influence a person’s success: after all, how many jobs ask for a grade point average on a resume? 

So why should a student’s test score be an important measure of their capacity for learning? Typically a student is not even considered for entrance unless they reach a minimum score. Why should how a student performs for three to four hours on a given day be such an all-encompassing measure? A close friend of mine took her LSAT while she had bronchitis. She vomited at least three times during the test. Whether she performed well or not, no one would consider the score she got as being a real indicator of her best. 

The poster child for unnoticed exceptional intelligence is Albert Einstein. One of the great scientific geniuses of our time was completely unrecognized in high school. I myself disliked all high school subjects—but upon choosing a specialized field of interest in college, found learning exciting and inspiring. The standardized learning of high school may alienate some who would blossom in a different environment. 

So how can we conduct college admissions? At the very least, do not assume that a test score can tell you how fit a student is for college. Test scores should be seen as just that—test scores. Obviously a student with a high SAT score can do well on tests. However, do they have passion? Do they have curiosity? Do they want to give to the community? Do they want to find a mentor that will cultivate their learning? Do they want to make a change? Do they want to be a leader? Their extracurricular activities, their recommendations, and their personal statement all are better indicators of these desirable qualities.  

Joy Lee Chua 

English Teacher, Berkeley Technology Academy 

 

• 

GRATEFUL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Martha Dickey’s mention, in her Nov. 20 First Person essay, of the “What Are You Grateful For?” question and its slightly sermonizing tone recalled my feeling when the lettering first appeared on an otherwise nice green awning atop the gratitudinal restaurant on Shattuck Avenue: I’m grateful for awnings that don’t ask me questions. 

Sandy Rothman 

 

• 

CONGRATULATIONS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Concerning the ‘Little Lectures Everywhere’ essay in the Nov. 20 edition: I would like to congratulate Martha Dickey for the craziest, most ludicrously self-justifying anecdote in the plentiful history of the Daily Planet. 

Stephen Ronan 

 

• 

THUGS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am writing to express my extreme indignation at the brown-shirt tactics used by pro-Israeli thugs at Eshelman Hall. 

It’s not enough that our incoming president has prayed at the Western Wall or pronounced Israeli’s security “sacrosanct.” It’s not enough that 1 million Gazans eat or starve at the whim of the Israelis. 

The fact is, it’s never enough! Power is addictive, and the closer one gets to the goal of absolute control over others’ lives, the more infuriating it becomes when one’s power is not absolute. There’s always one defiant person waving a a banner (at least until his organization is removed from Eshelman Hall). 

Last month the university embarrassed itself by over-reacting to the “desecration” of a commercial billboard which was not even on university property. How then will it respond to an organized invasion of a university building by non-students resulting in violence directed against students? Investigation by the police is of course in order, but how much better if the chancellor was moved to express his strong feeling that beatings by brownshirts are not compatible with the ideals of the university. 

I won’t hold my breath! I guess it’s a matter of who is being beaten. Try to imagine the outrage if someone should invade a university building and start beating Jewish students. You can bet the administration would be on that pronto. 

Edward Strauss 

Oakland 

 

• 

ANTI-ZIONIST NETWORK 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

A group calling itself International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network has published its manifesto in two parts in the Oct. 23 and Nov. 20 editions of the Daily Planet. Never having heard of such a group, I went to their website and discovered that it has been newly formed only in early October of this year. Their kick-off event was a demonstration in Oakland. Pictures posted on their website show about 10 unidentified attendees. Although admittedly Jews can come in different hues, some of the anonymous attendees clearly do not look classically Jewish, being apparently black and Chinese.  

More importantly, this group has declared that Palestinians “commemorated 60 years of ruthless occupation this year. At first glance, one would think this to be a simple editorial error, as in a typo. The occupation is normally taken to have resulted from the Six Day War, fought in June 1967, 41 years ago, not 60 years ago.  

But, on second glance, one realizes that this was no simple error at all. By the reckoning of this new group, the occupation did begin 60 years ago, in 1948, with the establishment by the United Nations of the State of Israel. The Anti-Zionist Network’s manifesto then can only be understood as a declaration calling for the destruction of Israel. What is to become of Israel’s millions of Jews? Are the three million or so Arab Jews and their descendants who were forcibly evicted from their homes now to be forcibly repatriated to Iraq, Syria, Morocco, Syria, Algeria, Egypt, Yemen, and Libya? Would these hapless Jews want to go (I definitely doubt it)? Would the Arab countries have them? Remember, not one single Jew is permitted to live in Palestinian Gaza, and by all peace proposals I have seen, Jews will not be allowed to live in the West Bank portion of Palestine either, just as, by law, Jews are not permitted to live in Saudi Arabia. Are the descendants of Holocaust survivors to be extradited to the countries that gave them up to Hitler’s ovens?  

Such extreme views among Jews (let’s say for the sake of argument that those black and oriental demonstrators were Jews) are very rare indeed. Occasionally, one will find pictures of an ultra-Orthodox rabbi hugging and kissing the now deceased Yasser Arafat or were more recently photographed with Ahmadininjad at a Holocaust denier’s convention. These folks believe that Israel and its ancient Temple cannot rise again until the day the Messiah shall appear to proclaim it. Any premature act of state building by man is then blasphemy, such that Israel’s enemies are actually doing God’s holy work in destroying the modern and democratic State of Israel. On the other hand, “secular” Jews who argue for the destruction of Israel are usually religious fanatics as well, worshipping at the altar of utopian one-worldism. They are often the descendants of an earlier age of Communist refugees from Europe. Most of their European and Russian counterparts perished in the gulags and the Holocaust. These few are the quaint remains of a discredited worldview, with remaining toeholds only in Cuba and North Korea if at all. There is even a name for them in the Jewish world, “red babies.” Paraphrasing the famous Israeli author, Amos Oz, wouldn’t it be nice if all borders could be erased and we all lived on one harmonious planet. Israel could then merge into the rest of the world, and should do so. Only, let Israel be the 40th or 50th country to go away, not the first. 

John Gertz 

 

• 

AUTISM 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Being a young gay man with Asperger’s is a frustrating experience. I need things to change, a lot of people in my situation need it to. A chance at employment, maybe a chance at a degree, a chance to learn better communication skills, a chance at a place to call home... . 

As for Asperger’s services in Berkeley, the College Internship Program has a ban on anyone older than 23, and anyone who can’t shovel over $60,000 a year, not including room and food. A fortress of cold elitism, CIP makes no attempts to reach out to young but poor autistics. Other smaller operations don’t want such mountains of cash, but still are way beyond the scope of what most people my age who have Asperger’s can afford.  

Despite the struggle for equality, the push to dissolve Proposition 8, I actually find many in the gay community can be cold to those who they don’t understand. The Pacific Center has a standing ban on anyone with any form of autism, depression, or anxiety disorder. Leslie Ewing and Judith Weatherly of the Pacific Center continue to reject the notion of supporting a Queer Suitcase Clinic, a service that would help all kinds of people who live on a very small SSDI check, like me. The Pacific Center used to tout itself as a center for human development. It could be one again if it opened it’s heart and if people donated funds and supplies to it. A city like Berkeley needs a thriving gay community that is open to all, especially those who feel isolated. It takes more than marriage to have a healthy and inclusive community. 

There has got to be a way I, and people like me, can have a chance at life. If you are a counselor who wants to set up an autism program, or want to help set up an autism co-op, or in anyway want to improve the quality of living for people on the Autism Spectrum please contact: autismliberation@yahoo.com. 

Nathan Pitts 

 

• 

‘ART OF DEMOCRACY’ 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

After reading and re-reading Joel Teller’s letter to the editor about my colleague Art Hazelwood’s intentions regarding this past fall’s planned “Art of Democracy” exhibition at the Addison Street Gallery, I find it most unfortunate that Mr. Teller deemed it necessary to take such a low road, accusing Mr. Hazelwood (and his coterie) of conspiring to manufacture a publicity stunt. Let’s blame the victim and then, well, shoot the victim, too. 

What impressed, amazed and continues to inspire our audiences, artists, and art critics alike is the extraordinary “high road” taken across the board by “Art of Democracy” exhibition planners, and artist participants. Speaking somewhat from the side-lines, I can however attest to the numerous internal, genuinely concerned, rational, solution-oriented communications between those concerned during the heat of the Addison Street Gallery “negotiations.”  

Never was it ever remotely a fleeting idea that a “censorship issue” might make for a timely self-serving cause among any associated with the coalition. On the contrary: From the start, “Art of Democracy” exhibitions have only been about a healthy exchange of politically oriented ideas through the open presentation of art to the public. 

Stephen A. Fredericks 

National Co-Organizer, 

Art of Democracy Coalition of Political Art Exhibitions 

 

• 

PREPOSTEROUS NOTION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As acting archivist and poster participant for the “Art of Democracy” coalition, I have to address this preposterous notion that Mr. Hazelwood engaged us in a deliberate censorship publicity stunt involving the Addison Street Gallery. The right to voice our political discontent is at the heart of what the “Art of Democracy” has accomplished thus far. This unprecedented level of freedom of expression is exactly what attracted such a widespread following of artists to this coalition and extended as well into the decision making processes Mr. Hazelwood has always graciously upheld. As artists, we voted and chose collectively not to exhibit our posters in a nonsensical and constricted environment that would deny visibility to any one of our participants. In a society that is increasingly vigilant in censoring, “Art of Democracy” showed a rare compassion for its outcasts and stood collectively in defense of our rights. 

Selene Vasquez 

Acting archivist and poster participant 

Hollywood, Florida 

 

• 

GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE EXPENSIVELY OUT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I have been a customer of EBMUD since 1976. The meter reading for my home have been estimated on and off for several years now. If either end of a billing period is an estimate, the billing is an estimate. I’ve been repeatedly told by EBMUD personnel and it is also obvious from looking at the bills, estimated meter readings are not always marked “estimate.” So, my bimonthly unit estimates for the last three years are a very unfair basis for calculating water rations for my home. The only fair thing to do is have the allocations be the average allocation per household for the district. 

I would also like to make a plea to have all the rationing for all households be the same, with some adjustment for number of people; not based on previous bills. 

Like many other people in the East Bay, I have tried to save water by every means possible for many years. Most of my landscaping is drought tolerant except the summer vegetable garden and the roses which I only drip irrigate once a week in the dry season. The lawn was taken out many years ago. I use gray water (reuse water for multiple purposes). We low water users should not be punished like this by much higher prices and punitive rationing, for having been good citizens. 

Also, it seems obvious that this whole problem came in large part about because you, the EBMUD board, have continually expanded the size and scope of the EBMUD district (an otherwise intermittent desert) for the last 30-plus years, seemly at the request of and for the profit of big developers. Now some of us have to drink Delta water rather than the high quality Mokelumne river water and the households in those same new developments get, on average, much higher water rations, in some cases to keep watering their inappropriate lawns. 

Please fix this very unfair and unworkable water rationing plan at once by making one district wide standard for reasonable water use as you have in previous droughts. 

Also, it more than time to ban further expansion of the EBMUD service district, without exception.  

Catherine Neergaard 

Kensington 

 

• 

FIREMEN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

No one criticizes firemen. They are essential. But why did they wear their uniforms off duty when campaigning? Why did they use firetrucks to put up political signs? Why can they not control overtime? I'm told there were 37,000 overtime hours last year. Why do they really only receive one phone call per day for seven fire stations? Why do we need a measure to fund their operations, including overtime, when we have a city budget to fund these activities? Perhaps someone ought to look into this. Like the city manager. And account to the public for it. 

George Oram 

 

• 

MAYOR DELLUMS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I wanted people to understand that I am not trying to defend Mayor Ron Dellums. I had some disagreement with him on some issues. However, I am appalled by the vicious attacks on him by both the local media (Oakland Tribune and San Francisco Chronicle) and zealot folks who never liked him nor believed his vision of a multi-racial Oakland. 

For example, they claim that Mayor Dellums is ineffective and doesn’t go out of his office much. That is a lie. Last year, Mayor Dellums, along with local mayors were pushing to get green jobs in their cities. Also at that same time, at the Paul Robeson School District Building, he along with Assemblyman Sandre Swanson, Assemblywoman Loni Hancock and others were there in a meeting to talk about returning local control to Oakland schools. 

Then Mayor Dellums settles a garbage strike at Waste Management between workers and their boss. In his state of the union address this year at the Oakland Marriott, he invited everyone, something that former mayor, Jerry Brown wouldn’t do. Finally, he wants to add more police to Oakland to solve the crime in this city, although I have some questions about it. 

Yet, both the local media and zealot folks are still not satisfied with his performance and some want him recalled. Personally, I look at these attacks on Mayor Dellums as a form of racial double standard because these same people were silent during the eight year reign of former mayor Jerry Brown about his misdeeds such as allowing back-room deals to allow questionable development in this city as well as his ineffectiveness in solving the homicide rate. 

Billy Trice, Jr. 

Oakland 

 

• 

FEDERAL LOAN AGENCY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Why does the federal government give billions of dollars to banks in the hope the banks will loan the money to individuals and small businesses. Isn’t this just another phony trickle-down theory and a scam to give away more billions of dollars to big business? Wouldn’t it make more sense for the federal government to become a competitor to the banks? Competition is healthy. It brings out the best in people and businesses and usually results in better opportunities for all concerned.  

The federal government should set up a federal loan agency. The sole purpose of this agency would be to make loan money available to credit-worthy individuals and businesses at reasonable interest rates. The loans would be protected because of the creditworthiness of the borrowers and the loans would be secured by real property or actual interests in the assets of the businesses. The government would only obtain secured interests if the borrowers defaulted on the loans. The vast majority of the loans would be paid off in a responsible manner. The economy would be stimulated and the populace would feel more secure. People wouldn’t have to worry about grossly mismanaged banks going under or about corporate greed (read extravagant bonuses) effecting the stability of their lender.  

Why do we need middlemen? Why do we need to give vast sums of money to banks and then beg them to loan it to individuals and businesses to stimulate the economy? If we must give money to banks, it needs to be given with strict controls requiring proof of loans and a requirement that the money be returned if not used for the purposes intended. What is wrong with our lawmakers and our regulators? This is simple stuff unless you are in the pockets of big business or corrupted.  

If the media or certain individuals complain that the federal government should not be in the loan business, or that it smacks of Socialism, ask them why their friends and buddies are recipients of government largesse. Also, the federal loan corporation or agency (whatever you want to name it) could have an expiration period. When it is no longer necessary because private institutions are filling the need they were meant to fill, then it could be dissolved.  

Paul M. Schwartz 


Few Pay Attention to AC Transit’s Transgressions

By Joyce Roy
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:43:00 AM

This is in response to the Nov. 20 commentary, “Fairness and Climate Change Demand MTC Attention,” by Richard A. Marcantonio, an attorney with Public Advocates Inc. 

Yes, the MTC does have a role in AC Transit’s financial problems. It enables them to misuse funds. You would think an “agency that holds the purse strings for AC Transit” could attach some strings to how the money is spent. Instead, they have turned a blind eye to AC Transit’s quasi-legal laundering of funds so they can use local monies designated for operations to buy imported buses. It is AC Transit that “deserves far closer public scrutiny than it has received.” 

The environmental justice community looks upon MTC as “bad,” that is, for rich people and watches it closely. But it views AC Transit as “good” because it serves poor people and only pays attention when they want to raise fares. Where is their voice when AC Transit votes to squander funds that results in the need to cut services and increase fares?  

I must say I bought into the good/bad views of that community, too, until I started paying close attention a couple of years ago to how AC Transit’s management was allocating its funds and the board’s absolute inattention.  

Some of the board members love to talk passionately about environmental justice but they don’t put their money where their mouth is. During this past campaign, Chris Peeples loved to say how he was serving poor people and at the past board meeting, Joe Wallace said he “fights for poor people.” But both of them, along with most of the board, vote time and again to squander funds on no-bid imported buses and numerous trips abroad for management and employees. 

All funds go into a big pool, the general fund. So, for instance, the money collected from Measure VV, whose glossy mailers and TV spots were “Sponsored by ABC Companies,” the U.S. distributor of Van Hool buses, and that emphasized the needs of the elderly and disabled, can be used to purchase buses that the elderly and disabled find treacherous. 

Let’s put some numbers to this. The ink was barely dry on Measure VV and the ABC Company received a hefty return on their investment at the Nov. 12 board meeting: 

• Nine more Van Hool 60-foot articulated buses (even though the general manager could not demonstrate a need for them) @ $592,289, therefore, squandered funds: $5,330,601 

• Forty 45-foot Van Hool suburban buses at $511,119: $20,444,760. The GM ignored the board’s May 14 directive to put out bids for both 40 and 45-foot buses and the board itself seemed to have forgotten it. For example, the Gillig 40-foot suburban bus that was exhibited at the APTA (American Public Transit Association) EXPO in October would cost $349,168 plus $75 delivery to Oakland. That would be $13,969,720 for 40 buses, therefore, squandered funds: $6,475,040. That is a total of $11,805,641 squandered funds at one board sitting, most of the $14,000,000 they are hoping to receive from Measure VV. 

• Part of the order for 50 40-foot two-door Van Hool buses (three doors, the original reason for having to import buses, didn’t turn out to be a good idea) are being delivered as I write. Each cost $400,000 including delivery. The average cost of a low floor 40-foot 2-door American bus according to APTA is $328,000. Therefore, squandered funds: $3,600,000. 

• While other agencies with a demonstration hydrogen fuel cell program are questioning them because of their high cost and ineffectiveness, AC Transit asked for and received a grant for expanding theirs rather than seeking grant funds that would actually provide expanded and improved service to increase ridership. The present program has three Van Hool buses that breakdown frequently and they are buying eight more at $2,250,000 each, for a total of $18,000,000! And expending at least $2,700,000 for a new fueling facility in Emeryville, so total squandered funds on expanded cell fuel program: $ 20,700,000! 

• And this agency that is serving “poor people” has sent the general manager, the General Counsel and 56 employees on a total of 153 trips to Belgium to the tune of $1,034,267 as June 30, this year.  

That is a grand total of $37,139,917 squandered, about two years of Measure VV funds. Think how much increased service this could have provided for the elderly and disabled used in the ads for VV!  

How can AC Transit so grossly misuse public funds with impunity? Easy—few are paying attention. Can you imagine if MUNI did any of these things? It would be on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle and heads would roll!  

Since AC Transit doesn’t have a lot of vocal middle-class riders like MUNI, there is a special need for environmental justice organizations to pay attention and speak loud and clear for the voiceless and vulnerable in our society, the minorities, the poor, the elderly and the disabled, that are ignored by AC Transit, and expose its gross misuse of public funds. That would be more productive than tilting at MTC windmills. 

 

Joyce Roy is an activist for for improvement in AC Transit service.


‘Red Neck Woman’—The Long Coming Legacy of Goldwater

By Jean Damu
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:43:00 AM

In director Sam Peckinpah’s 1962 classic, Ride the High Country, movie legend Randolph Scott yells to a bunch of Southern gunmen, “Hey you red-necked peckerwoods.” This was possibly a first in the history of film when one white character leveled a double-barreled racial epithet to other white characters. 

While the term peckerwood remains anathema to most right-thinking people, it would seem the term red-neck has gained respectability in some circles while in fact signaling to many (not necessarily whites) the meaning of the former term. 

We call attention to all this as Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who reveled in her self-description as a “red neck woman” begins to recede into the background of national consciousness following the recent conclusion of the national governors conference and as the Republican Party begins attempts to re-invent itself as a national political organization able to attract massive numbers of voters to its political agenda. 

As a leader Palin is not the only option available to Republicans but in terms of attracting the growing far right base of the party, she has to be considered a key contender in future discussions and elections. 

In terms of raw emotion the 2008 election of Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency and the role played by Palin and her unembarrassed racist appeal to white voters, resembled no other modern election perhaps with the exception of the 1964 election. 

At the 1964 Republican convention held at San Francisco’s Cow Palace, state’s rightist candidate, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater walked away with the nomination. Afterwards one wag noted the Cow Palace hadn’t smelled so bad since the last livestock exhibition. 

Goldwater was a proud conservative, and though he had supported local civil rights efforts in his home state and voted against the poll tax, he voted against the 1964 comprehensive Civil Rights Act arguing that these measures should be left to the individual states. 

In the most thorough drubbing ever delivered to a presidential candidate in modern U.S. history Democrat Lyndon Johnson, a southerner, recorded 486 electoral votes to Goldwater’s 54. The only states Goldwater carried were Arizona and the Deep South, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. 

Afterwards the nation’s newspaper and television pundits wondered if the Republican Party would ever again function as a national organization. 

Just four years later the Republican Party completely resurrected itself with the election of Richard Nixon whose campaign laid the basis of what today we refer to as the Southern Strategy; articulating the concerns and values of politically and racially conservative southern whites but which resonate with conservative white workers nationally. In 1968 what essentially was done was to campaign against the 1964 Voters Right Act, legislation that eventually politically empowered African Americans. 

In the coded language of 1968 politics this strategy was marketed as the “silent majority,” an appeal to white voters.  

The more recent version of the Southern Strategy and its’ primary articulator Lee Atwater, of whom much has recently been written, was used to overwhelming advantage by the Reagan campaign, ironically enough against southerner Jimmy Carter and that strategy has been the unstated name of the game for Republicans ever since. 

Despite the obvious changes U.S. demographics are undergoing, with massive numbers of Latinos and other “people of color” arriving in the United States, Republicans have found a comfort zone in making themselves attractive, once again, mainly to Southern white voters. 

When Gov. Palin chose to appear at the Asheville, North Carolina Republican rally, to sing and dance along as Gretchen Wilson sang her country hit, “Redneck Woman,” it was extremely difficult for a casual observer to tell if this crowd was composed of redneck women or peckerwood women, or more importantly, if there is any difference between the two. The only thing missing was the Confederate flag--and one is not convinced (after viewing just a snippet from the video) the flag was missing. 

The Republican Party may well choose the path of least resistance and follow in Palin’s media-created wake and continue to stoke the cultural fires; cultural fires long attributed by conservative media to the New Left of the 1960s. 

There exist a number of Republican alternatives to Palin. One of the most intriguing prospects is Louisiana governor Bobby Jindall, of whom Republican tax reformer Grover Norquist recently said, “He will be president. I don’t know the year.” Jindall is the first Indian American governor in the United States and the first non-white governor of Louisiana since the Reconstruction Era’s P.B.S. Pinchback. 

But will the Republicans go in a new direction? There is little evidence to make one think so. The media’s fawning treatment of Palin during the recent governors' convention and the breathless accounts of her criticisms of any Washington bailout of Detroit’s auto industry make it appear she will be given great credibility in any future discussion of Republican national leadership. 

Palin’s political and physical attractiveness has been described by some as the modern commodification of fascism, extreme right wing ideology that appeals primarily to those who still smart from advances made by African Americans and who object to the changing racial demographics of the nation. 

For the Republicans to have a meaningful future in a modern United States they need to change course from the paths of the Sarah Palins of the world and become representative of class interests beyond those who are members of the country club and those who wave Confederate flags and wish they could join the country club. But don’t hold your breath. 

 

Jean Damu is a Berkeley resident. 

 


Israel’s Policies in Gaza Inhumane and Self-Defeating

By Annette Herskovits
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:44:00 AM

An Israeli infantry unit entered the Gaza Strip early this month, violating a five-month-old truce between Israel and Hamas, the party now ruling Gaza. The Israelis set up camp in a family’s home, and as clashes with Palestinian militants followed, they called for air support. So it was that, on Nov. 4 and 5, while the world’s attention was focused on the U.S. election, Israeli aircraft fired missiles that killed six Palestinian militants.  

The Israeli Defense Ministry claimed this was a “preemptive” operation aimed at destroying a tunnel built by Palestinians to abduct Israeli soldiers, a claim impossible to counter, since, on Nov. 5, Israeli authorities closed the Gaza Strip to all foreign press—an unprecedented measure.  

Inevitably, Palestinian militants responded to the Israeli killings by firing rockets into Israel (which caused no casualties). Israel closed the crossings between Israel and Gaza. No food, medicine, or fuel, were allowed in. The humanitarian aid that feeds 80 percent of the population was stopped, and without fuel, Gaza’s power plant had to be shut down.  

These measures against Gaza’s civilian population, which includes 700,000 children age 14 or less, is collective punishment, and therefore a war crime under international law.  

Israel contends that sanctions are “working” because Hamas’ popularity with Gaza’s people has declined. This can hardly make a war crime acceptable, but in any case, as John Ging, a senior UN official, stated “[N]ot only are these sanctions not working, but because of their profound inhumanity, they are counterproductive to their stated purpose, and while Gaza is not yet an entity populated by people hostile to their neighbor, it inevitably will be if the current approach of collective punitive sanctions continues.”  

On Nov. 13, a convoy of senior European diplomats was refused entry into Gaza. Hearing of this, Philip Luther, an Amnesty International deputy to the Middle East, commented: “Gaza is cut off from the outside world. Israel is seemingly not keen for the world to see the suffering that its blockade is causing to the one and a half million Palestinians who are virtually trapped there.” 

This letter from the father of a Palestinian friend, a UN doctor working in a Gaza refugee camp, gives a view of life in the Strip: 

Anyone who monitors the quality of life in the Gaza Strip, which has been living under a tight state of siege for eighteen months, will be shocked by the situation. Unemployment has risen to 80 percent and more than half the people live on one or two dollars a day, far below the poverty line. 

As a medical professional, I am particularly concerned with certain harsh aspects of life for civilians in Gaza:  

First: There are tremendous health problems, which threaten people with death or life-long disability. There is a severe shortage in medicine and medical equipment. Hospital maintenance is poor, and X-Ray rooms, labs, pharmacies and operating rooms are desperately in need of attention. People with chronic and serious illnesses such as cancer or diabetes, unable to receive the appropriate treatment, have no chance of recovery. Since the siege began in June of 2007, a total of 257 people have died because they did not have access to adequate equipment. Many seniors and children with chronic illnesses—such as two-year old Said Al-Ayidy, three-month old Hala Zannoun, 15-year old Rawan Nassar, and numerous others—had to be left to die because they were denied travel permits for treatment. 

Hospitals in Gaza are anything but what hospitals should be. Daily power cuts, which last long hours, have caused immense suffering, especially to patients whose lives depend on medical machinery. Hospitals used gas-powered generators, but lack of gas and diesel have now made this impossible. Sadly, the only chance for patients with serious diseases is to be transferred either to Egypt or Israel. Often, this is an extremely complicated process and it is nearly impossible to obtain permission to transfer a patient to either country. None but for a few urgent cases can even consider leaving Gaza for treatment. Many patients have died while waiting for the official documents to be issued; others have died on their way to Israel or Egypt. 

In effect, hospitals have become places where patients sleep for several days without any healing or proper treatment because Israel has closed the commercial border points and drugs and medical equipment are not allowed to cross into Gaza. 

A second serious problem we face is sewage and pollution. This is a densely populated area. The people of Gaza live in shantytowns, refugee camps, and crowded neighborhoods, which share fragile and inadequate infrastructure. Lack of fuel supply stops the pumps needed to treat sewage water. The only solution open to the city is to drain the sewer water into the Mediterranean. As a result, the beaches have been polluted and the fishing season has been significantly curtailed. 

On rainy winter days, the streets and homes are flooded with water and the already bumpy and unpaved roads become even worse. Sewer pipes often burst and get damaged due to poor materials and lack of maintenance. Dirty and toxic water floods out from broken pipes into streets and homes. In some refugee camps, flooding was so severe that people had to assemble primitive boats and float over the water. In Jabalia refugee camp where I work, increasing numbers of people have reported illnesses and sickness due to exposure to toxic air and chemical wastes. 

Water has been flooding our backyard for days. The city public works department cannot fix the problem because it has no construction materials to replace the damaged utilities. Heavy machinery cannot operate because there is no fuel. We cannot open any windows and we breathe toxic waste for days until sunny days come to dry out everything. Streets are covered with mud, pebbles and hazardous sharp stones. City departments simply do not have any resources.  

I have not mentioned many other problems that face our impoverished, war-torn and isolated society: shortages in food, goods and services, cash and other basic needs—because I wanted to point out the health issues, which I am most familiar with... There is a need for urgent help from the international community. Former United States President Jimmy Carter described the siege that Gaza is enduring as a “crime against human rights.”  

Can you imagine living like this?” 

One can only hope that the Obama sdministration will be willing and able to steer Israel away from its blind, self-destructive policies.  

 

Annette Herskovits is a freelance writer living in Berkeley.


Poisonous PR Reported Too Faithfully

By Joanna Graham
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:44:00 AM

The more I study Riya Bhattacharjee’s “hate crime” article in the Sept. 25 Daily Planet, the more troubling I find it.  

It describes Blue Star PR’s pro-Israel poster in detail (a picture of a soccer star “calling for co-existence,” hard to photograph) and transmits pure ad copy from a Blue Star PR spokesman as if it were a personal comment. It also describes in detail (photographs of) the graffiti which appeared on the poster the night of Sept. 17 and quotes Kriss Worthington’s opinion that such graffiti might be followed by actual violence, so that we “need to take this seriously.”  

Finally, even though the article reports Chancellor Birgeneau’s observation that the vandalism “was not on campus property and may not have been perpetrated by our members,” it nevertheless takes at face value ASUC senator John Moghtader’s baseless link to Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)—he was rebutting a member’s remarks at the time of the defacement!—and includes a long, irrelevant discussion of what the disagreement was about (olive trees). Score 10 out of 10 for Moghtader and Gabe Weiner, “former ASUC senator” and “campus coordinator for the Israel Peace Initiative,” the person who, “extremely angry and upset” upon discovering the defacement (despite the fact that he’d been watching for it), reported it to the chancellor—and to the media. These two shaped the story to portray Israel and Jews as innocent victims while attributing, on no basis whatsoever, both actual vandalism and potential violence to SJP. Bhattacharjee, and others, dutifully spread the poisonous innuendo. 

Fast forward. On Oct. 15, members of Tikvah: Students for Israel noisily disrupted a lecture in Boalt Hall given by professors Norman Finkelstein and John Dugard at the invitation of SJP and other groups. As a result of this action, Tikvah was placed on probation by the Jewish Student Union, the umbrella group under which it is registered. The principal organizers of the action were Tikvah’s president, John Moghtader, and Gabe Weiner. It is unclear from various press reports whether Weiner presently is or is not a student at UC. 

Fast forward again. As recounted in the Nov. 20 Daily Planet, on Nov. 13 the Zionist Freedom Alliance was mounting a hip-hop rally for Israel on lower Sproul Plaza. Two or three dozen people were in attendance. Three SJP members, one man and two women, hung a Palestinian flag out a window in Eshelman Hall to protest “offensive remarks” at the rally. Organizers of the rally went upstairs; a fight ensued; police arrived too late to sort out the conflicting stories. Until UC releases its findings, we are not even certain who was charged. One thing we do know, however, is this: two of the people involved in the fight were John Moghtader and Gabe Weiner. 

I have questions. One, if I were planning to start a fight with up to three dozen people, would I send one man and two women to do it? Two, is Gabe Weiner a currently enrolled student at UCB? Three, why is he connected with such an extraordinary number of organizations? Tikvah appears to be a recognized UC student group, albeit an embarrassing one, but both the “Israel Peace Initiative” and the “Zionist Freedom Alliance” are off-campus groups, dedicated to promulgating Israel’s maximalist territorial ambitions. Four, how did the highly-biased ZFA version of the altercation, initially picked up by the Daily Cal, then later retracted, appear so speedily on the website Israel National News.com, complete with musings on the satisfactions of beating up “anti-Israel” activists? In the past, organizations like these, especially with the same person(s) involved in all, have often been suspected of being “front groups.” 

Zionists are extraordinarily skilled at furthering the narrative about helpless Jews and evil Arabs. Moreover, once such a narrative is well underway (as this one has been for 60 years), it has its own momentum, so that just an occasional push—like a defaced poster at a bus stop—is sufficient to keep it rolling along, especially since many of the finest, most gentle, people among us, like Kriss Worthington, find it difficult to put the whole enterprise to the question. 

Last Wednesday I was at a lecture where tensions ran so high with reference to this latest incident that even the known facts proved too controversial to recite. At least among Jews, and possibly others, a sense that UC has become a hotbed of anti-Semitism and potential Arab terrorist violence is now well engendered. On a campus with a student body of 35,000, this is a pretty remarkable feat for two men (one of them possibly not a student) to pull off. 

What’s happening here is a campaign to discredit an effective pro-Palestinian campus group—a campaign in which at least four off-campus rightwing Zionist organizations appear to be involved. This campaign can hardly be unexpected, since for many years a nationwide effort to silence both faculty and students who criticize Israel has been ongoing at colleges and universities, pretty much the last places in the United States open to the expression of such dissent. Sadly, the Daily Planet, along with other Bay Area media, by reporting these latest stories as concocted, has been turned into an unwitting accomplice in this effort. I strongly suggest that your reporters inoculate themselves against further dissemination of Zionist propaganda by bringing at least a minimal level of skepticism to bear on any story about apparently spontaneous outbreaks of “age-old Jewish/Palestinian conflict.” And certainly, as far as Cal is involved, if either Mr. Moghtader’s or Mr. Weiner’s name comes up, beware.  

 

Joanna Graham is a Berkeley resident.


The Carter-Olmert Middle East Peace Proposal

By Akio Tanaka
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:45:00 AM

There was much hope when the Oslo Peace accords were signed in 1993. However, the peace process was derailed when Dr. Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 Palestinians at the Cave of the Patriarch on Feb. 25, 1994, and the massacre was avenged 40 days later by the first suicide bombing inside Israel in the city of Afula on April 6, 1994. The peace process received further blow when the Prime Minister Isak Rabin was assassinated on Nov. 4, 1995, as he was leaving a rally in Tel Aviv in support of the Oslo process, by Yigal Amir, a radical right-wing Orthodox Jew who opposed the signing of the Oslo Accords. 

However, recently, the outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel again proposed that the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and East Jerusalem. 

This is the same proposal that President Carter put forth in his 2006 book, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid. 

Although some still argue that there can be no peace until Palestinians stop their “terrorist” attacks, many others recognize that the Palestinian “terrorist” attacks are desperate response against the Israeli government’s continued confiscation of Palestinian lands for Israeli settlements. 

Furthermore, the Palestinian “terrorism” is no match for Israel’s “state terrorism” with their F16’s, Apache helicopters, and Merkava tanks, which is why far more Palestinians fall victim to Israeli violence than Israelis to Palestinian violence. 

President Carter in his book cites that between September 2000 and March 2006, 1,084 Israelis were killed of which 123 were children, while 3,982 Palestinians were killed of which 708 were children. 

Sara Roy, who is a daughter of a Holocaust survivor, addressed what the Palestinians endure under the Israeli occupation at a Holocaust Remembrance lecture at Baylor University in 2002: 

“Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians is not the moral equivalent of the Nazi genocide of the Jews. But it does not have to be. No, this is not genocide but it is repression and it is brutal. And it has become frighteningly natural. Occupation is about the domination and dispossession of one people by another. It is about the destruction of their property and the destruction of their soul. Occupation aims, at its core, to deny Palestinians their humanity by denying them the right to determine their existence, to live normal lives in their own homes. Occupation is humiliation. It is despair and desperation. And just as there is no moral equivalence or symmetry between the Holocaust and the occupation, so there is no moral equivalence or symmetry between the occupier and the occupied, no matter how much we as Jews regard ourselves as victims.” 

After 40 years of military occupation, Israel has 500,000 settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and 2.5 million Palestinians herded into isolated Bantustans. 

Israel views itself as an enlightened western democracy, but they have established an Apartheid state in their backyard. 

Israel is building the separation wall to consolidate the confiscated land and to wall off the Palestinians. Palestinians who are not reconciled to the theft of their home and land are regarded as terrorists. 

It is a tragic irony that President Carter and Prime Minister Olmert are free to speak the truth only because they are no longer running for a political office. 

It is hoped that President Obama, who promises change, will reverse the America’s unquestioned support of Israel which has been the impediment to Middle East peace, and help broker a just peace to the two embattled peoples of the Middle East. 

 

Akio Tanaka is an Oakland resident.


Creativity in the Face of Climate Change

By Elyse Bekins
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:46:00 AM

In the academic world of our forward thinking and innovative universities, why should a broad over-arching societal issue such as climate change be confined to the department of environmental science? The environmental changes will certainly impact us all, therefore our learning institutions are starting to look at ways to bring in a broad spectrum of subjects into the dialogue, hoping to stimulate different ideas and new ways of dealing with the climate crisis. 

On Oct. 30, five distinguished scholars from the University of California system met in a symposium setting to discuss how the humanities can be incorporated to the climate change discourse. Two of these professors were from UC Berkeley: Robert Hass, a poet laureate and environmental studies professor, and Carolyn Merchant, environmental ethics, philosophy and history professor. Also included were Timothy Morton of UCD, Michael Osbourne of UCSB and Robert Watson of UCLA.  

The goal was to discuss the ways the humanities can become involved in climate change discussion in an institutional setting like the UC system. While this is a very important topic, the most intriguing portions of the dialogue dealt with the ability of the arts to promote the healing of the human psyche in the face of crisis.  

The very mention of global warming in today’s society triggers feelings of apocalypse and impending societal collapse. The notion that the planet is already heating up sparks feelings of anxiety and fear, yet these feelings seldom have an outlet of release. These feelings of anxiety and helplessness build up in the face of a changing planet, propagating the apocalyptic vision. Society is facing this impending doom theory, yet few people are finding cathartic outlets to express their fears.  

This is where the humanities can help. By expressing fears and angst through writing and art, one lets go of personal feelings and shares them with the world, hopefully helping to heal others in the process. There is no way we can heal the planet if we do not heal ourselves first.  

Creative expression becomes an outlet for sharing feelings, as well as inspiring new ideas and solutions. We may read about environmental destruction through scientific journals and newspapers, but we rarely see them through an artistic eye, imbued with feelings and passion. Like seeing a painting which forces one to question one’s own experience, it is this creative expression that will help us see our personal role and duty in regards to saving the environment. 

I see many outlets for people to express hopes in the face of environmental crisis, especially in Berkeley where we have the blessings of community gardens, farmers markets, environmental awareness, and political activism. Yet we cannot forget the global environmental crisis. There is a constant influx of this doomsday theory into our everyday awareness, and this is causing a toll on our personal psyches as we read about the collapse of ecosystems and the billions of marginalized people around the world.  

Sometimes we must admit that we do not have the solution, and that is what can make the world a scary place. Timothy Morton professed the need for society to let out a cathartic scream with footnotes attached. A release of all the built-up pressure, yet with an added note of intelligence and awareness. It is true that sometimes we just need to scream.  

Morton also pointed out that its okay to be depressed when it comes to the impending environmental crisis. He called the crisis, “unspeakable.” It is hard for us to even wrap our brains around and comprehend it with our current linguistic capabilities. We are slowly realizing the inter-connectedness of all living things, but we are learning it the hard way, as the planet is already heating up and society is not yet in the place to amend its wrongs yet. So we have all the reason to be depressed, and that can be okay. There is a degree of intelligence in depression. We cannot successfully deal with climate change if we are suppressing our feelings of sadness, under a mask of keeping busy with “progress”. Lets deal with our depressions and then perhaps we may come out of them notably more well equipped to tackle the problems we are facing.  

Dealing with our depressions does not mean sulking in our light impoverished bedrooms however, but instead expressing depression creatively through writing, art, performance, etc. When sad about the state of the environment, let that out. Write about what makes you afraid, paint your anxieties, creatively share with others when you are feeling helpless in the face of global warming. When reading about the next devastating hurricane or famine lets take a collective societal scream, and then we can get back to our business of saving the world. 

 

Albany resident Elyse Bekins recent environmental studies graduate from UC Santa Barbara.


Things Obama Should—But Won’t—Do

By Kenneth J. Theisen
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:46:00 AM

Barack Obama was elected by people who hope that he will change the political direction which this nation has taken over the last seven years of the Bush regime. When he takes office he will have the power to undo some of the damage of the Bush administration. But he will not do so because he does not owe his political allegiance to the majority of people in this country, but rather to the small class of people who live on the exploitation of the masses here and throughout the world. These are the people he will serve, regardless of the wishes of millions who voted for him. He may tinker with some of the programs of the Bush regime, but he will fail to reverse the fundamentally fascist trajectory. 

I have listed a few of the actions Obama could take if he was a real agent of change. I do not expect Obama to actually try to accomplish many of these items, but I think it is worth reflecting on how much damage has been done over the last seven years and then to think about what it will really take to reverse the course set by the Bush regime. We can not rely on false saviors from the ruling class such as Obama. We must rely on the masses to become politically active in a mass movement to actually have any hope of making real change possible.  

Obama could do, but won’t do, the following: 

He could direct the Department of Justice to begin investigations into the various crimes of Bush administration officials and agents. These would include, but not be limited to: war crimes, crimes against humanity, the invasions and commission of acts of war against sovereign nations, massive spying, torture, kidnapping, murder, assassinations, abuse of immigrants by illegal detentions and arrests, and the use of government offices to politicize official actions, etc. 

He could order the review and repeal of executive orders and presidential directives that potentially give the president dictatorial powers such as Presidential Directive 51. 

He could close down U.S.-run torture sites run by the Department of Defense (DOD) such as those in Guantanamo (He may close Gitmo as a public-relations move.), in Iraq, and Afghanistan which hold prisoners taken in the so-called “war on terror.” He could order the DOD to begin investigations into the crimes committed at these sites. These would include torture, false imprisonment, and murder. Tens of thousands of prisoners have been held in these hell holes. He could pardon any prisoners convicted under the Military Commissions Act which strips defendants of their human and legal rights. 

He could order the CIA to cease renditions and to stop the operation of “secret” prisons. The CIA has kidnapped and outsourced torture to “allies” in the war on terror, including to countries on the U.S. State Department’s own list of countries that engage in torture. 

He could decrease the size of the U.S. military which now operates 750 bases and sites in over 100 countries, instead of advocating the increase of the military by 92,000 troops which he supports. 

He could withdraw all troops and military resources from Iraq and Afghanistan. His Iraq “withdrawal plan” would allow more than 100,000 U.S. troops and contractors to remain. He wants to send more combat brigades and military resources to Afghanistan. 

He could order government agencies to cease covert and overt military operations against Pakistan, Syria, and Iran. He has advocated military strikes and incursions into Pakistan. 

He could order that U.S. military assistance to countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Columbia cease. These and other countries use this aid to suppress their own people. 

He could stop aid to Israel which uses it to suppress the legitimate rights of Palestinians and others and to maintain the most lethal military (including nuclear weapons) machine (other than the U.S) in the Middle East. 

He could dismantle the massive spy operations conducted by U.S. intelligence agencies against Americans and other innocent people. 

He could order the review of all federal regulations that impact the environment. Those that undermine environmental protection could be repealed. 

He could propose legislation to repeal the Military Commissions Act, the Federal Intelligence and Security Act, the PATRIOT Act, the Protect America Act of 2007, and the International Economic Emergency Powers Act. These and similar laws lay the legal basis for stripping people of their constitutional rights and also the creation of a police state. 

He could direct the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to stop raids on work places and other sites. He could direct that DHS stop erecting barriers along the borders that in effect kill immigrants by forcing them to cross deserts, mountains, or other deadly terrain. He could order that the military no longer cooperate in the policing of the border. ICE operations like “return to sender” that target immigrants for deportation could be dismantled. He could pardon all immigrants currently held or previously charged with such “immigration” crimes such as “illegally” crossing the border, using “fraudulent” documents, overstaying their Visas, etc. He could propose legislation that would “legalize” millions of immigrants without various restrictions, penalties, or other inhibitions that would make these immigrants unwelcome in the United States. 

He could order federal agencies to destroy “lists” created in the so-called “war on terror.” These lists contain the names of millions of people and are not limited to “suspected terrorists.” 

He could order the destruction of information gathered under the various spy operations created in the “war on terror.” This would include information gathered against various anti-war groups and their members or other groups that otherwise opposed the Bush regime. 

 

Kenneth J. Theisen is an Oakland resident and a steering committee member of the World Can’t Wait! Drive out the Bush Regime!


Letters to the Editor

Thursday November 20, 2008 - 10:09:00 AM

• 

‘ART OF DEMOCRACY’  

EXHIBIT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I want to add my voice to those who protested the censorship at the Windows Gallery. This exhibition was a part of the nationwide protest exhibitions which, under the title “Art and Democracy,” organized many exhibitions of political art. I have been working with this enterprise and, as far as I know, the only show that was censored was here in Berkeley, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement. In a country where one and all are carrying and using deadly weapons, it does seem important to let people—including children—know what they do and how they kill. Our Civic Arts Commission, which approved the ridiculous sculpture on the Pedestrian Bridge, should know better than to ban an exhibition which might have added to our discourse of bearing arms. 

Peter Selz 

 

• 

GALLERY WAS SET UP 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am responding to some statements in this paper about the “Art in Democracy” exhibit, originally scheduled for the Addison Street Windows Gallery. 

The show was canceled by Art Hazelwood, the organizer, not by the city. 

The guidelines for the Windows Gallery are simple, and are made explicitly clear to artists when they apply for an exhibit, months prior to the opening. Mr. Hazelwood had a choice: agree to the guidelines, or decline to exhibit. In an e-mail to the curator in January, 2008 he wrote “I think we can fill the windows without sex, violence or guns.” 

In October, Mr. Hazelwood and the curator met to verify the images he had selected, and they concurred that four of the works clearly failed to meet the criteria for inclusion in the Gallery. Mr. Hazelwood agreed to show the remaining posters, self-censoring his own exhibit in accordance with the guidelines. A few days later he flip-flopped. He canceled the exhibition just days before it was scheduled to open, breaching his contract with the city.  

Recently, in a public meeting, Mr. Hazelwood admitted his agreement to the guidelines was a commitment he fully intended to break. Then he and his associates went to the media with invented issues of free speech and censorship. I believe Mr. Hazelwood and his coterie carefully planned this misrepresentation in order to set up the city and gain publicity.  

Joel Teller 

 

• 

WINDOWS GALLERY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Addison Street Windows Curator Carol Brighton is to be congratulated for her efforts. Her intellectual forebear Thomas Bowdler would undoubtedly be proud of her. 

Guns are just the tip of the iceberg. Swords, knives, baseball bats, fists, civilian airplanes, even rope deserve a place on Ms. Brighton’s proscribed list.  

Ms. Brighton and Ms. Merker ought to turn over the names of artists manque such as Doug Minkler and Jos Sances to the Department of Homeland Security for a thorough investigation of their un-American art. Gitmo is still open, at least for the next 70 days or so. 

Ms. Merker and Ms. Brighton undoubtedly have the wholehearted support of Mayor Bates, personally experienced as he is in suppressing the free-speech rights of Berkeley residents. 

Shankar Ramamoorthy 

Albany 

 

• 

A NEW DANCE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In honor of the election of Barack Obama I believe we should start a new dance craze called “The Obama.” It should be jazzy, classy and upbeat. I believe it will catch on. 

We have the Macarena, the Jitterbug, the Charleston, the Two Step, Swing, the Tango, the Waltz, the Polka, etc. I am open to suggestions as to what form the dance “The Obama” should take.  

Possibilities for “The Obama” are: 

1. Democratic version: Two steps forward, one step back (not everything goes as you plan or hope), swing or circle to the left, always to the left. Have the audacity to hope for the best. 

2. Republican version: Two steps back, never forward, always swing or turn to your right. Hope the craze never catches on. 

3. The Independent voter version: Do not participate. Never take the dance floor. Be a wallflower.  

4. The Green Party version: Expend as much energy as humanly possible. Try to harness that energy and put it to good use. 

5. The Libertarian version: Dance freely with no structure whatsoever. Try hard to keep in tempo with the beat but don’t fret the structure or rigidity of the dance. Express yourself with no concern about what effect you are having on others. 

6. The Sarah Palin version: Dosado and pander to the right. Never Alemende left. Don’t bother learning how to dance, just do it. Dance as if God is directing your every step. 

Paul M. Schwartz 

 

• 

SMYTH HOUSE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Daniella Thompson writes in her interesting Nov. 13 article on William Henry Smyth and his Fernwald property that the Smyth House was “built in 1889 by realtor Joseph L. Scotchler, a leading Berkeley Republican...”  

Property records and newspaper articles are essential research tools, but they do not necessarily tell the whole, or most accurate, story. 

Years ago while researching, in my UC staff capacity, the history of the California Schools for the Deaf and Blind campus in Berkeley, I came across a fascinating photograph of the school site, now the Clark Kerr campus. 

The photograph, identified as taken in 1874, looked from the vicinity of what is now Garber Street northeast across the fields, showing the Deaf School campus and, beyond it on an otherwise open hillside, a white Victorian house with adjacent barn and plantings.  

The photograph must date from before January 1875, when the main stone edifice on the school campus burned. 

The hillside house in the photograph is so similar to Smyth House in massing, siting, and details such as placement of chimneys and windows, that I have thought it most probably shows the earlier incarnation of what is now Smyth House. If that is the case it’s far older than 1889, dating to the early 1870s at least.  

I thought I also might offer a helpful bit of additional detail on the origins of the Fernwald dormitories. During World War II, many fraternities in Berkeley shut down for the duration, and were rented to women who made up the majority of the Cal student population from the fall of 1943 through the spring of 1945.  

When the war ended the fraternities notified their women residents that they would have to leave. The construction of the Fernwald residence halls for women was one of the results. Later, they became co-educational, with separate buildings for men and women students and, still later, were converted to the family student apartments that remain there today.  

Margaret Dewell, my old supervisor at the University’s Housing Office, who was at Cal in that period, always recalled with pride the speed with which the campus responded to that sudden housing crisis at the end of the War. She referred to the Fernwald dormitories as “90-day wonders,” since they were constructed in about three months. 

Because of his gift of property that became the Fernwald residence halls, William Smyth’s name is now inscribed with those of individuals such as Phoebe Hearst, Jane Sather, and the Haas family, on the University’s memorial wall honoring “Builders of Berkeley” near the north entrance to Doe Library. 

Steven Finacom 

 

• 

OLD FOLKS JUST IN THE WAY? 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Regarding Judith Segard Hunt’s Nov. 13 letter demanding that people using senior BART tickets pay double during rush hour: I qualify for these tickets, and use them every morning on my way to the part-time job in Oakland that keeps me from living on the street and starving to death. Does Ms. Hunt think that all the seniors who so inconvenience her by riding BART during rush hour are on their way to the golf course? If so, than I can only hope and pray that she finds herself in the same position when her time comes. For shame! 

Michael Stephens 

Point Richmond 

 

• 

BERKELEY’S PRO-TRANSIT  

MAJORITY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The election results showed a solid pro-transit majority in Berkeley. Over 70 percent supported AC Transit’s Measure VV, 

and over 75 percent voted no on Berkeley’s anti-BRT Measure KK. If the Belgian manufacturer of Van Hool buses really did contribute to these campaigns, I’d like to think the result was better-informed voters. 

While Berkeley was considering KK, the city of Cleveland implemented a new BRT, with proof of payment (POP), hybrid buses and bus-only lanes.  

Now that we know that a majority of us want better bus service, it’s time to stop fooling around; we should ignore the endless minority misinformation campaigns and start planning for a BRT that will both give us car-free transportation and make a real contribution to the fight against global warming. Berkeley cannot claim to have a real Climate Action Plan unless Berkeley is planning for BRT—with bus-only lanes. 

We should negotiate reasonable compromises on the bus-only lanes. They don’t have to be everywhere. Some sections can be bus-only just during the rush hours. AC Transit should implement POP on the Rapid lines now. If Van Hool can’t supply hybrid buses for BRT, AC Transit should get them from Orion. AC Transit should stop sending people on junkets to Belgium and start sending observers to New York City (which runs Orions) and of course to see Cleveland’s BRT. I may visit Cleveland myself this spring. 

Steve Geller 

 

• 

BUS RAPID TRANSIT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It seems to me that 9,900 people who care for Telegraph Avenue voted for this and that 29,000 people who thought they were saving polar bears voted against it. 

It is very uncertain that carbon or pollution would be saved by BRT. The traffic back-ups that result will cause a good deal of pollution. Bus ridership will decrease because local service will be eliminated so there will be fewer buses spitting diesel into the air. This is a blessing for greenies but not for most bus users. 

We’ve got to face the fact that AC Transit is doing it for the money and prestige of having a BRT system. Our mayor is trying to amass green credentials in hopes of a job in the Obama administration. I do hope he gets one, it will save us a lot of trouble. 

No one is fooling anyone about the ridership on buses from Oakland to Berkeley. The route parallels BART for longer distances, and the true ridership is on the local that serves the people who live on Telegraph. 

We have ridden and studied the situation and if ever there was a tempest in a teapot, this is it.  

We’ve also got to face the fact that successful BRTs add lanes for traffic and the web is full of examples of huge traffic jams caused by BRTs that reduce lanes for cars. These sure cause pollution and carbon. 

Even though GM may well disappear, cars are here to stay, our towns are designed for them, and many of us, including me, cannot walk well enough any more to get to a bus. We need our car. 

George Oram 

 

• 

STORMS FLUSH LITTER INTO BAY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Did you participate in the Coastal Cleanup in September? Thousands of volunteers came out to help pick up trash along California’s beaches and waterways as part of a global effort. 

Unfortunately, the recent rains flushed a fresh load of styrofoam cups, plastic bags, cigarette butts, and other non-degradable trash down into the storm sewers, and out into the bay. The streets and sidewalks of Berkeley, like most other cities in the world, are littered with plastic trash. Although most plastic waste ends up in landfills, the fraction which does wind up as litter constitutes a major pollution problem. Much of this litter will wash out into the Pacific ocean to join a huge floating plastic garbage patch, and it will remain there indefinitely. Plastic does not biodegrade, and therefore it is critical that we find ways to reduce and eventually eliminate plastic litter. Otherwise future generations will inherit a world choked by our carelessly discarded coffee cups and soda straws. 

What to do? Each of us must play a role. Make sure your trash doesn’t wind up on the sidewalk or in the gutter. Don’t overfill trash cans. Pick up some litter every day. Don’t throw cigarette butts on the ground. Avoid creating plastic trash by looking for ways to avoid using throw-away items. When you go out for meal, support the many restaurants listed on GreenMyCuisine.com that use compostable containers. Encourage your favorite eateries to participate. If each of us does a little, we can all accomplish a lot. 

Jim Meador 

 

• 

IMPEACH NOW 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It is absolutely critical that impeachment hearings start now for Cheney and Bush. Do not let Bush pardon himself, Cheney, and everyone else pre-emptively, before they have even been charged with crimes against the Constitution. The evidence is too strong to ignore—and we at least need hearings to get the truth and justice! 

Cynthia Papermaster 

 

• 

GAY AND STRAIGHT TOGETHER 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Darren Main is mistaken; he leaps to the conclusion that demonstrations opposing the Mormons’ funding of Proposition 8 are the same as opposing the Mormon religion, and that such demonstrations disrupt services. 

The Nov. 9 demonstration at the Oakland Mormon Temple did not disrupt services, had nothing to do with religion, and had everything to do with politics and equal rights. 

The Mormons’ history of persecution for, among other things, its unorthodox view of marriage, is a history of an unconventional minority group finally finding acceptance and the freedom to worship as they please. Using that strength to fund an effort to rob a protected class of its fundamental rights is entirely separate from worship, and should be opposed from both within the church and from the outside community. 

Those who participated in funding Proposition 8 need to see the faces and the outrage of those they have wronged; gay people who live in a second-class status, and straight people who find this not only specifically objectionable, but who worry that churches will continue to use their tax-free dollars to target others. 

There is nothing wrong with Darren Main’s suggestion that everyone try to be respectful. But there is nothing disrespectful in standing outside someone’s church with a sign promoting equal rights, and taking care to make sure one chooses inclusive, pro-equal rights businesses to patronize in the community. 

Carol Denney 

 

• 

PROP. 8 REDUX 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It seems strange that no one is talking about putting a measure to repeal Proposition 8 on the next ballot. The outcome was close enough to suggest the outcome rests on vagaries of turnout. If it is on the ballot every single election, the chances go up for overturning this misery. 

Another thing to consider is the out of state money that will pour in to defeat this effort. That money will bring jobs and profits to our local media industry. Furthermore, a continuous effort will eventually exhaust the resources of the opposition. 

By all means, work for repeal through courts. However, it wouldn’t hurt to pursue all avenues of relief. Besides, when the pro-Prop. 8 advocates say, “Why don’t you respect the will of the people,” one can reply, “We do. That’s why it’s on the ballot.” 

Thomas Laxar 

El Cerrito 

 

• 

AFTERMATH OF PROP. 8 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Now that Proposition 8 was overwhelmingly approved by California voters, many protesting voices are belatedly heard. It would seem many opponents were shocked by the huge number of voters, especially in the Hispanic and African American communities, who oppose gay marriage. And now opponents are angry and hurt. But they should not have been surprised. In fact, both Obama and McCain campaigned as opponents of gay marriage. According to Mayor Willie Brown, the pro-Proposition 8 campaign very successfully used audio of Barack Obama expressing his opposition to gay marriage in robocalls to likely African American voters. Perhaps gay marriage supporters shouldn’t support candidates who oppose gay marriage. If gay marriage supporters had thrown their support to a pro-gay marriage candidate like Ralph Nader, perhaps the Democrats wouldn’t have taken the pro-gay marriage vote for granted.  

Nathaniel Hardin 

El Cerrito 

 

• 

LOONY LEFT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Regarding David Bacon’s Nov. 13 piece: To publish a lengthy commentary on the subject of illegal immigration that does not once mention the word “illegal” shows how loony the left is becoming. The first stage of insanity is denial. 

James Riley 

New York, NY 

 

• 

HYPOCRISY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Marc Sapir ludicrously clams that the Jewish people who returned to their homeland “lay waste” to the land. Of course, the Jews took a land that was mostly waste and developed it into a modern country—to the benefit of both Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel. And of course Israel did this despite multiple attempts by surrounding Arab countries to destroy it, and while integrating millions of refugees not only from Europe but also from Arab lands. 

If Sapir wants to see a member of a society that actually has seized land and subjugated the indigenous people, he merely has to look in the mirror—or doesn’t he realize that all of us are living on land that once belonged to the Ohlone and the Miwok? How does he think that this area came to be part of the United States? And, of course, those of us who are not Native American do not have our historical, cultural and religious roots in this area. 

When Sapir voluntarily turns over his own home to the descendants of the Native Americans that once lived in the area, then he can stand on his moral pedestal and demand that others living halfway around the world do the same. Until then, he’s just a hypocrite. 

Michael Harris 

San Rafael 

• 

MIDDLE EAST COMMENTARY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Your paper is so biased against Israel and the Jewish people that it is painful for me to read. You never put issues into long-term historical perspective (such as noting the continual attacks by Arab neighbors throughout Israel’s history as well as the sanctuary that Israel has provided for millions of refugees and victims of genocide).  

The British mandate as well as the United Nations gave the Jewish people back a portion their homeland and gave the Arab people a much larger portion of land called Transjordan. Israel was immediately surrounded and attacked in 1948 and many times thereafter. The Jewish people fought back and won those wars of aggression. Land was taken by the victor to ensure security at its borders. Israel did not ask for the 1967 nor the 1973 wars against it. Jordan is a Palestinian State. The West Bank and Gaza can become an independent Arab state if they would stop attacking Israel and negotiate for peace.  

Your paper makes everything one-sided. Since when does a warring conflict not involve missteps on both sides? How about calling for an end to Arab aggression? Call for an end to Hamas and Hezbollah openly calling for the complete destruction of Israel? Show me the peace advocates representing the Arab side? To live in peace, the Arab Palestinians must be working for peace as well. Both sides must work hard. Your paper is blinded by anti-Semitism, for you can only see the bad aggressive Jews in this situation. Jews are tired of being victims. I am tired of your anti-Semitic, biased and hateful editorials and news articles.  

There are 15 Arab countries within an hours drive from Israel. Let them open their doors to the suffering Palestinians. They have vast amounts of land to share. If they truly cared about their brothers’ suffering, let them provide land and resources to the Palestinians. The people have made a viable country out of a land with few resources. The Arab people could do the same if they stopped warring with Israel and helped one another create a good life for their people. Destroying Israel is not going to bring prosperity or a stable government to the Palestinians. Working for a positive society based on gender and sexual equality, democracy and peace will truly help the Palestinians have a viable existence. That said, shame on you for your very evident bias and anti-Semitism.  

Gail Taback 

Oakland 

 

• 

KENNEDY BUILDINGS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Eating my Wheaties or whatever while working my way through the intricacies of the Maio-Browning/Kennedy dealings over the past several years, I mostly felt mildly intrigued, even amused. I did drop my spoon, though, when I came to the sentence including such phrases as “homeowners’ association,” “pending ‘major suit,’” and “alleged ‘shoddy workmanship’” with respect to 1805 University Ave. Have we not been here before? Didn’t the roof leak, the mold invade, the tenants sue with respect to that other Kennedy property, the Gaia building, which, as a different article in the same issue of the Planet, probably incidentally placed on the facing page, divulges, has been recently cited as a public nuisance? One bad building could be an accident. Lemons happen. Two bad buildings strongly indicate a developer who cuts his corners a little too close. No matter which side one takes on the very Berkeley issue of cell phone antennas, one thing should be clear to all: Unless you thrive on problems and lawsuits, don’t move into a building built by developer Patrick Kennedy. 

Joanna Graham 

 

• 

WE NEED A FAVOR FROM McCAIN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In their meeting in Chicago on Monday, President-elect Obama and Sen. McCain spoke convincingly of working together for the good of the country. 

But the recent campaign has been marked by attacks that were unusually personal, vindictive, and false. These attacks have agitated the fears and hatreds of the small portion of the country, which has phobias about non-whites, and in general those they see as being Others. This includes attendees who were heard shouting, “Kill him” during Sen. McCain’s campaign rallies. 

Sen. McCain bears the liability for fueling these warped feelings by allowing his supporters to believe that Obama is a Muslim (and there is nothing wrong with being a Muslim), that he was secretly educated at a terrorist madrassa, that he will ruin America with socialism, and so on. 

Sen. McCain has a responsibility to the country he loves to undo the harm done by his campaign’s corrosive statements. 

He can do this fairly readily by publicly and repeatedly saying that he believes President-elect Obama is a good Christian. (Again, this should not be necessary, as it is not a requirement for any national office, but it would be helpful even so.) It would be even more effective if McCain could honestly say that he and Obama had prayed together for the future of this country. 

Sen. McCain could also say that he believes President-elect Obama’s education was one that he found to be normal and healthy. And that he believes he and Obama will work together as respectful partners to solve our common economic and other problems. 

It would be highly useful for Sen. McCain to say how much he deplores all violent notions, such as the skinhead assassination plot recently foiled by the FBI. He could state categorically that he has full confidence in Obama now that he is president-elect and that he strongly believes that all thoughts and plans of violence are misguided, wrongheaded, and un-American. 

The intemperate rhetoric of Sen. McCain’s campaign has sowed the wind. It appears to be time for the senator to calm that wind, so that we do not all reap its whirlwind. 

Gov. Palin could also be instrumental in the same way by undoing the rhetorical excesses of her campaign. 

These proposed actions would be well received by the nation and would redound greatly to the credit of those who took part in them. 

Brad Belden 

 

• 

REPUBLICAN OBSTRUCTIONISM  

IN SACRAMENTO 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Voters across America have just rejected the Republican anti-government philosophy by electing Barack Obama and sending more Democrats to Congress and to the state Legislature. It is time for Republicans to respect the will of the people. 

Republican legislators in Sacramento want a cuts-only budget and are using the two-thirds rule to prevent any tax increases. This rule is enabling a minority of legislators in Sacramento to dictate our tax policies. It is preventing us from solving our budget problems in a manner consistent with the wishes of the majority of voters. California is one of just three states with a two-thirds rule—the others are Arkansas and Rhode Island. Even deeply conservative states like Utah and Texas do not have a two-thirds rule. 

A cuts-only budget will make our economic crisis far worse, leading to massive job losses. That will actually make the budget deficit worse, as tax revenues will drop further. Even Gov. Schwarzenegger recognizes the need to find new revenues. Schools will close and teachers will be fired in the middle of the school year. Thousands will lose access to health care if the Republicans prevail. 

Majority rule is a basic principle of American democracy. If it’s good enough for the Founding Fathers it’s good enough for California. The two-thirds rule is allowing Republicans to obstruct solutions to this crisis. It makes California ungovernable and must be changed. 

Leonard Conly 

 

• 

ADDENDUM 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Regarding my previous letter to the editor, published last week, entitled “Where is the compassion?” I’d like to retract one statement where I said, “Where the poor and the homeless would be hungry, the people in the hills would be gorging on Thanksgiving.” 

What I would like to say is that I have friends in the Berkeley Hills and one of them bailed my camera out of the pawn shop. I had gotten in debt when I was making a documentary on Tent City. My statement was an unwarranted generalization, which probably applies to some in the hills but not all. People are individuals and no doubt there are not a few hill people who donate to free food for the homeless, especially on the holidays. 

Another matter that upsets me is that SSI does not really allow people to adequately pay for their food if they are paying rent, unless they have federally funded Section 8 housing. I have been fighting with the Berkeley Housing Authority over what I think is misuse of funds. People who live in Berkeley are welcome to call me at 540-6772 to voice your concerns and maybe we can get some real change. Thank you very much. 

Diane Arsanis 

 

• 

WOODPECKERS IN ROSSMOOR 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Acorn Woodpeckers (Melanerpes formicivorus) are handsome, noisy and very charming birds that live in oak woodlands in California. They have extended family groups and in the spring, summer and autumn, they gather insects for themselves and to feed their young. They also gather and store acorns for a winter food supply. In recent years, much of their traditional oak tree woodland habitat in central Contra Costa County has been invaded by humans and transformed into housing developments. 

Since the Acorn Woodpeckers have been losing their traditional oak granary-trees to human “progress,” and being smart and inventive creatures, they have turned to using parts of houses as places to store their acorns for winter. 

Rossmoor residents are primed to start killing Acorn Woodpeckers in a fruitless attempt to discourage new generations of birds from drilling holes in houses. 

Instead of trying to kill off the woodpeckers, the residents of Rossmoor could provide some alternative acorn storage facilities, such as erecting some nice new un-chemically-treated telephone poles. Also, they could consider replacing part of their golf course with some native oak tree woodland. They could also protect vulnerable wood areas of their houses with metal trim. 

James K. Sayre 

Oakland 

 

• 

WORDS IN THE NEWS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

People, like me, who read the Daily Planet, seem to be mostly college grads who write forcefully with good vocabularies. Here’s a vocabulary question for all of us college grads, as our country goes into a swirling, maelstrom, economic toilet: What are “hedge funds,” “derivatives,” “investment banks vs. regular banks,” “liquidity,” “leveraging,” and 50 more terms which I, and I suspect, most of us who claim to be educated, have no comprehension of?! Seems like in the future, our children, who we hope and pray will be able to go to college, should be required to take a course in American capitalism, which is based on the laissez-faire market. Then, with hope, they might be able to anticipate another collapse and prevent it. Even, perhaps, they might have enough foresight and guts to change the system. They will be able to bring America into an era of true democracy where class warfare results in some victories for the middle and lower classes.  

Robert Blau 

 

• 

UNENFORCEABLE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The latest regulation from those nice folks who brought us the Van Hool buses: “Strollers must be folded up or rolled to the back of the bus.” 

No one who actually rides the buses could ever expect to see this regulation enforced. The typical stroller is loaded down with all the stuff one has to carry, along with the baby (in fact, there is often no room for the baby in the stroller). The aisles in the Van Hools are not wide enough to allow strollers to reach the rear sections, and some drivers do no allow anyone except disabled passengers to enter by the rear door. 

People who use strollers and push carts struggle to get onto the bus wherever and however they can. Sometimes the only place they can actually get to is the front of the bus. Their fellow riders and the best drivers do what they can to work around them. It makes no sense to heap new regulations on people who are already doing the best they can. 

Marcella Murphy 

 

• 

BRING ‘EM TO JUSTICE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

If our country is to return to the rule of law then there cannot be allowed a failure to apply that standard of law to those who have acted in a criminal fashion for the past eight years. The United States can never even begin to repair its image to the world unless the criminals who seized power through a corrupt Supreme Court and then maintained that power via election theft are brought to justice! 

Allen Michaan 

Alameda 

 

• 

RAPID TRANSIT ROUTES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Is anyone opting for the narrow trains of Rapid Transit Monorail on Sacramento Street and University Avenue as the more centrally located alternatives to the noisy bus gas guzzlers planned far too far east on Telegraph Avenue? Shouldn’t our PUBLIC transportation system be a system that serves our residents, thus be more centrally located? Hasn’t anyone been on the quiet monorail in Disneyland, Oregon other places in the world? Shouldn’t we meet our social justice policies for South West and North West Berkeley and opt for environmental justice policies of cleaner, quieter transport? 

Have a look at where our local public schools are located—far more are close to Sacramento Street and University Avenue than Telegraph Avenue which has Le Conte and Willard. Sacramento Street is wide and could accommodate a monorail with less impacts on businesses and require less infrastructure construction and modifications. Regional transit passes would allow riders to transfer to the North Berkeley BART and in one stop they would be in downtown Berkeley or two stops north the BART Del Norte Transit Center where there is bus service east to Martinez, Fairfield, Sacramento, Davis, etc., northward to Vallejo, Napa, etc., and across the bay to the Marin County Transit Hub with connections to Santa Rosa, Eureka, and even the Pacific coast on Highway 1. 

Likewise University Avenue could have a center monorail from the train station to the UC Crescent or even from a ferryboat depot and satellite parking with transfers from small transports from the hills. 

Must we be such dummies that we go along with the Van Hool Bus Transit Company (also known as AC Transit) self-serving plans to introduce more petrol guzzlers? Is it true that on Measure VV, that the out of state ABC Company, the agent for Van Hool Buses sponsored the campaign? How much return on their investment for Proposition VV will they gain because we want good public transit be more rider friendly—especially for seniors, disabled and families with children and babies in strollers? 

Measure KK to require voter approval for lane removal was an excellent opener to get us thinking and talking with our neighbors on what do we want and what would be best for the needs of our community. How much money was used for KK and how much for the No on KK? 

And how do the comparisons on reducing car trips to take children to and from schools factor out for the monorail alternative compared to the Rapid Bus plans at present for climate action projections? 

Anamaria Sanchez Romero 

 

• 

SO MUCH DRIVING TO DO 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The bus vs. car debate goes around in circles. Russ Tilleman points out in the Nov. 13 edition of the Daily Planet that buses are gas guzzlers, that a bus with four people gets half the passengers per mile of a driver only Toyota Prius. On the other hand, bus advocates say people who won’t take the clumsy monsters are just lazy, that public transit worked back before GM and the oil companies destroyed the system. 

But back when transit worked we didn’t need to travel as much. Now we seem driven to drive. The shrink is in Orinda, the pre-school that the kid absolutely must attend is in Alameda, the favorite family restaurant is way out Geary Boulevard in San Francisco fog, the health care we have makes us go to Contra Costa for radiation and to San Mateo for brain surgery. And where we once were happy with jug wine we now rush to San Rafael at word that Posh Wines, Inc. is selling Abyssinian champagne for 20 percent off. 

Ted Vincent 

• 

THE PALESTINIAN PERSPECTIVE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Voters flocked to the polls for Barack Obama, many believing his administration will respect marginalized communities when shaping foreign policy, and thereby change the United States’ status as a bully among nations. But we warn that the appointment of Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff may nullify Obama’s mandate for change. Emanuel’s appointment is a signal that Palestinians’ voices still fall on deaf ears in the United States—although they commemorated 60 years of ruthless occupation this year. 

The United Jewish Communities’ director praised Emanuel as “coming from good Irgun stock.” This sends a threatening message to Palestinians and the world, because the Irgun was a Zionist terrorist organization that massacred civilians! Emanuel continues his family’s commitment to Israel’s military brutality—he supports the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and supported Israel’s 2006 bombing of Lebanon, silencing voices of opposition before Congress. In 2005, he voted to permanently adopt the Patriot Act, showing his support for repressive policies at home as well as abroad. He voted to start, and continually fund, the Iraq war. 

The Obama/Biden website (http://origin.barackobama.com/issues/foreign_policy/#onisrael) indicates their plan to continue giving a blank check to Israel. As anti-Zionist Jews, we state that denouncing Israeli apartheid is not anti-Jewish, but fundamental to an honest path to peace and justice. Obama has stated that political movements on the ground must be hailed by Washington; we call all progressive movements to hold Obama’s administration accountable to their stated ideals by working in solidarity with Palestinian people for justice in their land. 

Brooke Lober 

Greg Hom 

International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, Bay Area Chapter 

 

EDITOR’S NOTE: A previous letter from this organization, published in the Oct. 23 edition, was signed by Rebecca Tumposky, whose name was inadvertently omitted because of an editing error. 

 

• 

AFTERSHOCKS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The aftershock of the earth moving election of the 44th president of the United States is turning out to be as momentous as the event itself, albeit without the jubilation.  

Barack Obama campaigned as a man of the people and the people have not been silent about what they expect him to do: Leave Iraq, fix the economy, close Guantanamo, outlaw torture, stop warrantless wiretapping, enact universal medical care, reform immigration policy, and on and on and on. The dominant media reports breathlessly about who’ll get appointed or not get appointed to this or that cabinet post and when and how this or that should be done or not done, and on and on and on. 

Everyone—supporters, opponents and uncommitted—is offering advice. For example, the Washington Post solicited “Some thoughts on what Obama’s top priority should be” and published over a dozen proffered by people of various ilks including Linda Chavez (Reagan celeb), Carly Fiorina (failed HP exec), Ted Turner (rich maverick). By way of contrast, Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize novelist, advised “Brother Obama” to “keep happy and free and relaxed.” 

If each bit of advice were a drop of water the last two weeks would have drowned Obama’s administration eight weeks before the inauguration. 

How does The Man himself handle this flood? Well, he was quick to choose a chief of staff (gatekeeper) and his first post-election press conference concerned the economic crisis. It was memorable only for a staged photo of himself flanked by 10 notables on his left and an equal number on his right of whom the most outstanding were the tallest, Paul Volker (former Treasury secretary) and the shortest, Robert Reich (former Labor secretary). 

Last Sunday Barack and Michelle Obama sat down before Steve Kroft for a full “60 Minutes” interview and when it was over one conclusion was overwhelming: Whether he will be a good president or a bad one, whether he’ll be successful, transforming or what, this man is in full possession of himself, as is his wife. He has mastered the lesson of Socrates: More than any public figure alive today, Barack Obama knows himself.  

Marvin Chachere 

San Pablo 

 

• 

NO BAIL-OUT FOR YOU! 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I think it’s wonderful that the banks and mortgage companies and other financial institutions are getting a money boost to bail them out of the holes they’ve dug for themselves. All those years of ripping us off and they still couldn’t rake in enough profit to pay those million-dollar salaries to their CEOs. 

When I applied for my annual $340 Renters’ Credit from the State Tax Board, which I usually depend on to buy something that I can’t ordinarily afford like, say, a warm jacket or a pair of shoes (I survive on a government disability check). I was told that the great State of California doesn’t have enough loot in its budget to issue the Renters’ Credit checks. No warm jacket for you! 

How about a bailout for us? I noticed that during all the political hoo-ha this election year I heard no mention made of the poor. A few campaigners paid lip service to the middle class and even the working poor (is there a difference?) but those of us hanging by our fingernails to the lowest rung of the socio-economic ladder are apparently going to be left still twisting in the winds of change which will be blowing through the New America. 

The poor are still here and we’re not about to turn to the wall and die, as many of our politicians seem to fervently wish. We hung on all through the Reagan years, didn’t we? Maybe some of us still have hope, hope that things will somehow get better for ourselves and our families. Hope that somehow, someday, there will be a bailout for us. Don’t these idiot politicians realize that 99 percent of whatever bailout we might receive will go directly back into the economy rather than some bank in Switzerland? 

What’s happening in this country is absurd. To allow the giant money-machines to further perpetuate their sleazy scams on the public is ridiculous. To subsidize them is just nuts. A bloodthirsty feeding frenzy seems the inevitable result of such madness. Hopefully they’ll devour each other and make room for a real plan. 

Aggie Max 

 

• 

ECONOMIC RECOVERY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Congress apparently is considering another rebate to the taxpayers so that they can again buy Asian goods, hardly doing anything for America’s economy. Jobs are what stimulates the economy, and jobs are needed most by people laid off in construction with many workers chewing up dwindling unemployment funds. So we need a program of refurbishing or rebuilding some of the rundown old public housing complexes. For $10 billion a year for few years, 200,000 people can be put to work at $45,000 a year; 100,000 directly at the complexes and 100,000 in supplying new flooring, new plumbing, new doors and windows, new electrical wiring systems, etc. These workers will then be spending to generate other jobs in consumer goods, and services as well as for basic food and clothing putting perhaps another 50,000-plus back to work. They will be off unemployment payments and will be paying some taxes including some back to unemployment fund, and the companies contracted for the work will be spending on their operations and paying taxes. I urge readers to contact their congresspersons to call for jobs programs to recover our economy. And forget the rebate that will mainly help Asian economies.  

James Singmaster 

Fremont 

 

• 

THE AUTISTIC 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Last November UC Berkeley Chief of Police Celaya gave orders to frame a protester with autism for literally terrorist actions: a fictional chemical attack sending a squad of officers to the ER. One officer was allegedly disfigured; perhaps even at death’s door. Colluding in the fraud were UC Berkeley detective (and former UCB football player) Wade McAdams, officers Ruffin, Hernandez, Micelli, Zoe Garlick and Sean Aranas. The Autistic was going to face intense felony charges; he was going jail for 10 years. Twisted vengeance for mere participation at the oak grove. Some readers may recall the story as the UC’s propagandist Nathan Bromstrom made sure almost every Bay Area newspaper printed (on paper and online) the lie along with the full name of The Autistic. 

Last November, ADA Robert Graff, working under the guidance of Alameda County DA Tom Orloff, began creating the legal script in which to frame The Autistic. 

Fifty-one weeks later, both the UC and the DA’s office failed. The lie was too bold to sustain; certainly the disfigured person couldn’t be faked. The graver injuries vanished; seven felony counts turned into five. Also, The Autistic was carrying a recording device while interacting with police officers: gotcha. Felonies crumbled into soft excuses for misdemeanors (dull typical tree sit ground crew stuff). The Autistic who was to lose a decade of his life to prison isn’t going to see one day in jail. 

That protester was me. For almost a year the UC and the DA’s office had been trying to not only destroy my reputation and life, but also degrade what few legal protections autistics have in the criminal system. They tried to argue that people with my specific diagnosis (Asperger’s) are psychotically violent. They didn’t release any tapes of my arrest, as they all featured cops beating the daylights out of me. With my camera and YouTube account (Oaks4Peace), I escaped Graff and Celaya’s bizarre and stupid scheme against me. But what of others in the autistic community? Awkward and naïve to the criminal system, we are increasingly becoming scapegoats for the police and DA. Please help protect our community by contacting the DA’s office (272-6222), UC Berkeley Police (643-9597), and demand they cease the autism witchhunt. For more information contact the Autism Spectrum Liberation Front (autismliberation@yahoo.com). 

Nathan Pitts 


How George Bush Helped the Grassroots Movement

By Jack Bragen
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 10:55:00 AM

George Bush and Dick Cheney don’t mind being perceived as villains. Their value system does not prioritize popularity. They both seem to operate from a mysterious agenda that includes their vision of how they think the world ought to be. 

Because of his behavior, Bush has provoked the outrage and anger of billions of people across the globe. While in the process of carrying out his plans, he may not have quite understood how many people became unhappy with him and to what extent. In the final months of his last term, the mean sarcasm that characterized Bush, and that made it easier to despise him, has softened. In his post election interviews, he acted as if he was not such a mean man after all. This is hard to buy after all we’ve gone through with him. 

And it won’t erase the fact that Bush will be remembered as one of our worst presidents. People in the United States and around the world are rejoicing not just about Obama’s election, but also about Bush’s upcoming exit from office. 

The damage he has done is immense, to our worldwide standing, to the fabric of our Constitution, to our national security, and to our economy, as well as to the lives of millions. It will take decades to heal the damage of Bush. In some instances, the damage wreaked will never heal. 

Bush has an easygoing manner and an understandable way of speaking; for many he is a likeable man, and that supported his election and re-election. I have nothing personally against the man, especially since he has provided me with a lot of material to write about, even if it has all been Bush bashes. However, his actions and his policies while in office have been utterly rotten and a disaster. Nothing can erase this; not a softening of his sarcasm, or any type of doublespeak. 

The “good” that emerges from the “bad” is that during his two terms, Bush has indirectly mobilized millions of people to get involved in the political process and in the salvation of our species. For many conscientious persons, his outrageous actions have been a motivator to act and to oppose him. It took such an outrageous leader to mobilize many citizens who wouldn’t otherwise get involved. 

Bush’s awfulness has set the stage for Obama’s ensuing election. Bush screwed up so badly that the people needed to vote for someone qualified to bail us out—even though that person turned out to be African American. An African American person who is the most qualified would be harder to elect under other, less dire circumstances. 

Obama’s election to the presidency is like a miracle, and it is a restoration of hope. I remember feeling the same way upon Bill Clinton’s election some 16 years ago. 

Our goal, in part, should be to oppose the sabotage that the Republican Party will inevitably try, and which has already begun as I write this. We should also put pressure on the members of Congress to do their job, and to not continue to be mired in the shortsightedness, selfishness and spinelessness that has characterized them. 

 

Jack Bragen is a Martinez resident. 


What We Don’t Know About Changing UC’s Admission Standards

By Doug Ose
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 11:07:00 AM

The University of California Board of Regents is considering a set of sweeping changes to the UC system’s admissions criteria. Among the proposed changes is the elimination of SAT Subject Tests as an admissions requirement. Unlike the more comprehensive SAT, subject tests are focused on one of 20 different academic areas ranging from physics and chemistry to languages and fine art.  

Critics of subject tests argue for maintaining high academic standards and promoting diversity. A closer look tells a different story, one the regents and the UC Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS), which proposed the changes, aren’t talking about. 

A September 2008 report from the National Association for College Admission Counseling noted that, “there are tests that, at many institutions, are more predictive of first-year and overall grades in college and more closely linked to the high school curriculum, including the College Board’s AP exams and Subject Tests.” Eliminating subject tests in light of this research defies common sense. 

Further confounding common sense is a 2001 report by University of California researchers who studied some 80,000 student records and concluded that SAT Subject Tests combined with high school grades were among the best predictors of college success.  

Some call subject tests a “barrier” to admission in the UC system. What we’re not told is the main reason cited for getting rid of them is that some students don’t know the tests are required. This staggeringly simplistic rationale raises legitimate questions about the wisdom of the regents’ willingness to consider admitting to the UC system students who cannot understand the most fundamental step of entering college which is to apply for it. The answer is for UC to better communicate its admissions requirements, not eliminate them. 

Diversity is also used as an argument for eliminating subject tests. The facts show that subject tests play a critical role in admitting thousands of deserving minority students. Data compiled by the College Board, which administers SAT Subject Tests, shows that 10,010 students were admitted to the UC system in 2007 as a direct result of subject tests. These students had marginal scores on their SATs yet scored 700 or more on their subject tests, demonstrating tremendous knowledge and merit.  

Among these students last year were more than 4,800 children of Hispanic, Mexican-American, or other Latino heritage, and more than 3,700 students from Asian, Asian-American or Pacific Island backgrounds. To say that eliminating subject tests will improve diversity simply does not hold water. 

Another goal of the proposed changes is the desire for a “more holistic admissions system.” However, eliminating empirical measures like SAT Subject Tests could produce disastrous results. A “more holistic” admissions program is underway at UCLA with potentially illegal fallout amid allegations of violating Proposition 209, which banned race-based admissions to California’s public colleges.  

Professor Timothy Groseclose resigned from UCLA’s Committee on Undergraduate Admissions and Relations with Schools in August citing evidence that, “strongly suggests that UCLA is cheating on admissions,” and claiming the committee is engaged in a “cover-up” to prevent disclosure of illegal activity. Why would the Board of Regents even contemplate changes that invite similar mischief at other campuses? A system-wide scandal of this nature would plunge UC into chaos and degrade its reputation.  

Changes to the UC admissions standards affect the lives of thousands of students, the integrity of the institution and will have an impact for years to come. Revising these standards demands thoughtful deliberation, not the approach of UC regent and former Paramount Studios CEO Sherry Lansing who confessed during the Sept. 18 regents meeting, “I became a regent to get the SATs eliminated.” If this is the new standard for determining admissions to the UC system, we all have reason to be concerned for the future of the University of California and its legacy of excellence. 

For more information and ways to help please go to www.saveucstandards.com. 

 

Doug Ose is a former U.S. Congressman, representing California’s District 3.


Ask Your Doctor

By Dorothy Snodgrass
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 11:07:00 AM

Having reflected on the matter for quite some time, I’ve reached the conclusion that watching evening television news may very well be injurious to one’s health. I base this conclusion, not on scientific data, but rather on the Power of Suggestion theory. 

Settling down in a comfortable chair with a glass of sherry, as I do every evening for the ABC news at 5:30, I brace myself for the inevitable deluge of drug commercials, claiming to be a cure for every ailment known to man and God—all followed with the command, “Ask Your Doctor.” 

Now I consider myself to be in fairly good health, but I must confess that some of these commercials raise questions in my mind. To begin with, I, like many people, have bothersome allergies. So I pay attention to the commercial that shows a bumble bee hopping from one flower to another and then to a second commercial boasting that their drug “blocks leukotrienes, an underlying cause of indoor and outdoor allergy symptoms.” Ah, but then follows a warning of possible side effects—stomach pain, intestinal upset, heartburn, tiredness, fever, stuffy nose, upper respiratory infection, dizziness, headache and rash.” Forget that! I’ll just go on sneezing and keep a box of Kleenex handy. 

Next come two commercials on medications to fight osteoporosis. First, there’s the one with adorable Sally Field claiming earnestly that she’s been able to reverse her osteoporosis with a once a month drug, remarking that “I have just this one body and this one life.” Who can argue with that? But I’m quite taken with a second commercial which shows an elegant, aristocratic woman—an “on-the-go woman”—proclaiming the wonders of a once a year intravenous injection. That really gets my attention, as I like to think of myself as an “on-the-go-woman” (although I don’t always know where I’m going.) And the side effects of this one aren’t too severe; flu-like symptoms, fever, muscle or joint pain. I jot down the name of this drug. 

Another commercial that really rings a bell deals with a bladder control problem, the “gotta go feeling.” Just one of these pills works all day and night. I write down the name of this drug also, but then am dismayed by the side effects—dry mouth, headache, constipation, stomach pain and, worst, of all a warning not to drive a car. Putting delicacy aside, I think I’ll just go on wetting my knickers! 

Next we’re treated to a commercial advising us on how to lower cholesterol, suggesting that statins work mainly with the liver, while these tablets work in the digestive track. I’m not sure that I have a cholesterol problem, which is just as well as the side effects on this one are ominous; swelling of the face, lips, tongue, rash and hives, nausea, depression and gallstones! 

Now comes a drug commercial for people with poor leg circulation, putting them at risk of a heart attack or stroke. This condition we’re told is called P.A.D., resulting in blood clots, restricting blood flow to your heart. At this point, I’m getting a little depressed—even more so when I read the possible side effects, which include unexplained confusion, gastrointestinal bleeding, diarrhea, etc., etc.! 

Getting close to the end of the news broadcast (and they do squeeze in some news), comes a commercial addressing the problem of asthma (or COPD). This is a medication that helps lung function, but, oh, dear, the possible effects of this drug are absolutely blood-curdling! To name a few, there’s pneumonia, cataracts or glaucoma, thrush in the mouth ( pray tell, what is that?) and the chance of death! 

Given the above distressing litany of drug commercials, I believe you will agree with me that watching evening broadcasts may indeed be injurious to one’s health. I therefore suggest that you turn to CNN or C-Span, both of which are mercifully free of such commercials. 

 

Dorothy Snodgrass is a Berkeley resident. 


The Mexican Drug Trade: Supply and Demand

By Ralph E. Stone
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 11:07:00 AM

My wife and I were observing the Mexico Independence Day celebration in Guanajuato, Mexico, on Sept. 16, when we learned that terrorists lobbed three grenades into a group of celebrants in Morelia, the capital of the nearby state of Michoacan. Eight people were killed and hundreds were wounded. This was a new tactic for the drug cartels—indiscriminate violence. Later, it was reported that nine bodies were found dumped in Tijuana, where in the past few months, almost 50 have been murdered related to the drug trade. The Mexican “war on drugs” has resulted in increased drug-related deaths and abductions of judges, police, witnesses, journalists, and now innocent citizens. More than 7,000 deaths have occurred in the last three years, about 4,000 in this year alone. There is a growing perception among Mexicans that the government is losing the war against these well-armed drug cartels. 

Why the increased violence? Because the Mexican drug cartels—the Sinaloa Cartel and the Gulf Cartel—have largely wrested control of the drug trade from the Colombian producers and have developed their own production of heroin and methamphetamine (speed). The cartels have actually expanded production into northern California federal and state parklands. The United Nations estimates that these Mexican cartels control about $14.2 billion a year in cocaine, heroin, marijuana, speed, and other illicit drugs. Mexico is the transit point for 70 to 90 percent of cocaine entering the United States.  

And it is estimated that 90 percent of the weapons used in the Mexican drug war are bought or supplied from the United States. The illicit drugs flow north and the weapons flow south. 

Until recently, the United States assistance to Mexico’s “war on drugs’ paled in comparison to the funding for the failed Plan Colombia counter-drug program. We gave Colombia some $380 million in 2007. However, in June 2008, the Mérida Initiative was passed into law, providing $465 worth of assistance for Central America and Mexico. About $400 million of this U.S. aid is scheduled to go to Mexico in the form of surveillance aircraft, border-security equipment, and advanced technology for communications, eavesdropping and other forms of surveillance to support Mexico’s crackdown on narcotics trafficking and organized crime. The aid includes a strong human rights component. These human rights conditions require the Secretary of State to report to Congress Mexico’s progress in addressing human rights issues, including the use of torture by law enforcement officials and prosecution for personnel implicated in violations. However, there has been a delay in releasing the aid package to Mexico. 

Unfortunately, like the failed Plan Colombia, the Mérida Initiative focuses exclusively on security forces and supply-side interdiction without going to the root causes of the bilateral drug trade. Faced with a growing demand, the aid package includes no aid to promote crop conversion, contains no performance goals, and nothing for anti-gun-running or money laundering programs. 

The high demand for illicit drugs in the United States—60 percent of the world’s total—fuels the Mexican drug trade. About 20 million Americans over the age of 12 reported use of drugs in 2005, and an estimated 22.2 million persons aged 12 or older were classified with substance dependence or abuse, according to the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (2005). Twenty-one percent of 8th graders, 38 percent of 10th graders and 50 percent of 12th graders have tried an illicit drug in their lifetimes, according to the Monitoring the Future study in 2005. This means half of students have tried an illicit drug by the time they finish high school. Illicit drugs exact an enormous toll on society, taking 52,000 lives annually and draining the economy of $160 billion a year. Everyone pays the toll in the form of higher healthcare costs, dangerous neighborhoods, and an overcrowded criminal justice system.  

The Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment (SAPT) Block Grant is the cornerstone of the states’ substance abuse prevention and treatment systems; it accounts for approximately 40 percent of all public funds spent by state substance abuse agencies for substance abuse prevention activities and treatment services. The program is administered by Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) Center for Substance Abuse Prevention and Center for Substance Abuse Treatment. To reduce the presence of illicit drugs, drug-related organized crime, and the adverse effects of drug and alcohol abuse in society requires a comprehensive strategy involving federal, state, and local governments. This approach would include international cooperation, diplomatic initiatives, drug law enforcement, and sanctions, treatment, prevention, education, and recovery support services as well as research to identify and promote the strategies to reduce demand and supply. 

Unfortunately, President Bush’s fiscal year 2009 budget plan slashed $198 million from the SAMHSA and calls for elimination of the Recovery Community Support Programs and the STOP Underage Drinking program. The budget also calls for spending $10 million less on the Drug Free Communities program, a major funding source for many community anti-drug coalitions. The Center for Substance Abuse Treatment’s budget would fall by $63 million, while the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention would have $36 million less to spend next year if Bush’s plan is approved. The Center for Mental Health Services would be slashed by $126 million. 

The Safe and Drug Free Schools and Communities (SDFSC) national programs budget would increase from $137.7 million in 2008 to $282 million in FY09 under the plan, including $10 million for research-based drug prevention or school safety programs, $77.8 million for grants to school districts for comprehensive, community-wide “Safe Schools/Healthy Students” drug and violence prevention projects, and $11.8 million for school-based drug testing for students. However, the SDFSC state grants program was once again targeted for reduction, with Bush calling for cutting the school-based prevention program from $295 million in 2008 to $100 million in 2009.  

After reviewing the U.S.’s funding policy, our committment to drug prevention is heavily weighted on the supply side, while funds for addressing U.S. drug demand is largely underfunded. This seems a short-sighted view. As long as there is a demand for illicit drugs, there will be a supply, Given the current financial debacle this country faces, I would not expect any major increases in the fiscal year 2009 budget for substance abuse and treatment. Meanwhile, the Mexican government continues its uphill battle against the drug cartels. The Mexican drug trade is yet another challenge facing the Barack Obama presidency. 

 

Ralph E. Stone is a retired Bay Area attorney. 


Honk for a New Deal

By Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 11:15:00 AM

For seven years now, Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace (LMNOP) has held a weekly antiwar demonstration at the Lake in Oakland, becoming part of the regular Sunday scene along with the geese, pelicans, and boats on the water. We’ve been calling for an end to war and other manifestations of Mad-Cowboy Disease. Now, with the election of Barack Obama, we’ll have a government that just might listen to us, so we feel it’s more important than ever to continue our Sunday walks at Lake Merritt. 

We hope to see a new course for our country, at least as progressive an agenda as was instituted back in the 1930s under President Roosevelt. This may seem like a huge dream, but the present crises necessitate coordinated action on a host of problems. 

The damage and repair list includes ecological, economic, and human rights issues such as global warming, the income gap, corporate crime, and home foreclosures; the need for renewable energy, health care, re-regulation, media reform, enforcement of anti-trust laws, and repeal of the Patriot Act, just to name a few items. 

Meanwhile, the United States is fighting multiple wars, creating more terrorists. 

These are complex issues that require well-thought-out strategies. They go far beyond cleaning up the Bush mess; our country has been going in the wrong direction for decades, on a disastrous course mass-marketed by Reagan, maintained by Clinton, and finally run at full speed by Bush. 

Nothing will substantially change if progressives go home and leave matters in the hands of a “savior,” as our new president is often portrayed. The election of Obama is a political opening for us—as the elections of Lincoln and Roosevelt were for previous generations. The labor movement pressured Roosevelt, and the abolitionists pressured Lincoln. 

During the 1930s, it was pressure from the labor movement, along with economic necessity, that persuaded Roosevelt to institute the New Deal. During the Civil War, it was pressure from the abolitionist movement, along with military and diplomatic necessity, that persuaded President Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. 

Barack Obama seems to recognize that common, everyday people can exert a powerful force for change. During a debate last January, he was asked which of the Democratic candidates Martin Luther King would have endorsed. None of us, Obama replied, and explained that King would call upon the American people to hold the winner accountable. “Change does not happen from the top down,” Obama said. “It happens from the bottom up.” 

However literally Obama meant that, words and symbols take on a life of their own; it’s up to us to accept the challenge of his response, and to put such pressure on President Obama. 

Our weekly walk is in a visible part of town, bordering busy streets around the lake. We’ve had international coverage, in Japanese and Swedish newspapers, as well as the New York Times. We’re also in a very real sense our own media, reaching out directly to the community around us—motorists, pedestrians, bicyclists, picnickers, and even boaters on the lake—who give us an encouraging response. 

Please join us any Sunday in calling for peace and a progressive agenda. We meet at 3 p.m. at the Colonnade, between Lakeshore and Grand near the library branch. 

 

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace (LMNOP): Daniel Borgström, Oakland; Beth Wagner, Oakland; Mark Boynton, Alameda; Marin Sanders, Livermore; Nancy Harrington, Oakland; Pat Maginnis, Oakland; David Baker, Alameda. 


Proposition 8 Cartoon: How Dare You

By Mondrae Johnson
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 11:08:00 AM

I have just three words (as a starter) for Justin DeFreitas’ African-African phobic, racist cartoon depicting all African Americans as separatists who only care about themselves and not the plight of others: How dare you!  

However, an article in the Nov. 16 San Francisco Chronicle summed it up better than I could ever have done. Read this article for enlightenment. It is well-stated, gets to the point,and expresses my feelings to a tee. I would only add this comment for DeFreitas:  

Please tell me the dates, times and periods (in the United States) that homosexuals were spit on, beaten, hung from trees, murdered and tortured for small infractions like drinking out of the same water fountain as a white person or swimming in the same pool (in which all the water was drained) or “reckless-eyeballing” a white woman? If you were a black man it could mean the end for that person.  

Also, Emmett Till was dragged from his home in the deep south and murdered, hung, you name it. His little body was so mutilated, it was unrecognizable in the casket. No, you cannot equate homosexual activities with the plight of African-Americans. This is why your argument was rejected! We are insulted and offended by your ignorance and by your insistence that we are somehow mixed up in your sexual preference argument.  

Furthermore, as stated in the Chronicle article, you don’t know how I voted and more so, it isn’t your friggin business! I voted my conscience and it is no concern of yours. To lump all African-Americans into a group and label us ugly names only shows that your ugly, racist head is rearing itself again. You can’t help yourself! For all we know, your forefathers did some of the lynchings. We really don’t know!  

Also, look at the statistics of the vote. African-Americans were not the only ones who voted for or against Proposition 8. In fact, I know that most of the Chinese-Americans in my neighborhood voted yes on 8. However, we didn’t see them denigrated and disgraced in your lop-sided cartoon. People like you (your ancestors) have hated black people for far too long now. Whites also tortured the Japanese, destroyed their property, rounded them up and put them in concentration camps, and murdered them on a whim! 

I am afraid the United States is turning into one big hoorah-rah! Anything goes! Next, we’ll see lynch mobs again on the streets. Furthermore, so many other races have been disrespected by people with your same attitude. Hell, the Chinese built the railroad system in this country many years ago, only to be expelled from the United States after the work was done.  

Finally, even though Berkeley, San Francisco and other Bay Area locations prides itself on its liberalism, I am finding this not to be the case. I think Berkeley residents are more racist and accusatory than people in many parts of the south. I’ve even seen comments from readers in your paper such as: the reason for the crime is because of all the lower socio-economically-disadvantaged blacks moving into our neighborhoods. So, I guess that excludes the middle- to upper-class blacks that move to your neighborhoods? Or, do people judge us by our looks, what we wear, you know the drill.  

I was thoroughly disgusted by DeFreitas’ cartoon. DeFreitas: How dare you! 

 

Mondrae Johnson is a Sacramento resident. 


Fairness and Climate Change Demand MTC Attention

By Richard A. Marcantonio
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 11:08:00 AM

These pages have hosted vigorous discussion about AC Transit bus service. But they have largely been silent on the critical role of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), the nine-county regional transportation funding and planning agency that holds the purse strings for AC Transit. MTC’s funding decisions should treat all communities equitably and address the effects of catastrophic climate change. With the agency soon to adopt a $200 billion Regional Transportation Plan (RTP), it deserves far closer public scrutiny than it has received. 

For many years, MTC has chosen to fund costly freeway and rail capital expansion projects by systematically shifting public funds away from transit operating needs. This has come at the expense of maintaining existing urban bus service. 

The result has been a shortage of operating funding, leading to repeated service cuts and fare hikes for AC Transit riders. This hurts our most vulnerable neighbors and communities. Nearly 80 percent of AC Transit’s riders are people of color. More than 60 percent (including seniors, people with disabilities and low-income families) are “transit-dependent,” meaning they rely on buses to reach essential destinations like jobs, schools, health-care services, recreation, and places of worship. And 15 percent of AC Transit’s riders are youth, for whom AC Transit buses have replaced the now-defunct yellow school bus. 

AC Transit was once a world-class bus system. Since 1986, however, it has lost 30 percent of its service. 

Recognizing the importance of the issue, and the central role MTC plays in starving bus service, we filed a federal civil rights class action lawsuit, Darensburg v. MTC, that went to trial last month. Our contention is simple: MTC should fully fund operating expenses for existing bus service before it diverts scarce public dollars to costly expansion projects. 

Our case challenges three practices by which MTC builds a structural operating deficit into AC Transit’s budget, causing it to cut service and raise fares to unaffordable levels. 

First, MTC’s “regional transit expansion program” puts nearly 95 percent of its funding into expanding rail service, and less than 5 percent into bus projects. For example, MTC has included in its expansion program (known as Res. 3434) costly projects for BART and Caltrain. To get a sense of the relative cost-effectiveness of those investments, just one mile of new BART track from Fremont to Warm Springs will cost more than $400 million. With that sum, AC Transit could operate vastly expanded service for ten years. However MTC chose to exclude seven of the eight routes on which AC Transit proposed to operate enhanced bus service. 

Second, we are challenging MTC’s funding policies on how much state and federal funding a transit operator can receive, and for what purposes. For instance, MTC policy directs nearly all of the federal “formula” funds to capital use, though the funds could be used to meet a significant portion of transit operating budgets instead. And it allows large sources of state and federal funds to be used for expansion, though they could better be used to modernize the capital infrastructure of existing transit networks. (This decision does not affect only bus service. BART has a $6 billion shortfall to replace its aging cars and tracks over the next 25 years.) 

Finally, we are challenging MTC’s policy in its last four Regional Transportation Plans on so-called “uncommitted” funds. In the RTP, MTC identifies shortfalls between the funding each transit operator needs just to maintain its existing service levels and the funding the transit operator has. Those shortfalls have two components, capital and operating. Yet MTC funds only capital shortfalls, not operating shortfalls. Unfunded operating shortfalls can cause immediate service cuts, which AC Transit has suffered from consistently for 15 years. 

Over the same period, MTC has told the public that “uncommitted” funds can be used only for capital purposes. At trial, however, it was forced to admit the truth: that a significant portion of AC Transit’s operating needs—over $40 million a year—can be funded out of “uncommitted” RTP funds. 

These decisions also have a powerful effect on the environment. At the same time that our suit has focused on MTC’s deficiencies from a civil rights perspective, the California Attorney General has found that some of the same practices contribute to worsening the effects of climate change. AB 32 requires California to reduce its GHG emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. Fifty percent of the Bay Area’s GHG emissions result from transportation, primarily auto trips. In a strongly worded Oct. 1 letter to MTC, the attorney general noted that MTC has grandfathered some $29 billion in freeway projects into the new 2009 RTP that have not been shown to help meet California GHG reduction goals. The letter concludes: 

“If low-performing ‘committed’ projects were eliminated where feasible to do so, funding would be available to cover transit shortfalls, particularly for BART, Muni, and AC Transit, which together carry 80 percent of the transit riders in the Bay Area. If these shortfalls are not addressed, or if they are addressed through fare increases, as recently proposed, ridership may fall, with a concomitant increase in GHG emissions.” 

A newly-formed regional interfaith group known as Genesis has taken up the challenge of holding MTC accountable for promoting funding equity and GHG reduction by sufficiently funding current and increased AC Transit service. At an MTC meeting on Nov. 3, Gabrielle Miller of Genesis urged the “review, with community input and collaboration, of all MTC projects,” adding: “Only by doing this will we be able to achieve the environmental protection and transportation equality that we at Genesis demand of this region.” 

Equal access to every kind of opportunity depends on transportation, usually meaning bus service for low-income families, senior citizens, people with disabilities and people of color. The effects of global climate change must be altered. MTC can address both by fully funding AC Transit. It should be required to do so in the new Regional Transportation Plan slated for adoption in March 2009. 

 

Richard A. Marcantonio is an attorney with Public Advocates Inc. in San Francisco.


In Support of the Addison Street Windows Gallery Criteria

By Stephanie Anne Johnson
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 11:08:00 AM

The conversation going on about whether or not there should be criteria that excludes the use of guns for art work placed in the Addison Street Windows exhibition is very delicate. But now that the conversation has moved from the Civic Arts Commission meetings to the public sphere in the form of flyers and newspaper articles, I feel that it is time that I add my voice. I have served on the commission for the past year and a half and during that time I have had the privilege of learning an enormous amount of information about the ways that a city commission works. I have a newfound appreciation for those who serve in public office, their roles, responsibilities and the challenges of reaching consensus in a city with a progressive history and outlook.  

Publicly funded spaces have a different mandate than those which are privately owned. On-going exhibitions free of any type of consideration, or restriction based on size, theme, content or material are very rare outside of the “virtual” displays on the Internet. The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of galleries, museums and art exhibition spaces have in place some criteria, either clear and stated or covert. The selection process and curatorial decisions of these institutions are not done publicly, usually not informed by public input. In museums or galleries, one has a choice to visit and view art that might be considered controversial. Publicly displayed art doesn’t allow the viewer to have this choice. I believe that public art should not be focused solely on individual artists and their work. As an art form connected to public awareness and appreciation, public art’s capacity to educate, inspire curiosity, promote new ideas, support community involvement and provide a pleasurable experience should be in the fore ground of our conversations. As such, the focus is on the effect of the work on the larger mass of public viewers.  

As an African American parent of a young child who attends a Berkeley public school, it is my responsibility to provide a safe environment in our home, monitor and interpret the imagery presented on the streets so that she is buffered from sexism, racism and commercialism (among other “isms”). As we know, young children are deeply affected by the images around them and the world they live in. Until they reach a certain age, it is hard for them not to take on physical and psychic damage because they have not developed the ability to analyze and deconstruct what they are seeing. As a professor of art in the state university system, I have the opposite task; to encourage my students to create work that questions their world, to help them to critically analyze the images they see in the media, and to assist them in resisting the negative, destructive “isms” they see in any form, anywhere. Many of my college students are learning visual literacy and the impact of image and the underlying message that is being “sold.” It is my hope that the development of these tools will be a lifelong process that will inspire them to become active artists, productive local and global citizens, family members and participants in community building. As a parent and a professor, I am acutely aware of these two groups; minors who are sheltered in certain ways due to their vulnerability and young people who are entering the world as adults for the first time. 

Though I agree with those citizens and colleagues who question censorship in any form, I want to highlight the role of location and context in the Addison Street Windows display debate. Framed as “censorship,” I feel that the criteria is thoughtful and appropriate in light of two factors. The Addison Street Windows are two blocks from Berkeley High School and because of this location they operate as a public gallery. Our high school students are up against an unprecedented level of violence in their daily lives. This violence comes at them in a variety of forms ranging from shooting on the street to the violence in Iraq as a result of the United States occupation. A significant number of high school students in Berkeley and surrounding cities have been affected by the gun violence involving friends, family members, and associates who have been killed or injured as a result of being shot. Often, the students make altars as public displays of grief. A sense of anxiety and fear has been triggered in young people (and all of us) even for those who have not been directly affected. Parents worry about their children walking or biking to the neighborhood schools, students worry about being beaten up or shot as they walk to the corner store. There is an overall environment of apprehension in the city of Berkeley because the level of violence has increased to an unprecedented level. And Berkeley as a city is not alone, this is indicative of a national and international trend. The depiction of guns and the violence that is implied either metaphorically or physically could re-trigger the psychological wounds inflicted upon our young citizens so we need to be extremely thoughtful about their display in The Addison Street Windows space and the ways we approach a discussion of violence. When art is public is presented in a venue such as the Addison Street Windows, there is no structure in place for analysis about the images to help young people who may need guidance in understanding the work. For the record, I am not anti political art. On the contrary, I have gotten into trouble a number of times for my work being “too political." Therefore, I understand, support and applaud most political artwork as an essential safeguard against the tide of “art for art’s sake” and its associated commercialism. It is the location of the Addison Street Windows and the context of violence faced by our young people that are primary considerations in my support of the current Addison Street Windows criteria. 

Finally, do we want to extend the conversation about this particular venue into the foreseeable future? What kinds of compromises can be made to insure that our cultural ethos as an arts community is maintained at the same time that we pay attention to the needs of young people and other passersby? Though I appreciate the debate and discussion about this particular venue, I came to the Civic Arts Commission with a number of plans in mind. At this point in history both personally and nationally resources and time are precious commodities and I would very much like to turn my attention back to those ideas; the creation of city, community, campus and community art partnerships, the creation of art opportunities for the young people in Berkeley, and the active inclusion of communities of color, working class and poor people in art projects that renew, empower, and beautify all parts of my beloved city of Berkeley. Thank you for this opportunity to express my opinion. 

 

Professor Stephanie Anne Johnson is co-chair and service learning coordinator for the Visual and Public Art Department at California State University, Monterey Bay and represents Berkeley's District 2 on the Civic Arts Commission.  


Columns

The Public Eye: Contrasting Presidents Bush and Obama

By Bob Burnett
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:40:00 AM

On Jan. 20, George W. Bush will leave office and Americans will breathe a sigh of relief. While national policies will change, there will be a dramatic shift in style. Bush and Barack Obama have different views of presidential power: the imperial presidency will be succeeded by an era of democratic leadership. 

While Bush’s autocratic design for the office of the presidency snuck up on most Americans, it was evident in his August 2000 speech accepting the Republican nomination. After attacking his predecessors (“For eight years the Clinton-Gore administration has coasted through prosperity...they had their chance, they have not led.”), Bush self-promoted as a proven leader and person of “character:” “I’ve been where the buck stops in business and in government. I’ve been a chief executive who sets an agenda, sets big goals, and rallies people to believe and achieve them.” Bush promised to run the federal government as if it were a giant corporation. While the notion of electing a “CEO President” seized the imagination of many voters, few considered that corporations are not democratic organizations and corporation presidents rule as autocrats. Even fewer voters realized that Bush had falsified his credentials: He was neither an experienced CEO nor a person with a strong moral foundation, but rather a politician wearing a persona skillfully fabricated by Karl Rove. 

Following his controversial 2000 election, George Bush occupied the White House and expanded executive power. After the trauma of 9/11, he put on the cloak of commander-in-chief and used it to justify his imperial designs: abrogation of the intended effect of legislation by the use of “signing statements”; suspension of historic checks and balances in the name of national security; restriction on the use and distribution of intelligence information; and dissolution of the right of habeas corpus and either elemental civil liberties. 

After eight disastrous years, it’s become painfully evident that George Bush has not been an effective leader; he has neither reined in the federal bureaucracy nor provided the bold vision he promised. Furthermore, he has not proven to be a person of high moral character; his administration has been characterized by manipulation and deceit. And, his presidency has not been good for American democracy; Bush has weakened the elemental fabric of government—the separation of powers—and demoralized the electorate with his implicit message that individual Americans do not have a role to play in the body politic. He’s run an active presidency at the expense of a passive citizenry. 

Considering this background, what kind of president will Barack Obama be? How will he view presidential power? From the onset of his campaign, Obama has had a different view of the role of the president. On Feb. 10, 2007, Obama announced his candidacy by establishing the populist theme that would resonate throughout his campaign: “This campaign can’t only be about me. It must be about us—it must be about what we can do together...This campaign has to be about reclaiming the meaning of citizenship, restoring our sense of common purpose, and realizing that few obstacles can withstand the power of millions of voices calling for change.” Obama approached the presidency from his background as a community organizer. He saw his role being more of a facilitator than a CEO. 

In his Nov. 10, 2007 oration at the Iowa Democratic Party Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner, Obama amplified his elemental theme of “we’re in this together”: “I am not in this race to fulfill some long-held ambitions or because I believe it’s somehow owed to me... The only reason that I’m standing here today is because somebody, somewhere stood up for me when it was risky... And because that somebody stood up, a few more stood up. And then a few thousand stood up. And then a few million stood up. And standing up, with courage and clear purpose, they somehow managed to change the world... I’m running... to keep the American Dream alive for those who still hunger for opportunity, who still thirst for equality.” 

In his Aug. 28 acceptance speech Obama added: “Change happens because the American people demand it—because they rise up and insist on new ideas and new leadership, a new politics for a new time.” Finally, on election night, he summarized: “Let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other. Let us remember [in the United States], we rise or fall as one nation; as one people.” 

America has survived eight years of George Bush, the CEO president, who took his authority from the office of the president and disregarded the wishes of the people. On Jan. 20, we’ll enter the era of Barack Obama, the community-organizer president, who gets his authority from the American people and counts on a renewed sense of citizen participation in our democracy. 

 

Bob Burnett is a Berkeley activist. He can be reached at bobburnett@comcast.net.


Undercurrents: Never Too Early to Start Speculating About 2010

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:41:00 AM

One of the perks of being a newspaper columnist—as well as a newspaper reporter—is that from time to time, you get the chance to write your own fantasies. For political columnists and reporters, this often takes the place of handicapping—sometimes years in advance—political races. Like all good fantasies, political race advance handicapping needs to adhere to certain rules, such as the columnist or reporter clearly stating in advance what rules are to be used for including or excluding certain potential candidates. Without that, such political fantasy-writing provides no useful insight, except into the wishful thinking of the person doing the writing. But we’ll get to that, shortly. 

In the past couple of weeks, our friends in the East Bay bureau at the San Francisco Chronicle have begun to take a particular interest in the future of state Senate President Don Perata. Mr. Perata is facing two large changes in his life, one of them his terming out of the California State Senate as of the end of this year, the other the resolution—either dismissal or to trial—of the longstanding federal criminal investigation into his Senate dealings. 

Our Chronicle friends are more interested in Mr. Perata’s political future, however, particularly in the state senator’s longstanding desire to become mayor of the City of Oakland. 

Some months after he said that Mr. Perata would be a “good fit” as Oakland mayor, Chronicle East Bay columnist Chip Johnson expounded on the subject two weeks ago, writing in a Nov. 11 column (”Only Job Perata Ever Wanted—Oakland Mayor”) that “Oakland’s top post had been a goal for much of his political career.” 

Mr. Johnson then goes on to give several reasons why Mr. Perata would be running for mayor in 2010, and why he could win. “Politics is in my blood, public service is in my blood, and I love Oakland,” Mr. Johnson quotes Mr. Perata as saying. Mr. Johnson also writes that “when you look across the playing field at all the potential mayoral contestants, there’s no doubt that Perata, whose political skills and fundraising abilities are enormous, could mount a strong mayoral run. … Perata is a meticulous campaigner who is well-versed in canvassing homes, honing a message that strikes a public chord and sticking to the game plan. Over the years, his political organization has supported countless East Bay candidates, from city and county government to local school boards.” 

If you noticed something pointedly missing from the Perata resumé penned by Mr. Johnson, a list of public policy accomplishments on behalf of Oakland that would give Oakland voters a reason to choose Mr. Perata as our mayor—you are not by yourself. 

In fact, that seems to be the principle lacking in a Nov. 24 article on Mr. Perata’s political future (”Retiring Perata Ready To Be Outside Looking In”) by Chronicle staff writers Matthew Yi and Christopher Heredia. 

Mr. Perata “hopes his next destination is the mayor’s office in Oakland, a job that he said he’s coveted for more than a decade,” Mr. Yi and Mr. Heredia write. “In the interview, Perata stopped short of declaring his candidacy for Oakland mayor in 2010, but other East Bay power brokers and political experts say he will be a force to be reckoned with. Perata’s poll numbers are high with East Bay residents, while his negatives have risen over the past few years, said Larry Tramutola, an Oakland political consultant. … Tramutola said Perata could be the answer to what ails Oakland-high crime rate and struggling schools.” 

Mr. Yi and Mr. Heredia then quote Mr. Perata himself on his own mayoral credentials. 

“I’m a political mechanic—I like to fix things or tinker with it,” Mr. Perata tells the Chronicle reporters. “Probably fixing a pothole on Claremont Avenue would be important to more people than anything I’ve done.” 

What we are left with in the Johnson and Yi-Heredia pieces is that Mr. Perata is an ambitious, power-seeking politician—a lot of us had already guessed that—whose ambition has been to run for mayor of Oakland. Ambition is nice, and is to be commended. But what Oakland voters may be looking for in 2010 in a mayoral candidate is someone who can tell us what their vision is for Oakland—not their vision for themselves—their record on dealing with Oakland problems, and their intentions for Oakland government should they be elected. 2010 is a long time off, yet, so there is plenty of time for more Chronicle articles to address this subject. 

This, however, is not the main problem with the Johnson column and the Yi-Heredia article, and that goes back to the fantasy rules thing. One of the rules of fantasy writing is that if you are going to leave out a major fact or factor, you must at least acknowledge that you are leaving it out and—if you think it necessary—give a little explanation why. 

A somewhat major factor was left out of the column and article, as shown in the following quotes. 

From Mr. Johnson: Mr. Perata’s “name would appear near the top of the short list of potential candidates. Oakland City Council members Jane Brunner, Jean Quan and Ignacio De La Fuente could all run, along with former City Manager Robert Bobb if he returns to work in Oakland. Tony West, a prominent attorney who is well-regarded in Democratic circles, has also been mentioned for the job. … About the only serious challenge he would face would be from Bobb…” 

And from Mr. Yi and Mr. Heredia: “If Perata declares his candidacy for mayor of Oakland, he likely will find competition from some well-known locals, including City Auditor Courtney Ruby, Oakland City Councilwoman Jean Quan, former City Manager Robert Bobb and City Attorney John Russo.” 

If you cannot find the missing major factor in these two quotations, here’s a comment on the Yi-Heredia article that appeared this week on the East Bay Express blog from Express contributor Chris Thompson. “Ask yourself why the story takes for granted that Ron Dellums won’t be running for a second term!” Mr. Thompson asks. And, in fact, no mention of the fact that Mr. Dellums is eligible for a second mayoral term, and can run in the 2010 Oakland mayoral election if he chooses, appears in either of the two Chronicle articles. It is perfectly reasonable for Mr. Johnson and Mr. Yi and Mr. Heredia to write out 2010 mayoral fantasies in which Mr. Dellums is not factored in, but at the very least, they ought to tell us that they aren’t factoring the mayor in, and, if possible, why. Do the Chronicle writers have some special insight that Mr. Dellums will not run, or is this simply a part of their fantasy? 

If you have to be corrected on local affairs by Mr. Thompson—the Express bloggist who comments on East Bay affairs while not necessarily living in or near the East Bay—you’re in trouble. 

Mr. Thompson, in fact, goes on to write that Dellums would (thoroughly) get his ass handed to him if he did” run for a second term.” Why Mr. Thompson believes that is not explained, although his many criticisms of Mr. Dellums are well documented on the East Bay Express blog where he writes. 

Myself, I have a slightly different view of things. 

I have no special insight into whether or not Mr. Dellums will run for a second term as Oakland mayor. I know of no one who does other than Mr. Dellums and his wife, Cynthia, and neither of them appears to be sharing those insights at the present time. And while I’m not in the predicting business, I suspect that the outcome might not be the ass-handing that Mr. Thompson believes it will. 

The things that get politicians in the most trouble are not the things that they’ve failed to do, but the things that they’ve done. Mr. Perata, for example, will be remembered by at least some Oakland voters as the chief architect and promoter of the Raiders deal, the ill-fated, disastrous arrangement that brought the Oakland Raiders football team back from Los Angeles and left Oakland residents in debt for decades to come. Nothing that Mr. Perata can now do can undo the Raiders deal, and it will be a burden on his candidacy when and if he actually runs for mayor of Oakland. 

While Mr. Dellums’ poll numbers and approval rating are currently down from his status when he ran for mayor in 2007 in a triumphant homecoming, the disaffection with the mayor appears to be with things that Mr. Dellums has not done—or, in some cases, appears to have not done. In those cases, there is still enough time between now and 2010 to do those things—or show people that he’s already done those things—if the mayor indeed decides to stand for re-election. 

The two “undone” things that encompass the most criticism about Mr. Dellums is that he has accomplished little in his first two years as mayor, and he has been noticeably absent from most of Oakland’s neighborhoods during his tenure. 

I believe that Mr. Dellums has done far more than most Oakland residents know in the last two years. His Oakland police reforms in particular have been major, most especially his ambitious promise last January to bring the department up to full uniform strength by the end of the year. In fact, Oakland now has more police on the beat than at any time in its history, an accomplishment directly attributable to Mayor Dellums. The mayor has also—as promised—brought millions of extra public and private dollars into Oakland, something which has helped keep city programs afloat in these bad economic times. Mr. Dellums’ biggest problem in this area is that he has failed to keep city residents informed of these accomplishments. I don’t want to minimize this problem, but at the same time, it’s a problem that is easily rectified. 

The criticism that Mr. Dellums has not been visible in the community is also easily corrected, if the mayor chooses to. He can do so simply by spending 2009 accomplishing an ambitious community outreach agenda, speaking at meetings and attending neighborhood functions. If he were to do so, by next December, about the time the 2010 mayoral election was heating up, the issue of lack of mayoral visibility in the community would be, well, no longer an issue. 

There are other Oakland problems not as easily solved, and they may become factors in the 2010 election. While we can anticipate, no one can see exactly that far in the future. My point is that Ron Dellums remains the most formidable politician in Oakland, one of the best public speakers of our time and a man with enormous political talents and savvy, and the idea that his political enemies are advancing that the mayor does not have the energy—or is somehow too senile—to run for a second term is a little like whistling past a graveyard in the hopes that the bad old ghost won’t come soaring out. As I said, I have no special insight as to whether Mr. Dellums will run again in 2010. I just believe that anyone who automatically counts the mayor out—before he makes that decision or barring other, unforeseen events—is sadly lacking in the basics of arithmetic. 


Green Neighbors: Death and Change in the Forest

By Ron Sullivan
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:53:00 AM
Dead live-oaks in forested hillside, Bolinas Lagoon. The dead trees still support live beard lichens.
Ron Sullivan
Dead live-oaks in forested hillside, Bolinas Lagoon. The dead trees still support live beard lichens.

I remind myself that the Tarot card with Death on it is supposed to mean “change.” As I get older, though, and see more death than change, it gets to be more of a personal threat, an insult of sorts.  

The disease caused by Phtyophthora ramorum, called “Sudden Oak Death Syndrome,” felt pretty personal right from the start. I’d marveled at oaks even before I met California’s natives.  

When I was a distracted gradeschool kid in Pennsylvania, I spent a lot of time gazing out the classroom windows at a great old oak that presided over a grassy hill half a mile away, not thinking much at all, my mind filled with the perception of that upright, weathered, gnarl-limbed matriarch. When I got old enough to go off alone, I rode my blue bike up the road and dragged it up the hill and sat with my back against that oak for hours, just basking and watching. I don’t remember much from those hours except for the steady living presence that embraced me.  

I’ve lived in California for 35 years and kept company with Californian oaks right from the start. I loved their fierce determined spontaneity, their every-whichaways habits of growing, their gradual transformation of their space, their huge jokes with light and color, long before I’d learned about their keystone position in our local web of life.  

Briefly: Oaks are Californian forests’ chief plant protein producers. Acorns provide so much nutrition to so many animal species—our own among them—that it’s hard to imagine what could replace them. Maybe nothing can.  

Most of us don’t remember, but something like SODS happened to the great eastern forests of North America. In the early 20th Century, a fungus, Cryphonectria parasitica, entered North America under the bark of some imported Asian chestnut seedlings. It didn’t kill its original hosts, but it was lethal to Castanea dentata. From its apparent original locus in New York City, it spread with terrifying speed and devastation to the whole native range of American chestnut from Maine to Arkansas, a skirted sweep centered on the Appalachian mountain chain.  

The amnesia regarding chestnut blight and the chestnut’s former lynchpin role in Eastern forests is startling. Maybe the forest looks like wallpaper to the uneducated—and that’s most of us. For all my passion, it certainly included me when I was an Easterner. Then again, I and my peers certainly knew oaks from maples from willows from mulberries from horsechestnuts, which was as close to a chestnut as we had. Oaks and horsechestnuts bore things to throw at each other; maples had maple-noses to split and wear and look perfectly silly; willows had whippy twigs to chase each other with or to braid for no particular reason.  

There might be SODS remedies for individual “specimen” trees, but so far nothing is practical for whole woodlands. It’s possible we’re facing another tree plague that will change our land as chestnut blight did, and maybe we’re helpless before it. That galls; we like to fix things. What now?  

 

 

 


East Bay: Then and Now—The House of Three Charlies Conceals Many Stories

By Daniella Thompson
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:50:00 AM
2425 Hillside Ave. today.
By Daniella Thompson
2425 Hillside Ave. today.
The Charles C. Hall house, a remodeled Victorian featuring some Colonial Revival elements.
Hall family collection, BAHA archives
The Charles C. Hall house, a remodeled Victorian featuring some Colonial Revival elements.
Charles C. Hall’s sumptuous library at 2425 Hillside Ave.
Hall family collection, BAHA archives
Charles C. Hall’s sumptuous library at 2425 Hillside Ave.
The Hall brothers, Francis, Frederick, and Charles.
Hall family collection, BAHA archives
The Hall brothers, Francis, Frederick, and Charles.

Berkeley is full of storied buildings, but few can boast the sheer historic wealth concealed within the walls of the Neo-Georgian brick mansion overlooking Hamilton Creek at 2425 Hillside Avenue. Since 1971 the home of the Tibetan Nyingma Meditation Center (Padma Ling), the building had altogether different beginnings, as well as a different appearance. 

It began its life circa 1890, on a double lot in the Batchelder tract, built as the home of Charles Denslow Ford (b. 1858), a lumber man from Mendocino. Ford’s father, Jerome Bursley Ford (1821-1889), was a forty-niner from Vermont. In the spring of 1851, his San Francisco employer, the notorious entrepreneur Henry Meiggs, dispatched Jerome north to attempt a salvage from the clipper Frolic, which had foundered the previous year on the Mendocino coast.  

The ship had been carrying a valuable cargo of Chinese imports from Hong Kong to San Francisco, but all Ford managed to espy of the fabled hoard were elegant silk shawls that adorned some of the local Pomo women. No matter. Jerome Ford found something far more valuable—an abundance of gigantic redwood trees—and walked back to San Francisco to report his discovery. 

Meiggs ordered a sawmill from the east coast and purchased the ship Ontario to deliver the mill to Mendocino. Meanwhile, Ford drove a team of oxen overland, arriving in June 1852. He purchased land for the mill and became its first supervisor. Two years later, when Meiggs became overextended and fled to South America, Ford and Edwards C. Williams took over his California Lumber Manufacturing Company and restructured it as the Mendocino Mill Company. 

Jerome B. Ford became one of Mendocino’s leading citizens. He was instrumental in establishing the Mendocino Presbyterian Church and was the major donor for its Gothic Revival sanctuary building, a California Landmark designed by S.C. Bugbee and Son of San Francisco. (This church served as the model for the Church of the Good Shepherd in West Berkeley, which was designed by Sumner Bugbee’s son, Charles L. Bugbee.) Ford’s house on Mendocino’s Main Street now serves as a museum and visitor center. 

In 1873, Ford moved to Oakland for the benefit of his children’s education. His eldest son, Chester, succeeded him in the business, which was now called the Mendocino Lumber Company. The second son, Charles, would become the company’s treasurer and work in its San Francisco office. 

About 1883, Charles married the statuesque Nellie Lincoln. Seven years later, they built an imposing Victorian house on Hillside Avenue in Berkeley. At the time, the area was open land consisting of grassy slopes and wooded canyons; little stood in the way of the uninterrupted vistas opening to the north, west, and south. Perhaps this home was too isolated. As the Fords’ daughter Aline reached “coming out” age, the family decamped for San Francisco. Aline, reportedly as handsome as her mother, entered society and soon found an eligible husband in Lewis Pierce, a wealthy Solano County stock rancher. 

In 1899, the Fords’ Berkeley house was acquired by another Charles, this one the Maine-born master mariner Charles Edward Foye (1830-1913). Still active in his seventieth year, Captain Foye made the acquisition shortly after moving his office from San Francisco to Oakland. Foye and his wife Harriet were childless, but their household usually included some relatives. Apparently the Berkeley residence was less than ideal, for Foye returned to San Francisco the following year, although he continued to own the house until the summer of 1904. 

On Aug. 2, 1904, the Oakland Tribune published a deed transfer of four lots in Block B of the Batchelder tract—including the Foye house—from Charles and Harriet Foye to Charles C. Hall. In December 1906, Foye sold Hall the rest of Block B for a reported $1,000. 

Charles Crocker Hall (1836-1914) was a retired publisher from Syracuse, New York. Born in Ellington, Conn., he was the son of John Hall, a Yale graduate, county judge, and founder of the Ellington School, a highly regarded college preparatory. Judge Hall was the author of a popular series of reading books, designed for various levels of primary and secondary instruction, as well as of a book on resurrection, titled How Are the Dead Raised, and With What Body Do They Come?, published posthumously. 

Judge Hall married twice and fathered 16 children. His first wife, Sophia, delivered the eldest 11 within a span of 20 years before departing this world, no doubt utterly exhausted. The second wife, Harriet, bore five children in eight years and was fortunate to have survived her husband. 

The scholarly Judge Hall instilled in his children a love for books, and several of his sons went into the book trade. The first was Levi Wells Hall (b. 1818), who ran a bookstore in Springfield, Mass., where his younger brother, Francis Hall (1822-1902), clerked in the late 1830s. In 1841, Francis began to clerk at a bookstore in Syracuse, NY, and Wells subsequently bought it. A year later, with financial assistance from Wells, Francis opened his own store in Elmira, NY. By the 1850s, his store had become the gathering place for local intellectuals and abolitionists. 

In 1858, Francis sold the store to his younger brothers, Frederick (b. 1827) and Charles Crocker, and the following year departed for Japan in the wake of Townsend Harris’s newly negotiated treaty of Amity and Commerce with that country. During his seven years in Japan, he wrote close to seventy articles for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. An abridged version of his 900-page journal is available in paperback as Japan Through American Eyes: The Journal of Francis Hall, 1859-1866. 

Quick to seize a commercial opportunity, Francis co-founded the firm of Walsh, Hall & Company at the treaty port of Kanagawa. It became the leading American trading house in Japan. His fortune made, Francis returned to Elmira but continued traveling and, next to Bayard Taylor, was considered the greatest American traveler of his time. 

Frederick and Charles renamed their Elmira business Hall Brothers, listed as booksellers, stationers and dealers in wallpaper. An ad they placed in the 1863 Elmira directory described the concern as “The Cheap Cash Bookstore” and promised “Where can always be found a well-selected stock of miscellaneous & standard books, including all the latest publications of the day. Any foreign or American book procured to order. School books of every variety used in this section.” 

In 1872, Charles married Mary A. Corbett of San Francisco, and six years later, with wife and two children in tow, established himself in Syracuse and began publishing Graves’ Printed Index. The Library Journal, official organ of the Library Associations of America and the United Kingdom, reviewed the Index in 1881: “If you index borrowers, books, authors, subjects, periodicals, or anything, this will be found invaluable. Half the work is printed and so ingeniously arranged and notched that the exact word can be opened to at a single motion. After protracted use we give this Index the highest place as a library labor-saver and strongly recommend its trial.” 

Graves’ Printed Index made Charles Crocker Hall a wealthy man. He retired from business in 1903 and came to Berkeley the following year. He appears to have remodeled his new home extensively, judging by photos of his palatial library and by the Palladian windows—a feature alien to Victorian architecture—on some of the gables. 

Mrs. Hall soon threw herself into local affairs, joining women’s clubs and suffrage organizations. In December 1905, she hosted over a hundred ladies of the Berkeley Political Equality Club in an afternoon lecture by Louise Benson on the subject of “Divorce, Race Suicide and Marriage.” Amidst great hubbub, Mrs. Benson stated, “Divorce is not a menace to social morality. It is a remedy that is demanded by a social disease,” and argued for women’s participation in law-making powers, especially where laws that bear most directly upon women’s interests are concerned. 

The Alameda County Equal Suffrage Society held its 1906 and 1907 conventions at the Hall residence. By 1908, Mary Hall was vice-president of the Political Equality Club (the president was Mary McHenry Keith, wife of the famous painter), and the next year saw her the president of the Town and Gown Club as well as of the Alameda County Political Equality Club, declaring to the Oakland Tribune that “Suffrage will come to pass sooner or later.” 

After Charles Hall’s death in 1914, none of his adult children chose to live at 2425 Hillside Avenue. His second born, Frederick Francis Hall (1876-1955), lived for many years on the other side of Hamilton Creek, at 2411 Hillside Avenue. Another son, John Edward, lived at 2309 Eunice Street. The property was eventually sold to the Delta Tau Delta fraternity, and the latter hired architect Warren C. Perry to design a new chapter house on the site. 

Perry, a graduate of the University of California’s School of Architecture and one of its earliest and longest-serving faculty members, designed the Delta Tau Delta house in 1927, the same year in which he would replace John Galen Howard as director of the school. The building permit, issued on March 8, called for a three-story, 28-room building with brick veneer and a slate roof, to be constructed at a cost of $35,000. The architectural style is Neo-Georgian, stately and dignified. 

By the 1960s, fraternity life had gone out of fashion. In 1971, Delta Tau Delta retrenched (their current house at 2710 Durant Ave. is much smaller), selling its grand house on Hillside Ave. to Lama Tarthang Tulku, founder of the Tibetan Aid Project, who would go on to establish the Nyingma Institute and Dharma Publishing, also in Berkeley (in 1973, the Nyingma Institute acquired the old Psi Upsilon chapter house at 1815 Highland Place). 

Renamed Padma Ling, 2425 Hillside Ave. sports an assortment of Buddhist trappings that are somewhat startling to the novice viewer. Most if it, though, is well-hidden behind shrubbery, concealing, perhaps, stories for future generations. 

 

Daniella Thompson publishes berkeleyheritage.com for the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA).


About the House: Termite Baiting and Integrated Pest Management

By Matt Cantor
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:51:00 AM

Year ago, my friend Stan Millstein, a protohippie from Brooklyn who, like many, moved to L.A. in the 1960s turned on, tuned in and dropped everything. In L.A., Stan joined a C.R. or consciousness-raising group, which was essential a bull session. This group seemed primarily interested in tackling ethical problems.  

They decided to look at mouse traps and figure out which one worked best and was most ethical. They looked at a lot of mouse traps (this is before the sticky ones). Was it better to let the mouse die slowly in a trap or to smash it to death instantly? What of poisons? Would the kids get to them or the cat? In the end and after much discussion, Stan said, “We decided to live with the mouse.” Mice aren’t all that bad and we could probably all be better about cleaning the kitchen and sealing up the food. 

I don’t think that Stan knew anything about IPM (integrated pest management) but, whether he knew it or not, he had become, at least, to some degree, a proponent and perhaps a practitioner. 

IPM goes back to the years following the Second World War and, like many good things, began in California. The essential idea, which many of us now take for granted, was that a multi-pronged approach was preferable to one of search-and-destroy. (Even the CIA figured out that it was better to strategically take out a leader than to annihilate an entire population, but that’s a little Machiavellian for this discussion.) 

After many years of development, IPM as a science and practice has organized itself to the point where it has six clearly segregated tactics or prongs, if you will. With apologies to the experts, here is my take on each. 

1. Determine acceptable pest levels. Do you really need to kill the mouse? If there are a thousand mice, would it be O.K. to use a method that might be far less toxic or otherwise abhorrent but would only kill 95 percent of them and leave 50 for the cat? Destroying 100 percent of anything is usually far more rigorous than a lesser percentage and often involves collateral effects (such as poisoning yourself and your neighbors) that can be avoided by agreeing on acceptable levels of trouble. 

2. Integrate preventative cultural practices (buy a cat). This is about asking good questions. What grows best where you are? Before treating a plant with a pesticide, can you remove the mildewed leaves. (We’ve done this in our garden where powdery mildew has wrecked havoc upon our squashes, over spraying, I think). Using different wood to build the house (that the local termites don’t like.) 

3. Monitoring. IPM is about studying and responding intelligently and in a well- modulated manner to a perceived problem. This may involve studying insect populations, mold growth, rates of growth of whatever you have, reactions to interlopers or enemies by your subject. By studying insect reproduction or food gathering biology, it’s often much easier to develop a strategy of control. Monitoring or study is the cornerstone of IPM. 

4. Mechanical methods. In the building trades, removal of infested timber would be a mechanical method. In the garden, physically removing snails from plants is another. These are least toxic and often easy but always require monitoring and understanding the limitations of these approaches. No mechanical method can remove all of your pests but might be one part of a very effective system of control. 

5. Biological controls. A very exciting part of IPM is the use of competing organisms or other biological influences to control your subject (enemy?). We haven’t figured out how to get ants to fight off your termites and then go away (did you know that these insects are natural enemies and wage full-scale war upon one another?) but this will surely come. Many folks know that a carton of ladybugs bought at the nursery can be deployed among the roses to consume those pesky aphids, but did you know that this was IPM? Use of microorganisms including bacillus and fungi to control pests are also a part of this category. 

6. Chemical controls. Notice that this is last on the list and a good thing too. Every year, the EPA pulls another few chemicals off the shelf as we discover the long-range ill-effects of various giant molecules (often found cancerous) as another hundred move into our stores and industries. Pesticides vary in toxicity greatly and range from those made from the lovely Chrysanthemum (pyrethrum and its variants) to Nicotine (they told you it wasn’t good for your health right?). Some pesticides merely prevent some essential biological function such as making of a new skin (chitin in the case of the mighty termite) and do not, therefore require nearly the toxicity of something designed to outrightly kill the thing straight off. In an IPM method such as a termite bait trap, one might use one millionth the dose of a chemical otherwise pumped into the soil in a less elegant method. The more strategically we can apply the use of a chemical and the less toxic that chemical to the overall environment, the better for all concerned. 

So how can this methodology be used to address termite issues at your house? Some of this is already happening whether you’re aware of it or not. We are slowly moving away from high volume spraying or soil saturation of carcinogenic pesticides toward those with lower toxicity and, most recently, toward the use of baiting stations. I see these as I walk around houses from time to time but until contacting Bill Quarles at Berkeley’s Bio-Integral Resource Center I didn’t realize just how they worked.  

BIRC publishes a range of periodicals and books that provide practical how-to information on pest control for garden and structure that still manage to provide plenty of scientific data for wannabes like me. The IPM practitioner from Jan/Feb of 2003 is all about the science of controlling termites and included a healthy dose of termite biology. Did you know that over 45 species of termites inhabit the U.S. (a blessedly small number given their near 4,000 species total) and roughly two-thirds are considered pests (I assume that most of this must involve the consumption of our buildings and the like.) 

As of 1990 research in this volume (I guess we backdate that another few years for publication delays), these 30 or so species ravage upwards of 2.5 billion in homes, barns and bridges each year. I guess we can safely double that number to allow for inflation, making it about the budget for the National Science Foundation. 

Curiously, most of the methods discussed in Dr. Quarles newsletter were within grasp of a moderately intrepid homeowner (can it be you, dear reader?). Quarles even specifies some relatively safe toxicants (just a tax oxymoronic, I guess) such as boric acid, that can be bought locally and handled with relative safety (though gloves and a respirator would be well advised). 

This issue gave fairly simple instructions for construction of a bait system that involved mostly common items like PVC piping, cardboard or wooden stakes. Petri dishes were called for but I suspect that you backyard warriors can find substitutes as no single part of these systems appeared to be pivotal once the essential concept was borne. 

A common method in monitoring for termites intriguingly involved setting wooden stakes in a perimeter about the house and then checking them monthly for activity. One method involved using stakes with a hole bored through the center and a cork plug (termites love cork). I guess you’d have to make those with your 18-inch-long drill bit! 

Once these were attacked, the article suggested that some operators could then drop the “recruits” (yes, and the ironies are beyond perfect) into a manufactured bait station built using perforated piping and poisoned cardboard). 

The “recruits” eat the cardboard, carrying a low level of poison bait back to their home below ground. Termites leave a pheromone trail and will be far more likely to return in numbers to this bait station if they’ve first been shown the way in this manner (thus the term, recruit). Once home, termites will regurgitate and share the poisonous munchies with their mates, a behavior known as trophyllaxis. One of the tricks of this method is to find a poison and a dosage that won’t alert the termite or kill them prior to sharing the spoils (so to speak). A well-designed system allows time for thorough distribution of the poison and death of the entire colony (ugh). That said, I’ll now stump (ahem) for a totally different approach. 

Modern housing design requires fundamental “mechanical” prophylaxis regarding termites and a range of other pests. In the case of termites, foundations must be tall enough so that no wooden part of the structure is within eight inches of the ground (used to be six inches but just changed in California). Termites are both xenophobic and photophobic. They like to hide and will avoid coming into view or into the light. They like short stubby foundations that allow them to attack and consume wood without exiting from the safety of the ground. If they must, they will sometimes build masticated tubes of cellulose that allow them to climb the foundation but, like the burglar, they will move on to the next house if yours is a bit too much trouble. 

If you keep woody debris and scrap lumber out of your crawlspace and scoop a bit of the excess soil away along the side of the foundation so that you have a few clear inches below the yummy wooden structure, you are likely to be well protected, remembering all the while that monitoring is the hallmark of IPM. 

In the end, I side with Stan. I really don’t mind termites. Actually, I hear they’re rather nice with a little olive oil and salt and in a world food crisis they’re especially delicious.  

I say, leave the termites alone and build to suit. The alternative is to keep on poisoning the planet until nothing tastes good. 


The Public Eye: A Call for a National Economic Recovery Act

By Arthur Blaustein
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 10:05:00 AM

Make no mistake about it, this election was won on bread and butter economic issues. While John McCain and Sarah Palin focused on the rhetoric of patriotism, “trickle-down” economics, “staying the course” on Bush’s tax cuts and family values; they also embraced the very economic policies that both undermine the middle class and subvert the security of American family life. 

American families voted with their feet and pocket books. They wanted less pious rhetoric, and more policies geared toward a healthy economy, secure jobs, decent health care, affordable housing, quality public education, renewable energy and a sustainable environment. Barack Obama understood that. 

What the election results told us is we need a president who understands and believes in coherent, comprehensive and equitable policies that promote sustainable and healthy economic growth. What we need is a leader who in his First Hundred Days in office will deal effectively with the housing crisis and demand legislative oversight and accountability of those financial, insurance and other corporations that have been, or will be, bailed out. 

The first thing that President-elect Obama should do is to begin to restore the confidence of the American people by demonstrating that he is willing to provide leadership; that he is willing to take immediate and bold policy initiatives to put the economy back on the right track. Toward this end he should call a meeting as soon as possible with Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, and Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House. At this meeting he should propose that they call Congress back into a special session to consider emergency legislation: the National Economic Recovery Act of 2008. 

The legislation would include: 

• Investment in alternative energy development and new green-collar jobs. 

• An extension of unemployment benefits. 

• Expansion of the Food Stamp program. 

• Re-negotiation of mortgage terms for those about to lose their homes. 

• An increase in the Community Economic Development discretionary budget to $250 million a year so that community economic development corporations (CDCs) can create more business and employment opportunities in economically distressed neighborhoods and communities that have been hit hardest by the sub-prime loan crisis. 

And most important: 

• A major economic stimulus package that would provide $250 billion in direct assistance to states and local governments for infrastructure development. This kind of direct federal spending for community and economic development would be far more productive than rebate checks. It will create jobs and crucial investments where it counts and is needed. 

It is the smartest investment we can make as a nation. Just think about some recent events: a bridge in Minneapolis collapsing; the electric grids failing last summer; Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans; commuter traffic logjams; and a sewage system breaking down in Honolulu are but a few examples of our outdated and crumbling infrastructure. In communities across our nation, our schools, mass transit systems, water and sewer plants, hospitals, bridges, levees, railway beds, ports and subways are in disrepair. If we are to participate in an increasingly competitive international economy we must rehabilitate our infrastructure. 

It is entirely possible that the Democratic congressional leadership is convinced that it would take more time to put together a coherent and comprehensive package—or that the lame-duck Bush administration would block it. If that is the case President-elect Obama should tell the American people that this legislation would be his first order of business immediately following the inauguration in January. That is the kind of leadership we need.The tasks before us will not be easy but the sooner we begin, the better. 

 

Professor Arthur Blaustein was chairman of the President’s National Advisory Council on Economic Opportunity during the Carter administration and was appointed to the board of the National Endowment for the Humanities by Bill Clinton. He teaches urban studies, politics and community economic development at the University of California, and his most recent books are Make a Difference: America’s Guide to Volunteering and Community Service and The American Promise. This article was origionally posted on BeyondChron.org.


Dispatches From The Edge: Latin America, the Crisis, and Mr. Monroe

By Conn Hallinan
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 10:53:00 AM

When the Mexican dictator Porfiero Diaz said the great tragedy of Mexico was that it was so far from God and so near to the United States, the comment summed up the long and tortured relationship between the Colossus of the North and Latin America.  

Starting with the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, the United States has routinely dictated the hemisphere’s political and commercial life and, on a score of occasions, overthrown governments it found inimical to its interests.  

But the world has suddenly turned upside down. 

From a collection of countries servicing U.S. interests, South America now boosts the third largest trade organization in the world, Mercursor, which includes Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Venezuela. Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador have associate status, and Mexico is an “observer.” This so-called “southern common market” accounts for 50 percent of Latin America’s gross domestic product, 59 percent of its landmass, and 43 percent of its population.  

The continent also recently formed the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), which includes 12 nations, along with observers from Mexico and Central America. 

This new found independence that will be sorely tested in the coming months as most of the world goes through an economic meltdown. In the past if Washington sneezed, South America came down with pneumonia. Will the continent’s increasing integration help it avoid the worst of the global financial crisis? Or will the current economic conflagration derail South America’s growing autonomy, allowing the United States to again dominate the life of region?  

The worldwide economic crisis will certainly have an impact on South America. Currency values from Brasilia to Mexico City have fallen, and at one point Brazil shut down its stock market to staunch the hemorrhaging. At the same time, most of the countries in Latin America are in a better position to weather the storm than the United States, Europe, and Japan, where banks play a larger role in the economic structure. 

“No one can avoid the events of the past few weeks,” says Riordan Roett, director of Johns Hopkins Western Hemisphere Studies Program, “but we are seeing some countries better insulated than other countries.” 

Brazil’s foreign exchange reserves, for instance, amount to more than $216 billion, which should cover the country’s need for export credit until “the most acute stage” of the crisis is over, says Brazilian Finance Minister, Guido Mantega. 

And because the government of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has reduced poverty, thus expanding its internal market, the country is in a better position to weather the storm. “Brazil is not immune to the crisis,” says Mantega, “but this affects the countries with problems in their banks more, and countries like Brazil less.” 

Argentina also has a substantial reserve in its central bank—$47 billion—and is hinting that it will delay replaying its $6.7 billion debt to western creditors until it can negotiate better terms.  

Venezuela has reserves of $30 billion, the largest per capita total on the continent, says Martin Saatdjian of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but the government is being careful. It is considering a “minor devaluation” of the Bolivar, Venezuela’s currency, and “austerity spending for the next fiscal year” if the crisis “deepens and the price of oil drops,” says Saatdjian. 

Caracas is spreading its oil wealth throughout the continent, which has cushioned the impact of the economic downturn. The fact that Venezuela purchased almost one-third of Argentina’s debt in 2005 has helped Buenos Aires build a rainy day fund. 

Venezuela and Brazil are leading an initiative to form The Bank of the South (BancoSur), which would pool a portion of participating countries reserves. The idea is to replace the International Monetary Fund, and its onerous insistence of cutting social services and infrastructure programs as a condition for its loans. BancoSur would have a more development-friendly approach. Besides Brazil and Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Paraguay, and Uruguay have signaled their interest in joining.  

Starting in the late 1990s, South America began diversifying its contacts with the rest of the world, in particular resource hungry China. Beijing buys Chilean copper, Cuban nickel and cobalt, Brazilian and Uruguayan soy, and Venezuelan, Ecuadorian and Bolivian oil and gas.  

Trade between Latin America and China was $102.6 billion in 2007, and the Chinese currently plan to invest up to $100 billion over the next five years. Brazil, Chile and Argentina have $28 billion in two-way trade with China, and China is investing heavily in Chilean copper and Venezuelan, Bolivian and Ecuadorian oil and gas. Beijing is currently negotiating a free trade agreement with Peru. Almost one-half of China’s foreign investment goes to Latin America. 

While China’s economy is slumping, that term is relative. It is still growing at 9 percent, and the Chinese government is pumping $586 billion into their economy to keep growth from falling any lower.  

Russia and Iran have also become major players in Latin America. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, accompanied by business leaders, just finished a tour of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, and the Russians are helping to develop oil fields in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. Iran’s President Mamoudd Ahmadinejad has been welcomed in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua, and Iran’s Chamber of Commerce announced Oct. 20 that joint commercial councils with South and Central America would soon be established. 

The U.S., on the other hand, is saddled with the legacy of its “Washington Consensus” policy of wide-open markets. The neo-liberal strategy led to ruinous debt in Latin America, a yawning gulf between rich and poor, and financial catastrophes like the 2001 Argentine collapse that impoverished half that country’s population. 

The wreckage wrought by the “Washington Consensus” and International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) enforced austerity sparked an economic and political revolt in Latin America that is still gaining steam. 

Brazil and Argentina paid off their IMF debts and concentrated on building infrastructure and alleviating poverty. The result has been a steady growth rate of more than 4 percent, which, according to Citibank forecasts, will fall next year, but probably not more than a percentage point. In contrast, U.S. and European growth rates are projected to drop to 1.5 percent, or even to zero. 

Latin America is “a better built boat,” says the World Bank’s chief economist for the region, Augusto de la Torre. 

Political independence is on the agenda as well.  

In 2003, no major country on the continent backed the U.S. war in Iraq. In 2005 South America rejected a U.S.-led Free Trade for the Americas plan. And while Washington is hostile to left-led governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, the rest of the continent has rallied behind them.  

When U.S. sponsored right-wingers overthrew the government of Hugo Chavez in 2001, a massive outpouring of resistance and widespread condemnation by other countries in the region reversed the coup, the first time that has happened in Latin America.  

And again, when right-wingers staged a “civil coup” in Bolivia last month, virtually every nation in Latin America backed the left-wing government of Evo Morales government. “We won’t tolerate a rupture in the constitutional order in Bolivia,” warned Marco Aurelio Garcia, Brazilian President Luiz Igacio Lula de Silva’s foreign policy advisor.  

UNASUR declared its “full and firm support for the constitutional government of President Evo Morales.” 

Rather than looking north, countries like Brazil are increasingly developing south-south relations. In 2003, Brazil, India, and South Africa formed the IBSA alliance, which met recently in New Delhi to discuss a joint approach to the current economic crisis, as well as the issues of food security and energy prices. Between them, the countries represent 1.3 billion people and three of the most dynamic economies in the developing outside of China. Trade between the three is projected to top $15 billion by 2010.  

“Developing countries need to learn from the crisis,” says Lula da Silva, and “to construct a new world economic order.” 

The economic crisis has accelerated these moves toward breaking the strangle hold the U.S. has had on the world of finance. “There is a new reality,” says United Nations General Secretary Ban Ki Moon, “new centers of power and leadership in Asia, Latin America and across the newly developing world.” 

German Finance Minister Peer Steinbruck was blunter: “The U.S. will lose its status as the superpower of the world’s financial system. This world will become multi-polar … the world will never be the same.” 

However, it is unlikely that the United States will stand idly aside as Latin America frees itself from the shadow of the Monroe Doctrine. For instance, Washington has recently made a number of moves that have heightened its military profile on the continent. The Bush administration has reactivated its Latin American Fourth Fleet and, according to the magazine Cambio, the United States is developing a major military base at Palanquero, Colombia. 

But beset by economic crisis and bogged down in two unwinnable wars, the colossus of the north no longer wields the clout it once had. “In the past, the door for talks with the United States on any issue had to remain open. We had no choice,” a Brazilian diplomat told Southern Pulse. “Now we can close it if we want.”


Undercurrents: Bus Rapid Transit Demands Greater Public Discussion

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 10:53:00 AM

One of the most important single development decisions that inner East Bay residents can make in the next several years surrounds AC Transit agency’s proposed Bus Rapid Transit system (BRT). Unfortunately, to date only a handful of officials and residents have been paying close attention to the project. That’s got to change. 

AC Transit is proposing running a high-speed bus line from downtown San Leandro through downtown Oakland to downtown Berkeley using the East 14th Street-International Boulevard-Telegraph Avenue route currently operating the 1 and 1R lines. The best-known-and most controversial-aspect of the BRT proposal is to dedicate bus-only lanes in the center of the streets along the route, but other portions of the proposal include modified coordination with traffic lights to eliminate as many red light stops as possible for the BRT buses, as well as the setting up of awning-style partially covered bus stops where tickets can be purchased, allowing “proof of payment” boarding at the front and back of the buses to speed up service by eliminating front-door delays while passengers pay at the fare box, 

In many ways, BRT is set up to function as a sort of light-rail-lite, with buses substituting for trains and dedicated, bus-only center lanes functioning like light light-rail lines without the major expense of putting in rails. 

I fell in love with light-rail some years ago during the time I was working in San Jose and used it frequently to get from the downtown area to the city’s northside civic center, and several times expressed the hope in writing that such a system could be imported to the inner East Bay as a component of our public transportation system. However, I confess that I was initially skeptical when I first saw AC Transit’s BRT proposal. 

There were several reasons for this skepticism. 

The first is that however AC Transit touts the light-rail like qualities of BRT, including speed and proof-of-payment boarding, buses can never duplicate the ease-of-riding that you experience on rail. That was exacerbated by the announced intention by AC Transit to use the 60 foot articulated Van Hools as the backbone of the BRT fleet. Because I’ve never ridden any other articulated bus (the two-portion buses with the accordion-type connection in the middle) other than Van Hools, I cannot say for sure that the problem is with the Van Hool artix in particular or articulated buses in general. In this case, however, it doesn’t matter. In my opinion, the Van Hool articulated buses give the worst ride of any bus I’ve ever ridden, the exact opposite of what I was looking for in light-rail, and something I feel would turn potential new riders away from the BRT system rather than attract them, which would be needed to make it successful. 

A second concern I have with AC Transit’s proposed BRT is that in some key ways, it duplicates the area’s existing high-speed public transit line: BART. AC Transit proposes BRT to run between either the downtown San Leandro or Bayfair BART stations and the downtown Berkeley BART station. Although BRT would directly serve important major transportation corridors that BART does not—all of East 14th in San Leandro, most of International Boulevard in Oakland, and all of the Telegraph Avenue route—its three downtown service points—San Leandro, Oakland, and Berkeley—are all in direct competition with BART. 

God knows that BART is an imperfect system, designed primarily for inter-city travel (between, say, Concord and San Francisco) than inner-city travel within Berkeley or Oakland. However, BART is already in place and is neither going away nor going to add any inner-city routes, and so, if we are to look at our transportation needs as a whole rather than AC Transit’s particular needs or wants, a more prudent way to spend any available transportation dollars would be to find ways for AC Transit buses to complement—rather than compete with—the BART line. That would mean buttressing up the AC Transit feeder lines between BART and major inner East Bay street corridors, something which has become more and more neglected as AC Transit has run into financial difficulties. (As an example, while BART runs until midnight, the AC Transit line that connects the BART Coliseum Station and my neighborhood—near International and Allen Temple Church—stops running at 7 p.m. There is no way to get from BART to my house after 7 unless you have driven and parked in the parking lot, can call someone to pick you up, catch a $5 cab, or risk walking in the dark along some of Oakland’s most dangerous streets). 

Another pressing public transportation need not addressed by AC Transit’s proposed BRT is connecting neighborhoods with Oakland and Berkeley’s successful neighborhood commercial centers, such as the Laurel, Grand Avenue-Lakeshore, College Avenue, Piedmont Avenue, Fourth Street, and Solano Avenue. Many of these neighborhood commercial centers have reached capacity not because of lack of demand, but because they simply have no place to accommodate more traffic and parking. A major AC Transit expansion that begins in cooperation with local governments to connect more shoppers with these neighborhood commercial centers would generate additional retail tax revenue for the cities—particularly Oakland, which is in desperate need of such—which could in turn be passed on in part to AC Transit to buck up its own dwindling financial resources. 

Another concern I have with BRT—or any new AC Transit initiative at this time, for that matter—is AC Transit’s current cavalier manner of doing business, which I’ve outlined in detail in a number of columns and Berkeley Daily Planet news articles. I am not ready to declare that this is the result of malfeasance, as some of my friends and newspaper colleagues have done. But as a working journalist who has covered councils, boards, and commissions throughout the Bay Area for several years, it is my feeling that the current AC Transit administration—aided by the board—operates far too loosely with facts and finances for my taste, or my trust, with General Manager Rick Fernandez far too often pulling statistics or strategic reasoning off the top of his head when questioned at board meetings, rather than putting these down on paper in staff reports as they should be, and too often the board going along and not exercising its proper oversight responsibility. Again, I’m not ready to declare this malfeasance, only a sort of mom-and-pop culture of fiscal and administrative looseness that has grown up out years of being out of major scrutiny by either the press or the general public. 

All that being said, there are major reasons why I do not think the inner East Bay public or the three city councils that represent citizens along the proposed BRT line should outright reject BRT. 

When it was first formed by the California legislature in 1957, BART consisted of representatives of five counties (Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, Marin, and San Mateo) and was intended to create a high-speed electric train loop that circled the rim of the bay. The difference between that proposed system and what we have today would have been the inclusion of a connection between San Rafael and San Francisco and San Rafael and Richmond, paralleling the routes of the Golden Gate and San Rafael-Richmond bridges, as well as a southern loop connecting San Mateo and Hayward. No-one in 1957 could envision the Silicon Valley boom out of the orchards and farmland of the Santa Clara Valley, but even a decade later, when BART was actually built, government, development, and transportation visionaries could have been able to see the value of extending the original proposed southwestern terminus down to San Jose, and then back up the eastern bayshore through Hayward and north. 

Had the BART lines been built in that manner in the 1960s, when the price of land right-of-way purchase was exponentially cheaper than now and government funds were more easily had, and if the lines and stations had been configured to accommodate more trains at a time, we would have mitigated some of the Bay Area’s most pressing traffic difficulties of the last 30 years, particularly those connecting the Bay Area with Silicon Valley. Extending BART lines north and south now—and across the bay at its northern point—makes eminent transportation and public policy sense today and eventually, we will almost certainly do it. But the tax dollar and political costs are going to be huge, and far more difficult than if we had done so in the 1960s.  

And that is why we cannot take AC Transit’s BRT off the table, despite its many flaws. At some point, we are going to have to bring back light rail travel to the inner East Bay. We must do so in order to accommodate travel in an increasingly-dense Bay Area in the 22nd century and beyond. Whether such a system is run by AC Transit, by another existing agency, or some new creation or transportation hybrid is beside the current point. BRT’s most controversial aspect—its dedicated bus lanes—will be a major component of that light rail system. If we do not dedicate bus lanes today—to eventually be turned into light rail tracks at some future point—we will have to do it tomorrow, with escalated political problems, economic dislocations and discomfort, and tax costs that will dwarf anything the current BRT proposal could possibly imagine. 

What is most important, the federal money is available now for BRT. At some future point, when we have come to recognize the need, that money may no longer be there. 

This is not meant to overlook or dismiss my concerns—or the concerns of others—-about the BRT proposal in its current form. For one thing, I do not think BRT needs to be wedded to the Telegraph Avenue portion of the line. A major case could be made that for many reasons-including a thoroughfare that is ready-made for dedicated bus lanes and a direct connection to the booming Emeryville retail centers—the northern spur of BRT might more properly run down San Pablo Avenue rather than Telegraph, thence up University to downtown Berkeley. In fact, the kind of residential-retail infill that BRT is supposed to enhance makes far more sense along San Pablo than it does along Telegraph. 

But that is only one suggestion. 

My major point is that while the BRT proposal has major flaws—and while the government-corporate culture at AC Transit itself has problems which desperately need correcting—BRT needs the benefit of a longer view, and a wider discussion base, than it has currently been getting. This is an argument for a greater public and government involvement in the BRT process in order to reform the proposal and make it work. This won’t be the last chance for inner-city public transportation upgrade in the inner East Bay, but if we miss this chance, we or our children will be kicking ourselves and themselves in years to come.


Wild Neighbors: Rossmoor, Spare Those Woodpeckers!

By Joe Eaton
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 10:54:00 AM
An acorn woodpecker and a colony’s granary tree.
Ron Sullivan
An acorn woodpecker and a colony’s granary tree.

I have no idea how what kind of readership the Daily Planet has in Rossmoor. For whatever it’s worth, though, here’s my two cents on the acorn woodpecker controversy. You may recall that the Rossmoor homeowner’s association has obtained a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service permit to execute 50 of the local woodpeckers for malicious destruction of property, namely drilling acorn-storage holes in human residences. 

I’ve been observing acorn woodpeckers in the Bay Area for years, from the Stanford campus to Point Reyes, and have always found these noisy, conspicuous birds engaging. “This sociable woodpecker impresses one as an exceptionally jolly bird,” writes ornithologist Alexander Skutch, “and certainly it is one of the most amusing to watch.”  

More is known about the acorn’s behavior than that of other woodpecker species. UC biologist Walter Koenig, author of Population Ecology of the Cooperatively Breeding Acorn Woodpecker, has monitored the birds at the Hastings Reservation in the Carmel Valley for over 30 years. Remarkable findings have emerged from this research. 

An acorn woodpecker’s world revolves around its granary: usually a tree, sometimes a series of fence posts, a telephone pole, or a building. One group used the radiator of a car. Pines or sycamores are preferred to oaks as storage trees. The quantity of storage space can be mind-boggling: W. Leon Dawson counted 50,000 acorns in one ponderosa pine near Santa Barbara. At the Hastings site, Koenig calculated an average storage rate of 325 acorns per bird per year. 

Few of the stored acorns go to waste. They constitute more than half the woodpecker’s diet for most of the year, supplemented by flying insects, ants, and tree sap. Hatchlings are fed a mix of insects and broken-up acorns, with older chicks receiving proportionately more acorns.  

Each granary is controlled by a breeding group. At its most complex, the family unit may include up to seven co-breeding males, either brothers or a father and his sons; up to three joint-nesting females, sisters or mother and daughters; and up to 10 non-breeding helpers, hatched in previous years, who incubate the eggs, feed the nestlings, and aid in territorial defense. A group may contain as many as 13 individuals.  

It’s not just one big happy family. Breeding males compete for mating opportunities, and females vie to have their own eggs incubated in the nest they share. The first egg laid may be tossed out or eaten by a sibling; perhaps as a result, females often begin with a nonviable “runt” egg. DNA fingerprinting studies suggest inbreeding is extremely rare. If a group loses all its breeders of one sex, their place is taken by a coalition of siblings who had been non-breeding helpers in another family, usually after a prolonged “power struggle” among candidates for the vacancy. 

The origins of this system are not fully understood. Although group size would be advantageous in defending the granary, acorn woodpeckers in Central and South America live in groups but—perhaps because resources are more dependable—don’t store food.  

The full spectrum of group-nesting behavior may emerge only in the most densely populated parts of the acorn woodpecker’s range, like central California. The woodpeckers occur only where two or more oak species grow. Koenig’s study site has five common and two less common oaks. The more species of oaks in an area, the more stable the woodpecker population from year to year. There’s a kind of insurance at work: acorn production, in a one- or two-year cycle depending on the species, is synchronous over a wide area. If canyon live oaks have a bad year, California black oaks may take up the slack. 

A general failure of the acorn crop can have devastating effects. As last season’s food stores dwindle, conflict increases within the group and the birds begin to disperse, the least dominant leaving first. In the worst years, the granary and its surrounding territory may be abandoned. 

A few years back I asked Walter Koenig how Sudden Oak Death Syndrome could impact the acorn woodpecker. “I don’t really know what it could mean for the woodpeckers,” he said, “but as a worst case scenario, if it wiped out coast live oaks, black oaks, and tanbark oaks, we’re talking a considerable decrease in oak species diversity throughout the state (and potentially beyond), which, give that their populations are highly dependent on oak species diversity, would most likely restrict their range significantly.” 

The acorn woodpecker is not on the endangered species list, or any of the less formal watch lists, yet. But that could change if the SOD pathogen spreads. It’s not a good time for indiscriminate killing. Let’s hope whoever is in charge at Rossmoor gives nonlethal control methods more of a chance. See the Lindsay Museum’s web site (www. wildlife-museum.org/wildlife/solutions/woodpecker) for options. 

 

 


About the Hous: Freeing Aesthetics from the Constraints of Economics

By Matt Cantor
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 10:58:00 AM

If the terriers and bariffs are torn down, this economy will grow.—G.W. Bush (Heck if I know what a bariff is but if the terriers get torn down, I’m moving to Canada—M.C.) 

 

From high atop North America (if you accept the Mercator Projection), the Royal Bank of Canada tracks consumer confidence with their program “Consumer Attitudes and Spending by Household” (amusingly acronymed C.A.S.H.) These ratings have plummeted from nearly 70 percent in September ‘08 to about 35 percent this November. In other words, they’ve crashed. Perhaps more than the various stock markets—none of which I understand—the perceived safety or prudence of spending has fallen dramatically this year, foreshadowing a Christmas season that will have Target missing its mark and Amazon up the creek without a blowgun.  

I can’t say that I’m entirely unhappy about all these happenings any more than I’m entirely unhappy about recently high gas prices. I think that our consumer cult(ure) is unhealthy on several levels, including those of our spiritual life (not religious or even theistic … just spiritual), the health of the planet and the health of our true economy (working people producing good and vital services). Spending is the not the basis of either a healthy economy or a healthy personal life. We all know this but we tend to forget, so I’m here to act, once again, as an annoying but a relatively benign reminder. 

Americans don’t save. Using credit cards they can’t afford, they try to impress people they don’t like by buying things they don’t need. The instability of our economy started at home and that’s where it continues to crumble. The housing crisis is certainly as good an example of misguided spending as any and it is clearly near the core of the current economic crisis. While home ownership is a very desirable thing when it’s within our means, when it’s beyond our means, it’s beyond our means. Selling someone a mortgage they can’t afford to keep up is a crime that should be punishable by business failure. Don’t get me started—well, that ship would seem to have sailed, so my apologies. 

The other day I met a young woman who impressed me very much. Her name is Hyland. She does own a home and she has paid the mortgage. She bought her house on the other side of the tracks, as it were, and she’s just fine with that. It’s part of living within her means, which she does uncommonly well. The house is sparse and clean and I was so envious at this alone that it was actually physically painful in much the way that one yearns for ice cream or youth or the ability to undo a really nasty faux pas. Her house is full of color and light and not too much of anything else. Without spending a lot of money, she has achieved a kind of perfection. 

Her attic is one of those that cannot be called a proper living space for reasons including ceiling height, floor strength and proper ingress (stairway.) But it is lively, being neatly arrayed with a score of clear totes containing the archive of her life. Things that would have been piled up in my home (and yours, perhaps?) are filed away and labeled with amusing cards in the front that make it easy to see what each contains. Clearly, she has not voided her life of all memorabilia but she has wrangled them in such a way as to allow for breath, space and clarity.  

This allows her living room, kitchen, the bedroom and bath to be nearly empty of extra stuff. These rooms feature thoughtfully chosen textures and colors, bits of ancient memory in the form of a deliberately remaindered bit of linoleum (evoking history almost reverentially) and various delicious bits of wonder culled from the salvage yards. These include common vessels of glass (I share this love of glass) and cans with labels from 70 years ago. 

She commissioned her long-time friend Brian to construct several pieces of very simple built-in furniture, each cleverly designed to serve exactly as needed. None look fancy or ostentatious but each seems as though it belonged there from the time that this very simple 800-to-900-square-foot house was built.  

Color and light are emphasized in each small item and nothing is fancy. In other words, Hyland made no purchases to please the neighbors or a buyer. She was filling specific needs and providing stewardship of a craftsman and a friend.  

Hyland is not afraid of color, and what a blessing this is. There is color everywhere and it’s so very refreshing. (How I ache from looking at white, white, white.) The front is a scheme of two colors, the back a different pair. Each room has its own set of colors and each evokes its own feeling. Again, there are very few objects/furnishings and there is plenty of room to dance, to plop down on the floor or to start a project. 

Now, Hyland is not without her many bits of salvage and discovery. The basement—thank goodness for basements—is filled with tools and art objects. There’s an enormous wooden mold for a ship’s propeller, for example, probably from the Kaiser Richmond shipyards of WWII. She somehow obtained several massive chests of drawers of the kind used in industry for parts storage. Opening one revealed a nutcracker. I imagine that the others contain marbles, upholstery tools, pink-pearl erasers and paint brushes. 

While seeming lavish and, sensually, almost opulent, this home contains virtually nothing bought new at any store in recent years. The luxury comes from space, color, light and order; from a joy found in ordinary immemoria. An old toy, some beaded-board planks lining a wall, an ancient jar. 

With this aesthetic, Hyland is pretty recession-proof. Yes, she does need to pay the mortgage, but she’s not working her life away. She doesn’t make a financier’s earnings and doesn’t need to. She earns a living by selling houses, doing graphic design and editing copy—and she has time and has crafted a life for herself that leaves me somewhat dumbfounded. (And I don’t generally lack for words as you, dear reader, can attest. If you’d like to join me in admiring her home, you can see bits of it at hylandbaron.com.)  

So back to my initial point. With respect to our houses, there are many things we can do to avoid going bankrupt whilst making these places serve us. First is to give up on doing it the way the Joneses do. Leave the granite in the ground (I hear some of it’s radioactive, anyway). The green cost of shipping granite across the sea is untenable and it’s also becoming so common that Formica is starting to carry the shock of the new by comparison.  

Second: Visit the salvage yards. Once you’ve begun to see what’s missing in your space, see if something used can fill the bill. If it needs alteration, you can invest in the local economy by hiring a craftsperson to shape, install and paint something that’s one quarter the cost of new. You can give Kermit a run for his greenness when you use something old, as you will be combating dozens of significant ways in which the manufacture of new goods is ravaging this planet (deforestation, shipping and manufacturing CO2, land filling, to name just a few.)  

A client of mine, Lara, a scientist, mother and homeowner, is currently rehabbing much of her house. She has elected to reuse her cabinets, feeling that they are still perfectly adequate. She also plans to not to install a new one as she builds out a new kitchen. Why not? Her current dishwasher idles in mechanical indolence below the counter where hand-washed dishes rest in a disk rack. She is making reasonable choices based on actual need-how refreshing!  

If you must buy new, consider where things are made (shipping being a major element in the destructive impact of each new thing, especially if it is weighty.) Consider that what makes a space wonderful may be less a function of what you put into it than what you take out of it; and less a function of money than of good fundamental design.  

For those acquiring new homes, My friend, realtor Leif Jenssen, likes to cite that it’s best to wait a year or so before doing any major remodeling simply because it will take that long to begin to discern the real deficiencies in the new place. Also, it can take a year to figure out where you spend most of your time, where it’s too dark, and so forth.  

The recession isn’t likely to leave us any time soon and the value of your home—if you’re lucky (lucky?) enough to own one—may remain static or even drop in the coming years. Further, many will have to make do with smaller incomes and all of us would be wise to save more and spend less.  

Hyland’s lesson—which she lives but does not preach—is that happiness, aesthetic gratification and sensible home maintenance need not break the bank. In fact, none of these things can be found at the bank. They are obtained through the interest and engagement of active minds and eager hearts. 


Arts & Events

Arts Calendar

Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:47:00 AM

WEDNESDAY, NOV. 26 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Berkeley Poetry Slam with host Charles Ellik and Three Blind Mice, at 8 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Tangonero at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Tango dance lesson at 7:30 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

La Verdad at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Salsa dance lessons at 8:30 p.m. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

THURSDAY, NOV. 27 

HAPPY THANKSGIVING 

FRIDAY, NOV. 28 

THEATER 

Aurora Theatre “The Devil’s Disciple” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 7 p.m. at 2081 Addison St. through Dec. 7. Tickets are $40-$42. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org 

Berkeley Rep “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” at 8 p.m. at the Roda Theater, 2015 Addison St, through Dec. 14. Tickets are $13.50-$71. 647-2949. berkeleyrep.org 

Berkeley Rep “The Arabian Nights” Tues.-Sun. at the Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St., through Jan. 4. Tickets are $27-$71. 647-2949. berkeleyrep.org 

Contra Costa Civic Theater “Greater Tuna” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at 951 Pomona Ave., El Cerrito, through Dec. 7. 524-9132. www.ccct.org  

Impact Theatre “Tallgrass Gothic” Thurs.-Sat at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean, to Dec. 20. Tickets are $10-$17. 464-4468. impacttheatre.com 

Masquers Playhouse “Do I Hear a Waltz?” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2:30 p.m. at 105 Park Place, Pt. Richmond, through Dec. 20. Tickets are $20. 232-4031. www.masquers.org 

Women’s WIll “Holiday Memories” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at the Pardee Home Museum, 672 11th St., Oakland. Tickets are $10-$15. 420-0813. www.womanswill.org 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Melissa Rivera in a birthday tribute to Silvio Rodriguez at 8:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12. 849-2568.  

Golden Dragon Acrobats at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $24-$46. 642-9988.  

Moodswing Orchestra at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $10-$13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Blame Sally at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50-$20.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Loose Ends at 9 p.m. at Maxwell’s, 341 13th St., Oakland. Cost is $15. 839-6169. 

Pomegranate, The Patrick Winningham Band at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Jerry Kennedy, acoustic soul, at 7:30 p.m. at 33 Revolutions, 10086 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito. 898-1836. 

Nine Wives at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Jinx Jones Trio at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Eric Benet at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $26-$30. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SATURDAY, NOV. 29 

CHILDREN  

“Coppelia, the Doll with the Porcelain Eyes” a puppet show at 11 a.m., 2 and 4 p.m. at Children’s Fairyland, 699 Bellevue Ave., Oakland. Cost is $6. 452-2259.  

EXHIBITIONS 

“Out of Darkness” A show of Winter Solstice altars at Oakopolis, 447 25th St., Oakland. 663-6920.  

FILM 

“Our Hospitality” A Buster Keaton film for all ages at 3 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Golden Dragon Acrobats at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $24-$46. 642-9988.  

Yancie Taylor Jazztet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Glen Washington, reggae, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $20. 525-5054.  

Laurie Lewis, Tom Rozum & Friends at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50-$20.50. 548-1761.  

Don Carlos, reggae, at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $15-$20. 548-1159.  

The Luke Thomas Trio at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

The Melatones, Spidermeow, Dave Gorssman at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082.  

Hatchet, Fog of War, Witchaven at 7 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $8. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, NOV. 30 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Chamber Music Sundaes, featuring San Francisco Symphony musicians and friends, at 3 p.m. at St John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Tickets are $20-$25 at the door. 415-753-2792.  

Golden Dragon Acrobats at 3 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $24-$46. 642-9988.  

Cynthia Davis at 4 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island. Cost is $7. 841-JAZZ.  

Jane Lenoir & Calvin Keys Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ.  

Mahea Uchiyama, at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054.  

Irish Christmas at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $22.50-$23.50. 548-1761.  

MONDAY, DEC. 1 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“The Importance of Words” with Christine Hutchins, Albany Poet Laureate at 12:30 p.m. at Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave., Albany. 526-3720, ext. 16. 

Eric Drooker discusses his paintings and his graphic novels at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Thomas Lynch reads Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

Poetry Express with Larry Beresford at 7 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. 644-3977. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Mike Vax Jazz Orchestra at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $8-$15. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

TUESDAY, DEC. 2 

CHILDREN 

First Stage Children’s Theater Company “Mystery on Mulligan’s Mountain” at 7:30 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $5-$7 at the door.  

Nutcracker Children’s Dance Program for ages 4 and up at 6:30 p.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043.  

EXHIBITIONS 

Oakland Art Association Group Show on display at the Rockridge Library, Community Gallery, 5366 College Ave. to Dec. 30. 597-5017. 

“Walls” Paintings by Joel Isaacson on contemporary social and political concerns, at Flora Lamson Hewlett Library, 2400 Ridge Rd. Exhibition runs to Jan. 30. 649-2500.  

FILM 

Martha Colburn’s Collage Animations with the filmmaker in person at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“The Power of Myth in Movies” with Richard Stromer at 7:30 p.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. Cost is $40. 525-0302, ext. 306. 

Jack and Adele Foley and Ivan Arguelles read their poetry at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Sauce Piquante at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Singers’ Open Mic with Ellen Hoffman at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Christian Scott at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$16. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Laura Klein/Ted Wolff jazz duo at 7 p.m. at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198. 

WEDNESDAY, DEC. 3 

FILM 

“Helvetica” Gary Hustwit’s film celebrating the 50th anniversary of the popular typeface at 6 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak sts., Oakland. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Janet Doell discusses “CALS Mini Guide to Some Common California Lichens” at 5:30 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585. www.universitypressbooks.com 

Jan Frazier reads from “When Fear Falls Away” at 7 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Vince Ho, Christmas pastoral organ music, at 12:30 p.m. at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, 1501 Washington Ave., Albany. Free, donations welcome. 525-1716. 

Loose Wig! at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $8. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Jewish Songwriter’s Night with Saul Kaye, Gary Lapow and Elana Jagoda at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

“Salute to Billy Pilgrim” Blues jam and benefit at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Whiskey Brothers, old-time and bluegrass at 9 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Orquestra Universal at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Salsa dance lessons at 8:30 p.m. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Christian Scott at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$16. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

THURSDAY, DEC. 4 

THEATER 

Nursha Project of the Oakland Public Theater “Children of the Last Days” Written and performed by Thandiwe Thomas De Shazor Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at The Noodle Factory Performing Arts Center, 1255 26th St., #207 at Union, Oakland. Tickets are $9-$20.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

International Body Music Festival a lecture on the origins of body music with Crosspulse Artistic Director Keith Terry and others at 8 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak sts., Oakland. Tickets are $5-$10. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

Osha Neumann reads from “Up Against the Wall Motherfker: A Memoir with Notes on Reason, Obsession, and the Dream of Revolution” at 7 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $5-$10. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Ronald Sundstrom reads from “The Browning of America” at 6 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585. www.universitypressbooks.com 

Poetry Flash with Peter Neil Carroll and Jared Smith at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Eliyahu & Qadim, music of the Near East, at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $12-$15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

George Coles & Vive le Jazz at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Kelly Park and Friends at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $8. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

The Sonando Project, Michael Bello and Kevin Odea at 9 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5-$7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

John Seabury at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Jesse Michaels, Kevin Seconds at 7:30 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

B-Side Players at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $14-$20. 238-9200.  

FRIDAY, DEC. 5 

THEATER 

Altarena Playhouse “A Taffeta Christmas” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Altarena Playhouse, 1409 High St., Alameda, through Dec. 21. Tickets are $17-$20. 523-1553. www.altarena.org 

Aurora Theatre “The Devil’s Disciple” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 7 p.m. at 2081 Addison St. through Dec. 7. Tickets are $40-$42. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org 

Berkeley Rep “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” at 8 p.m. at the Roda Theater, 2015 Addison St, through Dec. 14. Tickets are $13.50-$71. 647-2949. berkeleyrep.org 

Berkeley Rep “The Arabian Nights” Tues.-Sun. at the Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St., through Jan. 4. Tickets are $27-$71. 647-2949. berkeleyrep.org 

“Bruising for Besos” A solo play examining domestic violence, written and performed by Adelina Anthony, Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$13. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Contra Costa Civic Theater “Greater Tuna” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at 951 Pomona Ave., El Cerrito, through Dec. 7. 524-9132. www.ccct.org  

Impact Theatre “Tallgrass Gothic” Thurs.-Sat at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean, to Dec. 20. Tickets are $10-$17. 464-4468. impacttheatre.com 

Masquers Playhouse “Do I Hear a Waltz?” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2:30 p.m. at 105 Park Place, Pt. Richmond, through Dec. 20. Tickets are $20. 232-4031. www.masquers.org 

Nursha Project of the Oakland Public Theater “Children of the Last Days” Written and performed by Thandiwe Thomas De Shazor Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at The Noodle Factory Performing Arts Center, 1255 26th St., #207 at Union, Oakland. Tickets are $9-$20.  

EXHIBITIONS 

“L.A. Paint” Gallery Tour with Phil Linhares, curator and Ron Tuner at 7 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak sts., Oakland. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

NIAD 25th Anniversary Retrospective Works by artists with developmental and other disabilities. Artist reception at 6 p.m. at Pro Arts Gallery, 550 Second St., Oakland. Exhibition runs to Jan. 13. 763-9470. 

“Suenos Mensajeros/Dream Messengers” Works by Luz Marina Ruiz. Reception at 6 p.m. at NoneSuch Space, 2865 Broadway at 29th St., 2nd flr., Oakland. 625-1600. 

“Out of Darkness” A show of Winter Solstice altars. Opening reception Dec. 5 at 7 p.m. at Oakopolis, 447 25th St., Oakland. 663-6920. 

“Plein Air Watercolors” by Anne Poley, Annetta Fox, and Linda Oppen. Open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park, through Dec. 28. 525-2233. 

“Pen, Paint, and Paper Through Time” Paintings, drawings, prints and giclees from 1970 to 2008 by Laura Basha. Opening reception at 5 p.m. at Awaken Cafe, 414 14th St., Oakland. 836-2058. 

“Retrograde: New Work” Opening reception at 6 p.m. at Mercury 20 Gallery, 25 Grand Ave., at Broadway, Oakland. www.mercurytwenty.com 

“Open Space” Works by Zachary Royer Scholz. Opening reception at 6 p.m. at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, 25 Grand Ave., upper level, Oakland. Exhibition runs through Jan. 31. 415-577-7537. www.chandracerrito.com 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Handsome Books: Decorative Bindings of the 19th and 20th Centuries” with Martin Holden at 6 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585. www.universitypressbooks.com 

Deborah Nelson discusses her new book, “The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth” at 7 p.m. at Revolution Books, 2425 Channing Way. 848-1196. 

Dave Weinstein describes “It Came From Berkeley” at 7 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Bay Area Classical Harmonies “Incarnation: Advent and Christmas Music of Eastern Orthodox Traditions” at 7:30 p.m. at Arlington Community Church, 52 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Tickets are $15-$28. 868-0695. www.bayareabach.org 

Larry Vann Band at 7 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak sts., Oakland. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

Deno Gianopoulos, piano, performs works of Mozart, Chopin and Brahms, at 8 p.m. at The Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Cost is $10-$15. www.hillsideclub.org 

Ballet Flamenco José Porcel at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $24-$48. 642-9988.  

Linda Tillery and the Cultural Heritage Choir at 8 p.m. at Sacred Space at Rudramandir 830 Bancroft Way, at 6th. TIckets are $25-$30. 486-8700.  

Dick Hindman Trio at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $15-$18. 845-5373.  

Eric Swinderman’s Quintet “Straight Outta Oakland” at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Bongo Love, Chinyakare Ensemble, music from Zimbabwe, at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $12-$15. 525-5054.  

House Jacks at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $20.50-$21.50. 548-1761.  

The Royal Deuces, The High Rhythm Hustlers at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $8. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Social Unrest, Arnocorps, United Defiance at 7:30 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $8. 525-9926. 

The Green Machine at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

MURS, hip hop, at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $15-$20. 548-1159.  

Gato Barbieri at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $18-$30. 238-9200.  

 

 

 

SATURDAY, DEC. 6 

CHILDREN  

Los Amiguitos de La Peña with Colibrí at 10:30 a.m. at La Peña. Cost is $5 for adults, $4 for children. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Tony Borders Puppets for 3-7 year olds at 10:30 a.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St., 3rd Flr. 981-6223. 

“Some Babies Sleep” with illustrator Paul Tong at 1 p.m. at Museum of Children’s Art, 538 Ninth St., Suite 210, Oakland. 456-8770. www.mocha.org 

Jean Paul Valjean “Short Attention Span Circus” Sat. and Sun. at 1:30 and 2:30 p.m. at Children’s Fairyland, 699 Bellevue Ave., Oakland. Cost is $6. 452-2259. www.fairyland.org 

Andy Z at 11 a.m. at Studio Grow, 1235 10th St. Cost is $7. 526-9888. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Lines of Communication” A group art show at 4th Street Studio, 1717d 4th St. Reception at 7 p.m. www.fourthstreetstudio.com 

THEATER 

“Playback Theatre” Personal stories shared by audience members instantly transformed by the ensemble into improvised theatre pieces at 8 p.m. at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave. Tickets are $12-$15. 595-5500, ext. 25. www.livingartscenter.org 

Shotgun Players “Macbeth” Thurs.-Sun. at 8 p.m. at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., through Jan. 11. Tickets are $18-$30. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

Stone Soup Improv Comedy at 8 p.m. at Temescal Arts Center, 511 48th St. at Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $6-$9. www.stonesoupimprov.com 

FILM 

“Attack!” with introduction by critic David Thomson at 6 p.m., “Kiss Me Deadly” at 8:45 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Winners of the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles 18th Annual National Literary Awards & 12th Annual PEN Oakland Censorship Award, with keynote address by poet Michael McClure at 2 p.m. at the Rockridge Branch Library, 5366 College Ave., Oakland. Free. 681-5652. 

Bay Area Poets Coalition open reading from 3 to 5 pm. at Strawberry Creek Lodge, 1320 Addison St. Park on the street. 527-9905. 

Harold Davis, featured artist in “100 Views of the Golden Gate” at 7 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Community Chorus & Orchestra “The Geography of Emotions” Selections of Opera Choruses with Marcelle Dronkers, soprano, and Richard Goodman, baritoneat 8 p.m. at St. Joseph The Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. Free, donations greatly appreciated.  

San Francisco Mandolin Orchestra Renaissance and modern mandolin compositions at 7:30 p.m. at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church. 1501 Washington Ave., Albany. Cost is $10-$15. 525-1716 www.sfmandolin.com 

Oakland-East Bay Gay Men's Chorus “Oh What Fun, A Holiday Variety Show” at 7:30 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at Lakeshore Avenue Baptist Church, 3534 Lakeshore Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $12-$20. 800-706-2389. www.oebgmc.org 

Philharmonia Baroque “Natale Barocco” Scarlatti, Corelli, Vivaldi and more at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing. Tickets are $30-$72. 415-252-1288. 

Contra Costa Chorale and Kensington Symphony Orchestra “Tidings of Joy” at 7:30 p.m. at the Unitarian Church of Berkeley, One Lawson Rd., Kensington. Admission is free. 527-2026. 

Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir Holiday Concert at 7:30 p.m. at Paramount Theater, 2025 Broadway, Oakland. Tickets are $5-$30. 465-6400. 

Voci Women's Vocal Ensemble “Voices in Peace VIII: Fire in the Air” at 8 p.m. at St. Mary Magdalen Parish, 2005 Berryman St. Tickets are $17-$20, free for children under 12. 531-8714. www.vocisings.com 

Pacific Boychoir Academy “Harmonies of the Season” at 7 p.m. at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 114 Montecito Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $15-$20. 652-4722. www.pacificboychoiracademy.org 

Senior Chamber Symphony Fall Concert including Mozart’s Magic Flute Overture and Haydn’s Symphony No. 83 by senior members of the Young People’s Chamber Orchestra at 7 p.m. at All Souls Church, 2220 Cedar St. Tickets are $5-$10. www.ypco.org  

Neema Hekmat and Friends “A Musical Journey through Persia” at 5 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $15-$20. 800-838-3006. 

Ballet Flamenco José Porcel at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $24-$48. 642-9988. www.calperformances.net 

Ellen Robinson & Her Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $15. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

MJ Greenmountain with members of Hamsa Lila at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Sotaque Baiano, Brazilian, at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159. www.shattuckdownlow.com 

Tom Russell at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $26.50-$27.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Laurie Antonelli “Intrinsic Music” at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $18. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Fred Randolph Jazz Group at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $3. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Guns for Sebastian at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

The SAGA: Saturday Afternoon Gallery Acoustic, music open mic with Philip Rodriguez at 2 p.m. at Frank Bette Center for the Arts, 1601 Paru St., at corner of Lincoln and Paru, Alameda. Donations appreciated. 931-7646. 

Burlesque ‘n’ Brass, featuring Hot Pink Feathers & Blue Bone Express, Orleans-inspired jazz, at 9 p.m. at Café Van Kleef, 1621 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Cost is $10. 763-7711. 

The Devil Makes Three, the Brother Comatose at 9 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $15. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

“Circle Fest 2008” at 7:30 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $8. 525-9926. 

Gato Barbieri at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $18-$30. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SUNDAY, DEC. 7 

EXHIBITIONS 

“L.A. Paint” Tour of the exhibition at 2 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak sts., Oakland. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

FILM 

African Diaspora Film Society “Negroes with Guns” the story of Robert F. Williams who fought racist terrorism of the Jim Crow South, at 2 p.m. at Parkway Theater, 1834 Park Blvd., Oakland. Cost is $5. 814-2400. 

Talk Cinema Berkeley Preview of new independent films with discussion afterwards at 10 a.m. at Albany Twin Theater, 1115 Solano Ave., Albany. Cost is $20. http://talkcinema.com 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

NaNoWriMo Young Writers read from their works at 4 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

Poetry Flash with Rick Barot and Victoria Chang at 3 p.m. at Diesel, 5433 College Ave., Oakland. 653-9965. 

Egyptology Lecture “Horses and Chariots in Ancient Egypt” with Kathy Hansen, independent scholar at 2:30 p.m. at Barrows Hall, Room 20, Barrow Lane and Bancroft Way, UC campus. 415-664-4767. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Community Chorus & Orchestra “The Geography of Emotions” Selections of Opera Choruses with Marcelle Dronkers, soprano, and Richard Goodman, baritoneat 4:30 p.m. at St. Joseph The Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. Free, donations greatly appreciated. 

Elizabeth Blumenstock, violin, perfroms Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D minor at 4 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Tickets are $10-$20. 684-7563. 

Oakland-East Bay Gay Men's Chorus “Oh What Fun, A Holiday Variety Show” at 5 p.m. at Lakeshore Avenue Baptist Church, 3534 Lakeshore Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $12-$20. 800-706-2389. www.oebgmc.org 

“Messiah-Sing” in Baroque style, at 6 p.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church, One Lawson Rd., Kensington. Suggested donation $15, no one turned away. 525-0302. 

Philharmonia Baroque “Natale Barocco” Scarlatti, Corelli, Vivaldi and more at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing. Tickets are $30-$72. 415-252-1288. 

Soli Deo Gloria “Mixed Blessings” at 3:30 p.m. at St. Philip Neri, 3108 Van Buren St., Alameda. Tickets are $20-$25. www.sdgloria.org 

“Hidden Saints and Drunken Sages” Songs and stories inspired by Jewish spirituality at 7 p.m. at JCC East Bay, 1414 Walnut. Tickets are $10-$18. 848-0237. 

Nicolas Bearde’s Holiday Jazz and Blues Concert at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $15. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Po’Girl at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

 

 


‘Arabian Nights’ Comes to Berkeley Rep

By Ken Bullock Special to the Planet
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:48:00 AM

The hook is perhaps the greatest, besides the most famous, narrative device of all time: a ruler, cheated on by his consort, marries again and again—but only for a night, executing each new bride at dawn. When he demands the hand of his prime minister’s daughter, the young woman proves resourceful, telling him enchanting stories that spawn new tales, each posing a cliffhanger as morning arrives. Many nights go by, and she is spared each dawn, until she presents her overwhelmed husband with the children he has fathered. 

Jorge Luis Borges, an ardent admirer, remarked that each of the various titles this medieval collection is known by has an equally beautiful ring: “A Thousand Nights and a Night,” in its original Arabic; “A Thousand and One Nights” in most European languages—and in English, The Arabian Nights, which Mary Zimmerman calls her newest venture, now onstage at Berkeley Rep. 

The Rep’s production, which Zimmerman wrote during rehearsal and directed, retells Scherezade and Shahryar’s story and the tale-telling that sprang from it. The cast of 15, many who have worked with Zimmerman before, play multiple parts, all at one point or another becoming storytellers. There’s the music of dumbek and oud, touches of dance, and much movement theater across Daniel Ostling’s set, strewn with carpets and pillows, with lamps lowered from the flies, on The Rep’s angular Thrust Stage. As the modular vignettes string out into full-blown stories, interrupted by interlocking tales-within-tales, the air of improvisation hangs like perfume in the air. 

In some ways, that’s the strongest flavor, despite the true virtuosity of the original tales and the efforts of the young cast—in particular, Sofia Jean Perez as Scherezade and Jesse J. Perez and Melina Kalomas in various roles—to bring them to life. But with all the well-meaning intent (Zimmerman said she was inspired by The Nights’ opposite, media spins on the Mideast since the Gulf War), competence of execution, and attempts to bring across cultural nuances, like the rich hyperbole of the high caliphal medieval prose, the synaesthesia of setting, music, movement, voice, even scent—what once was admiringly referred to as “Oriental”—the production can’t shake something of the banality of sketch comedy routines or the resonance of cable TV. 

Modern theater has been, in some ways, the search for marriage between the episode, the tableau (or “pregnant moment”) and that oxymoron, the spontaneous act of rigorous movement. Soviet director V.S. Meyerhold called a way he staged scenes with acrobatic movement to bring out or counterpoint meaning “attractions,” from circus parlance.  

Many of these techniques found their way into improv exercises, from which sprang contemporary sketch comedy, and emulations of the old avant-garde in performance art—which, often media-driven, can resemble improv comedy routines, which the media has embraced, 

Zimmerman’s Arabian Nights has too much sense of riffing, of being “bitty.” The profound, sometimes contradictory sensibilities of the original tales and how they intertwine can be better found in some of the—curiously incomplete—adaptations and inspired emulations of The Arabian Nights: Jan Potocki’s Manuscript Found in Saragossa (inspired as he read The Nights to his sick wife), but not the extraordinary and hilariously acted film by Wojcek Has, Saragossa Manuscript, tale told within delirious tale in flashback. Neither is Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Arabian Nights (last of a trilogy of tale-telling, after The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales)—or the work of two living filmmakers who are also close to theater and improvisation, innovators of new ways to weave diverse strands into open-ended, ongoing stories, beyond the heady brew, even, of “magical realism”: Jacques Rivette, Raul Ruiz.


Impact Theatre Stages ‘Tailgrass Gothic’ at La Val’s

By Ken Bullock Special to the Planet
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:49:00 AM

Tailgrass Gothic, Impact’s production of Melanie Marnich’s new play, in the netherworld below La Val’s Pizzeria, cleverly resets Middleton and Rowley’s harrowing tragedy of 1622 in the modern American Midwest (after the bloody conclusion to Impact’s last Jacobean thriller, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, “Heartland” already takes on an eerier tone of meaning).  

On Sarah Coykendall’s set—a bed strewn with hay, aggie implements along the walls and a leatherette backseat of a car thrown over wooden crates as a bench—the action plays out: adultery in a tight, church-going community, where everybody knows everybody else. And everybody seems to talk to each other, or themselves, over a beer, about what they imagine is happening in everybody else’s lives, or about whether they believe in strange appearances, ghost stories ... 

Directed by Mina Morita, using every inch of the little basement playing area, the plot unravels like a combination of film noir with daytime TV, wisely without intermission: Laura (Mayra Gaeta) can’t get over her intoxication with Daniel (Chris Celotti) or her aversion to her abusive husband Tin (Joseph Rende), who in turn brags about his hot connubial bliss to his buddy Scotto (Bryan Quinn), showering Scotto’s hints of Laura’s infidelity with belittling invective. 

Laura’s confidante is her old friend Mary (Elissa Dunn), who has more than a sisterly affection for her friend. One of the clever links to the Jacobean stage is Mary’s sword-swallowing act with her brother’s discarded blade—“It’s just a trick!”—and its repetition later under more ghastly, but still tricky, circumstances. As on the “ancient English stage,” there are both portents and appearances, naturalized to the workaday homilies of America’s Breadbasket. 

Lurking almost in the shadows is the strangely smiling loner, Filene (Stacz Sadowski), “not a body with a scar-a scar with a body”—who offers his services to Laura out of a perverse gallantry, not expecting love in return, but apparently just because she’s caught his eye—as different. 

Sadowski and Dunn have the plum roles in this kind of show. As Orson Welles once put it, Renaissance English tragedy is close to melodrama, and in melodrama, the villain is always more interesting than the hero. Or heroine. Both take the bloody baton and run with it. But, as in ‘Tis Pity, despite any and all rough edges, all the players—and the play—come through when it counts, up to the quick, admirably dry conclusion, so chilling it smarts. 

Marnich calls her play “actually a ghost story, a tale about being haunted by one’s desires, actions and mistakes.” When the script and the show bring that to the fore, it’s most theatrical, paradoxically a palpable feeling—something you can see, hear, smell, taste ... was it Democritus who wrote, “All senses are forms of touch”?


CYNTHIA DAVIS SINGS AT ANNA’S JAZZ ISLAND

Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:49:00 AM

Cynthia Davis sings jazz standards, with Eric Shifrin on piano, Sunday, Nov. 30, 4-6 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island. 2120 Allston Way. $7, donation.


East Bay: Then and Now—The House of Three Charlies Conceals Many Stories

By Daniella Thompson
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:50:00 AM
2425 Hillside Ave. today.
By Daniella Thompson
2425 Hillside Ave. today.
The Charles C. Hall house, a remodeled Victorian featuring some Colonial Revival elements.
Hall family collection, BAHA archives
The Charles C. Hall house, a remodeled Victorian featuring some Colonial Revival elements.
Charles C. Hall’s sumptuous library at 2425 Hillside Ave.
Hall family collection, BAHA archives
Charles C. Hall’s sumptuous library at 2425 Hillside Ave.
The Hall brothers, Francis, Frederick, and Charles.
Hall family collection, BAHA archives
The Hall brothers, Francis, Frederick, and Charles.

Berkeley is full of storied buildings, but few can boast the sheer historic wealth concealed within the walls of the Neo-Georgian brick mansion overlooking Hamilton Creek at 2425 Hillside Avenue. Since 1971 the home of the Tibetan Nyingma Meditation Center (Padma Ling), the building had altogether different beginnings, as well as a different appearance. 

It began its life circa 1890, on a double lot in the Batchelder tract, built as the home of Charles Denslow Ford (b. 1858), a lumber man from Mendocino. Ford’s father, Jerome Bursley Ford (1821-1889), was a forty-niner from Vermont. In the spring of 1851, his San Francisco employer, the notorious entrepreneur Henry Meiggs, dispatched Jerome north to attempt a salvage from the clipper Frolic, which had foundered the previous year on the Mendocino coast.  

The ship had been carrying a valuable cargo of Chinese imports from Hong Kong to San Francisco, but all Ford managed to espy of the fabled hoard were elegant silk shawls that adorned some of the local Pomo women. No matter. Jerome Ford found something far more valuable—an abundance of gigantic redwood trees—and walked back to San Francisco to report his discovery. 

Meiggs ordered a sawmill from the east coast and purchased the ship Ontario to deliver the mill to Mendocino. Meanwhile, Ford drove a team of oxen overland, arriving in June 1852. He purchased land for the mill and became its first supervisor. Two years later, when Meiggs became overextended and fled to South America, Ford and Edwards C. Williams took over his California Lumber Manufacturing Company and restructured it as the Mendocino Mill Company. 

Jerome B. Ford became one of Mendocino’s leading citizens. He was instrumental in establishing the Mendocino Presbyterian Church and was the major donor for its Gothic Revival sanctuary building, a California Landmark designed by S.C. Bugbee and Son of San Francisco. (This church served as the model for the Church of the Good Shepherd in West Berkeley, which was designed by Sumner Bugbee’s son, Charles L. Bugbee.) Ford’s house on Mendocino’s Main Street now serves as a museum and visitor center. 

In 1873, Ford moved to Oakland for the benefit of his children’s education. His eldest son, Chester, succeeded him in the business, which was now called the Mendocino Lumber Company. The second son, Charles, would become the company’s treasurer and work in its San Francisco office. 

About 1883, Charles married the statuesque Nellie Lincoln. Seven years later, they built an imposing Victorian house on Hillside Avenue in Berkeley. At the time, the area was open land consisting of grassy slopes and wooded canyons; little stood in the way of the uninterrupted vistas opening to the north, west, and south. Perhaps this home was too isolated. As the Fords’ daughter Aline reached “coming out” age, the family decamped for San Francisco. Aline, reportedly as handsome as her mother, entered society and soon found an eligible husband in Lewis Pierce, a wealthy Solano County stock rancher. 

In 1899, the Fords’ Berkeley house was acquired by another Charles, this one the Maine-born master mariner Charles Edward Foye (1830-1913). Still active in his seventieth year, Captain Foye made the acquisition shortly after moving his office from San Francisco to Oakland. Foye and his wife Harriet were childless, but their household usually included some relatives. Apparently the Berkeley residence was less than ideal, for Foye returned to San Francisco the following year, although he continued to own the house until the summer of 1904. 

On Aug. 2, 1904, the Oakland Tribune published a deed transfer of four lots in Block B of the Batchelder tract—including the Foye house—from Charles and Harriet Foye to Charles C. Hall. In December 1906, Foye sold Hall the rest of Block B for a reported $1,000. 

Charles Crocker Hall (1836-1914) was a retired publisher from Syracuse, New York. Born in Ellington, Conn., he was the son of John Hall, a Yale graduate, county judge, and founder of the Ellington School, a highly regarded college preparatory. Judge Hall was the author of a popular series of reading books, designed for various levels of primary and secondary instruction, as well as of a book on resurrection, titled How Are the Dead Raised, and With What Body Do They Come?, published posthumously. 

Judge Hall married twice and fathered 16 children. His first wife, Sophia, delivered the eldest 11 within a span of 20 years before departing this world, no doubt utterly exhausted. The second wife, Harriet, bore five children in eight years and was fortunate to have survived her husband. 

The scholarly Judge Hall instilled in his children a love for books, and several of his sons went into the book trade. The first was Levi Wells Hall (b. 1818), who ran a bookstore in Springfield, Mass., where his younger brother, Francis Hall (1822-1902), clerked in the late 1830s. In 1841, Francis began to clerk at a bookstore in Syracuse, NY, and Wells subsequently bought it. A year later, with financial assistance from Wells, Francis opened his own store in Elmira, NY. By the 1850s, his store had become the gathering place for local intellectuals and abolitionists. 

In 1858, Francis sold the store to his younger brothers, Frederick (b. 1827) and Charles Crocker, and the following year departed for Japan in the wake of Townsend Harris’s newly negotiated treaty of Amity and Commerce with that country. During his seven years in Japan, he wrote close to seventy articles for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. An abridged version of his 900-page journal is available in paperback as Japan Through American Eyes: The Journal of Francis Hall, 1859-1866. 

Quick to seize a commercial opportunity, Francis co-founded the firm of Walsh, Hall & Company at the treaty port of Kanagawa. It became the leading American trading house in Japan. His fortune made, Francis returned to Elmira but continued traveling and, next to Bayard Taylor, was considered the greatest American traveler of his time. 

Frederick and Charles renamed their Elmira business Hall Brothers, listed as booksellers, stationers and dealers in wallpaper. An ad they placed in the 1863 Elmira directory described the concern as “The Cheap Cash Bookstore” and promised “Where can always be found a well-selected stock of miscellaneous & standard books, including all the latest publications of the day. Any foreign or American book procured to order. School books of every variety used in this section.” 

In 1872, Charles married Mary A. Corbett of San Francisco, and six years later, with wife and two children in tow, established himself in Syracuse and began publishing Graves’ Printed Index. The Library Journal, official organ of the Library Associations of America and the United Kingdom, reviewed the Index in 1881: “If you index borrowers, books, authors, subjects, periodicals, or anything, this will be found invaluable. Half the work is printed and so ingeniously arranged and notched that the exact word can be opened to at a single motion. After protracted use we give this Index the highest place as a library labor-saver and strongly recommend its trial.” 

Graves’ Printed Index made Charles Crocker Hall a wealthy man. He retired from business in 1903 and came to Berkeley the following year. He appears to have remodeled his new home extensively, judging by photos of his palatial library and by the Palladian windows—a feature alien to Victorian architecture—on some of the gables. 

Mrs. Hall soon threw herself into local affairs, joining women’s clubs and suffrage organizations. In December 1905, she hosted over a hundred ladies of the Berkeley Political Equality Club in an afternoon lecture by Louise Benson on the subject of “Divorce, Race Suicide and Marriage.” Amidst great hubbub, Mrs. Benson stated, “Divorce is not a menace to social morality. It is a remedy that is demanded by a social disease,” and argued for women’s participation in law-making powers, especially where laws that bear most directly upon women’s interests are concerned. 

The Alameda County Equal Suffrage Society held its 1906 and 1907 conventions at the Hall residence. By 1908, Mary Hall was vice-president of the Political Equality Club (the president was Mary McHenry Keith, wife of the famous painter), and the next year saw her the president of the Town and Gown Club as well as of the Alameda County Political Equality Club, declaring to the Oakland Tribune that “Suffrage will come to pass sooner or later.” 

After Charles Hall’s death in 1914, none of his adult children chose to live at 2425 Hillside Avenue. His second born, Frederick Francis Hall (1876-1955), lived for many years on the other side of Hamilton Creek, at 2411 Hillside Avenue. Another son, John Edward, lived at 2309 Eunice Street. The property was eventually sold to the Delta Tau Delta fraternity, and the latter hired architect Warren C. Perry to design a new chapter house on the site. 

Perry, a graduate of the University of California’s School of Architecture and one of its earliest and longest-serving faculty members, designed the Delta Tau Delta house in 1927, the same year in which he would replace John Galen Howard as director of the school. The building permit, issued on March 8, called for a three-story, 28-room building with brick veneer and a slate roof, to be constructed at a cost of $35,000. The architectural style is Neo-Georgian, stately and dignified. 

By the 1960s, fraternity life had gone out of fashion. In 1971, Delta Tau Delta retrenched (their current house at 2710 Durant Ave. is much smaller), selling its grand house on Hillside Ave. to Lama Tarthang Tulku, founder of the Tibetan Aid Project, who would go on to establish the Nyingma Institute and Dharma Publishing, also in Berkeley (in 1973, the Nyingma Institute acquired the old Psi Upsilon chapter house at 1815 Highland Place). 

Renamed Padma Ling, 2425 Hillside Ave. sports an assortment of Buddhist trappings that are somewhat startling to the novice viewer. Most if it, though, is well-hidden behind shrubbery, concealing, perhaps, stories for future generations. 

 

Daniella Thompson publishes berkeleyheritage.com for the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA).


About the House: Termite Baiting and Integrated Pest Management

By Matt Cantor
Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:51:00 AM

Year ago, my friend Stan Millstein, a protohippie from Brooklyn who, like many, moved to L.A. in the 1960s turned on, tuned in and dropped everything. In L.A., Stan joined a C.R. or consciousness-raising group, which was essential a bull session. This group seemed primarily interested in tackling ethical problems.  

They decided to look at mouse traps and figure out which one worked best and was most ethical. They looked at a lot of mouse traps (this is before the sticky ones). Was it better to let the mouse die slowly in a trap or to smash it to death instantly? What of poisons? Would the kids get to them or the cat? In the end and after much discussion, Stan said, “We decided to live with the mouse.” Mice aren’t all that bad and we could probably all be better about cleaning the kitchen and sealing up the food. 

I don’t think that Stan knew anything about IPM (integrated pest management) but, whether he knew it or not, he had become, at least, to some degree, a proponent and perhaps a practitioner. 

IPM goes back to the years following the Second World War and, like many good things, began in California. The essential idea, which many of us now take for granted, was that a multi-pronged approach was preferable to one of search-and-destroy. (Even the CIA figured out that it was better to strategically take out a leader than to annihilate an entire population, but that’s a little Machiavellian for this discussion.) 

After many years of development, IPM as a science and practice has organized itself to the point where it has six clearly segregated tactics or prongs, if you will. With apologies to the experts, here is my take on each. 

1. Determine acceptable pest levels. Do you really need to kill the mouse? If there are a thousand mice, would it be O.K. to use a method that might be far less toxic or otherwise abhorrent but would only kill 95 percent of them and leave 50 for the cat? Destroying 100 percent of anything is usually far more rigorous than a lesser percentage and often involves collateral effects (such as poisoning yourself and your neighbors) that can be avoided by agreeing on acceptable levels of trouble. 

2. Integrate preventative cultural practices (buy a cat). This is about asking good questions. What grows best where you are? Before treating a plant with a pesticide, can you remove the mildewed leaves. (We’ve done this in our garden where powdery mildew has wrecked havoc upon our squashes, over spraying, I think). Using different wood to build the house (that the local termites don’t like.) 

3. Monitoring. IPM is about studying and responding intelligently and in a well- modulated manner to a perceived problem. This may involve studying insect populations, mold growth, rates of growth of whatever you have, reactions to interlopers or enemies by your subject. By studying insect reproduction or food gathering biology, it’s often much easier to develop a strategy of control. Monitoring or study is the cornerstone of IPM. 

4. Mechanical methods. In the building trades, removal of infested timber would be a mechanical method. In the garden, physically removing snails from plants is another. These are least toxic and often easy but always require monitoring and understanding the limitations of these approaches. No mechanical method can remove all of your pests but might be one part of a very effective system of control. 

5. Biological controls. A very exciting part of IPM is the use of competing organisms or other biological influences to control your subject (enemy?). We haven’t figured out how to get ants to fight off your termites and then go away (did you know that these insects are natural enemies and wage full-scale war upon one another?) but this will surely come. Many folks know that a carton of ladybugs bought at the nursery can be deployed among the roses to consume those pesky aphids, but did you know that this was IPM? Use of microorganisms including bacillus and fungi to control pests are also a part of this category. 

6. Chemical controls. Notice that this is last on the list and a good thing too. Every year, the EPA pulls another few chemicals off the shelf as we discover the long-range ill-effects of various giant molecules (often found cancerous) as another hundred move into our stores and industries. Pesticides vary in toxicity greatly and range from those made from the lovely Chrysanthemum (pyrethrum and its variants) to Nicotine (they told you it wasn’t good for your health right?). Some pesticides merely prevent some essential biological function such as making of a new skin (chitin in the case of the mighty termite) and do not, therefore require nearly the toxicity of something designed to outrightly kill the thing straight off. In an IPM method such as a termite bait trap, one might use one millionth the dose of a chemical otherwise pumped into the soil in a less elegant method. The more strategically we can apply the use of a chemical and the less toxic that chemical to the overall environment, the better for all concerned. 

So how can this methodology be used to address termite issues at your house? Some of this is already happening whether you’re aware of it or not. We are slowly moving away from high volume spraying or soil saturation of carcinogenic pesticides toward those with lower toxicity and, most recently, toward the use of baiting stations. I see these as I walk around houses from time to time but until contacting Bill Quarles at Berkeley’s Bio-Integral Resource Center I didn’t realize just how they worked.  

BIRC publishes a range of periodicals and books that provide practical how-to information on pest control for garden and structure that still manage to provide plenty of scientific data for wannabes like me. The IPM practitioner from Jan/Feb of 2003 is all about the science of controlling termites and included a healthy dose of termite biology. Did you know that over 45 species of termites inhabit the U.S. (a blessedly small number given their near 4,000 species total) and roughly two-thirds are considered pests (I assume that most of this must involve the consumption of our buildings and the like.) 

As of 1990 research in this volume (I guess we backdate that another few years for publication delays), these 30 or so species ravage upwards of 2.5 billion in homes, barns and bridges each year. I guess we can safely double that number to allow for inflation, making it about the budget for the National Science Foundation. 

Curiously, most of the methods discussed in Dr. Quarles newsletter were within grasp of a moderately intrepid homeowner (can it be you, dear reader?). Quarles even specifies some relatively safe toxicants (just a tax oxymoronic, I guess) such as boric acid, that can be bought locally and handled with relative safety (though gloves and a respirator would be well advised). 

This issue gave fairly simple instructions for construction of a bait system that involved mostly common items like PVC piping, cardboard or wooden stakes. Petri dishes were called for but I suspect that you backyard warriors can find substitutes as no single part of these systems appeared to be pivotal once the essential concept was borne. 

A common method in monitoring for termites intriguingly involved setting wooden stakes in a perimeter about the house and then checking them monthly for activity. One method involved using stakes with a hole bored through the center and a cork plug (termites love cork). I guess you’d have to make those with your 18-inch-long drill bit! 

Once these were attacked, the article suggested that some operators could then drop the “recruits” (yes, and the ironies are beyond perfect) into a manufactured bait station built using perforated piping and poisoned cardboard). 

The “recruits” eat the cardboard, carrying a low level of poison bait back to their home below ground. Termites leave a pheromone trail and will be far more likely to return in numbers to this bait station if they’ve first been shown the way in this manner (thus the term, recruit). Once home, termites will regurgitate and share the poisonous munchies with their mates, a behavior known as trophyllaxis. One of the tricks of this method is to find a poison and a dosage that won’t alert the termite or kill them prior to sharing the spoils (so to speak). A well-designed system allows time for thorough distribution of the poison and death of the entire colony (ugh). That said, I’ll now stump (ahem) for a totally different approach. 

Modern housing design requires fundamental “mechanical” prophylaxis regarding termites and a range of other pests. In the case of termites, foundations must be tall enough so that no wooden part of the structure is within eight inches of the ground (used to be six inches but just changed in California). Termites are both xenophobic and photophobic. They like to hide and will avoid coming into view or into the light. They like short stubby foundations that allow them to attack and consume wood without exiting from the safety of the ground. If they must, they will sometimes build masticated tubes of cellulose that allow them to climb the foundation but, like the burglar, they will move on to the next house if yours is a bit too much trouble. 

If you keep woody debris and scrap lumber out of your crawlspace and scoop a bit of the excess soil away along the side of the foundation so that you have a few clear inches below the yummy wooden structure, you are likely to be well protected, remembering all the while that monitoring is the hallmark of IPM. 

In the end, I side with Stan. I really don’t mind termites. Actually, I hear they’re rather nice with a little olive oil and salt and in a world food crisis they’re especially delicious.  

I say, leave the termites alone and build to suit. The alternative is to keep on poisoning the planet until nothing tastes good. 


Community Calendar

Wednesday November 26, 2008 - 10:41:00 AM

WEDNESDAY, NOV. 26 

Golden Gate Birding Walk at Lake Merritt and Lakeside Park. Meet at 9:30 a.m. at the large spherical cage near Nature Center at Perkins and Bellevue. 549-2839.  

“Health for Sale” A documentary on Big Pharma and their policies and actions at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Donation $5. www.Humanist Hall.org 

“Pesticides and the New World Order” Anti-Thanksgiving Potluck with Mitchel Cohen of the No Spray Coalition in New York, at 7 p.m. at Long Haul Info Shop, 3124 Shattuck Ave. Please bring vegetarian food, drinks and poetry to share. 540-0751. 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes and a warm hat. 548-9840. 

Theraputic Recreation at the Berkeley Warm Pool, Wed. at 3:30 p.m. and Sat. at 10 a.m. at the Berkeley Warm Pool, 2245 Milvia St. Cost is $4-$5. Bring a towel. 632-9369. 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Station, corner of Shattuck and Center. Sing for Peace at 6:30 p.m. followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www. 

geocities.com/vigil4peace/vigil 

Teen Chess Club from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. at the North Branch Library, 1170 The Alameda at Hopkins. 981-6133. 

Morning Meditation Every Mon., Wed., and Fri. at 7:45 a.m. at Rudramandir, 830 Bancroft Way at 6th. 486-8700. 

THURSDAY, NOV. 27 

Annual Food Not Bombs Thanksgiving Dinner from 5 to 8 p.m. at at Ashkenaz. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Vegan Thanksgiving Potluck An East Bay tradition for 35 years, from 4 p.m. on in North Berkeley. To RSVP call 562-9934. 

Community Thanksgiving Dinner at 1 p.m. at Lake Merritt United Methodist Church, 1330 Lakeshore Ave., Oakland. Volunteers needed. 465-4793. 

FRIDAY, NOV. 28 

“Back to the Jurassic” Dinosaur activities all weekend at the Lawrence Hall of Science, Centennial Drive below Grizzly Peak. Open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Cost is $6-$11. 642-5132. www.lawrencehallofscience.org 

Santa’s Wonderland Santa arrives noon near Peet’s on Fourth St. then joins his elves at Santa’s Wonderland, 1809 Fourth St. for photos until 7p.m. For other dates see www.FourthStreet.com 

Circle Dancing Simple folk dancing in a circle, no experience or partners needed. Potluck at 7 p.m., Dancing at 8 p.m. at Hillside Community Church, 1422 Navellier St., El Cerrito. Donation of $5 requested. 528-4253. www.circledancing.com 

Berkeley Women in Black weekly vigil from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. Our focus is human rights in Palestine. 548-6310. 

SATURDAY, NOV. 29 

East Bay Sactuary Covenant International Craft Fair with items from Africa, Tibet, Central America, Haiti, Palestine, Asia, Guatemala, Kurdistan, Mexico, and Afghanistan from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at The First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way at Dana St. ebsccraftsfair@yahoo.com 

3rd Annual Arts & Crafts Benefit Show and Sale of antiques and new items in the Arts & Crafts style from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Cost is $5, $20 for 10 a.m. opening. www.HillsideClub.org  

Womyn of Color Arts and Crafts Show, Sat. and Sun. from 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Berkeley Open Studios Sat and Sun. from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. through Dec. 21. 845-2612. www.berkeleyartisans.com 

Berkeley Potters Guild 38th Holiday Sale Sat. and Sun. from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 73 Jones St. at Fourth St. www.berkeleypotters.com 

Artisan Faire Handcrafts and artwork from 40 local artists in the East Bay, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Claremont, 41 Tunnel Rd. Free.  

Recycled Glass Workshop from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Studio One Art Center, 365 45th street, off Broadway, Oakland. For ages 16 and up. To register call 597-5027. 

Close the Farm Help us close the Little Farm and tuck in the animals for the night, from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. at Tilden Little Farm, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Mini-Farmers in Tilden A farm exploration program, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. for ages 4-6 years, accompanied by an adult. We will explore the Little Farm, care for animals, do crafts and farm chores. Wear boots and dress to get dirty! Fee is $6-$8. Registration required. 1-888-EBPARKS. 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden Sat. and Sun. at 2 pm. Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Call to confirm. 841-8732.  

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

Oakland Artisans Marketplace Sat. from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sun. from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Jack London Square. 238-4948. 

SUNDAY, NOV. 30 

East Bay Sactuary Covenant International Craft Fair with items from Africa, Tibet, Central America, Haiti, Palestine, Asia, Guatemala, Kurdistan, Mexico, and Afghanistan from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at The First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way at Dana St. ebsccraftsfair@yahoo.com 

Little Farm Goat Hike Join a short hike with the Little Farm goats as we explore the historic connections between humans and our ungulate friends. For ages 6 and up, at 10:30 a.m. at Tilden Little Farm, Tilden Park 525-2233. 

“Scientific Revolutions and Religion: The Copernican Revolution” with Bill Garrett, Prof. of Religion and Philosophy, JFK Univ., at 10 a.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302, ext. 306. 

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Peace walk around the lake every Sun. Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712. lmno4p.org 

Tibetan Buddhism with Jack Petranker on “Dealing with Uncertainty” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 809-1000. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

MONDAY, DEC. 1 

Festival of Lights from 3 to 6 p.m. in Civic Center Park at Center and Milvia sts. Santa and his elves arrive at 5 p.m., art projects, entertainment, tree lighting at 6 p.m. www.buylocalberkeley.com 

“House and Garden Audit” for home environmental and health safety, with Karen Paulsell of Friends of Sausal Creek at 7 p.m. at Eve Case Room, Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin, at Masonic. 848-9358. www.fivecreeks.org  

“Education & Treatment of Common Eye Diseases” with Dr. Marlena Chu, optometrist at the UC Berkeley School of Optometry, on macular degeneration, glaucoma, cataracts and nutrition benefits and myths, at 10:30 p.m. at West Berkeley Senior Center, 1900 Sixth St. 841-4776 ext. 123. 

Biodiesel 101 Presentation for people new to biodiesel on emissions, homebrewing, types of vehicles and commercial availability at 7:30 p.m. at Biofuel Oasis, 2465 4th St., at Dwight Way. 665-5509. http://biofueloasis.com/bbc 

East Bay Track Club for girls and boys ages 3-15 meets Mon. at 6 p.m. at Berkeley High School track field. Free. 776-7451. 

World Affairs/Politics Discussion Group, for people 60 years and over, meets at 9:45 a.m. at Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave, Albany. Cost is $3.  

TUESDAY, DEC. 2 

Tuesdays for the Birds Tranquil bird walks in local parklands, led by Bethany Facendini, from 7 to 9:30 a.m. Today we will visit the Berkeley Meadow in Eastshore State Park. Call for meeting place and if you need to borrow binoculars. 525-2233. 

“The Green Collar Economy” with Van Jones, at 6 p.m. at International House, 2299 Piedmont. http://events.berkeley. 

edu/#13431 

“Low-Impact Development: Saving Water” A meeting of the Alameda Watershed Forum with Rosey Jencks of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and Ingrid Severson of Bay Localize on how to make buildings “low impact” on water with practices like rooftop gardens and rainwater catchment at 2 p.m. at the Coastal Conservancy, 1330 Broadway, Oakland, 4th flr. conference room. dhopkins@waterboards.ca.gov 

“How Will You Survive in the Upcoming Economic Times” with Jonathan K. DeYoe at 6 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library Community Room, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6107. 

International Body Music Festival Teacher Training Workshop at 4 p.m. at the First Unitarian Church, 685 14th St., Oakland. Cost is $15. For details on other workshops and programs see www.crosspulse.com 

“The Power of Myth in Movies” with Richard Stromer at 7:30 p.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. Cost is $40. 525-0302, ext. 306. 

“27 Days of Change” Meditation, yoga and more for agents of social change at the Center for Transformative Change, 2584 MLK Jr. Way. No one tunred away for lack of funds. 549-3733. www.newdharma.com 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers Join a few slowpoke seniors at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm for an hour or two walk. 215-7672, 524-9992. 

End the Occupation Vigil every Tues. at noon at Oakland Federal Bldg., 1301 Clay St. www.epicalc.org 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

Sing-A-Long Group from 2 to 3 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave., Albany. 524-9122. 

Caribbean Rhythms Dance Class begins at 5:30 p.m. at Redwood Gardens, 2951 Derby St., and meets every Tues. eve. Donations accepted for Community Rhythms Scholarship Fund. 548-9840. 

Ceramics Class Learn hand building techniques to make decorative and functional items, Tues. at 9:30 a.m. at St. John's Senior Center, 2727 College Ave. Free, materials and firing charges only. 525-5497. 

Yarn Wranglers Come knit and crochet at 6:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

WEDNESDAY, DEC. 3 

“After Prop. 8: What Next?” A marriage equality forum at 6:30 p.m. at Albany High School Multipurpose Room, 603 Key Route Blvd., Albany. ca-sanfrancisco@marriageequality.org 

Berkeley Path Wanderers: North Berkeley Churches and Paths Walk Meet at 10 a.m. at Live Oak Park at the center picnic table in the area closest to Shattuck Ave. 848-9358. www.berkeleypaths.org 

Succulent Wreath Making at 7 p.m. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. Registration required. Cost is $50-$60. 643-2755. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu 

Bonita Hollow Writers Salon meets at 7 p.m. at Bonita Hollow, 1631 Bonita Ave. 266-2069. 

Red Cross Volunteer Orientation from 10 a.m. to noon at 6230 Claremont Ave., Oakland. To sign up call 594-5165. 

“Software Development Best Practices: What did we learn in 2008?” with East Bay Innovation Group at 6 p.m. at RHI, 1999 Harrison St., Suite 1100, Oakland. Cost is $10, free for eBig members. www.ebig.org  

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes and a warm hat. 548-9840. 

Theraputic Recreation at the Berkeley Warm Pool, Wed. at 3:30 p.m. and Sat. at 10 a.m. at the Berkeley Warm Pool, 2245 Milvia St. Cost is $4-$5. Bring a towel. 632-9369. 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at 6:30 p.m. at the Berkeley BART Station www.geocities.com/vigil4peace/vigil 

Jump Start Entrepreneurs Network meets at 8 a.m. at Cuppa Tea, 3202 College Ave. at Alcactraz. Cost is $5-$6, includes breakfast. 899-8242. www.jumpstartten.com 

“Shamanism and Syncretism in Peruvian Traditional Medicine” with Dr. Douglas Sharon at 7:30 p.m. at Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 526-3805. www.northbrae.org 

Fearless Meditation I: practice of the body Part 1 of a 3 part series for agents of social change at 7 p.m. at Center for Transformative Change, 2584 Martin Luther King Jr Way. RSVP to 866 PEACE 2008 

Morning Meditation Every Mon., Wed., and Fri. at 7:45 a.m. at Rudramandir, 830 Bancroft Way at 6th. 486-8700. 

Berkeley CopWatch Drop-in office hours from 6 to 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. 548-0425. 

Stitch ‘n Bitch at 6:30 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

THURSDAY, DEC. 4 

Mario Savio Memorial Lecture “Our Environmental Destiny” with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Community Theater, 1930 Allston Way. Free. 707-823-7293. 

Heyday Harvest Fundraiser with poets Gary Snyder and Al Young and others at 6:30 p.m. at The Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Suggested donation $60. 549-3564, ext. 316. www.haydaybooks.com 

Walkers 50+: Explore Restored Nature on Baxter Creek Meet at 9 a.m. at El Cerrito’s Gateway Park, Conlon and Ohlone Greenway, stub end of Conlon just east of San Pablo Ave., AC Transit 72, near El Cerrito Del Norte BART. This two-hour, moderately hilly loop walk is free but numbers are limited. Register at Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic. 524-9122.  

Cool Cuisine with Laura Stec and Eugene Cordero on the scientific and savory solutions to global warming, with displays and tastings, at 7 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. 548-3402. 

Yard Sale to Support Tanzanian AIDS Orphans from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at St. Paul Lutheran Church, 1658 Excelsior Ave., Oakland. 530-6333. 

“Faith and Reason in the 21st Century” A panel discussion inspired by “The Atheon” Art work by Jonathon Keats, sponsored by the Magnes Museum at 5:30 p.m. at 2222 Harold Way. Cost is $6-$8. 549-6950, ext. 337. 

Baby & Toddler Storytime at 10:15 and 11:15 a.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043.  

Circle of Concern Vigil meets on West Lawn of UC campus across from Addison and Oxford, Thurs. at noon and Sun. at 1 p.m. to oppose UC weapons labs contracts. 848-8055. 

Fitness Class for 55+ at 9:15 a.m. at Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. 848-0237. 

Avatar Metaphysical Toastmasters Club at 6:45 p.m. at Spud’s Pizza , 3290 Adeline at Alcatraz. namaste@avatar.freetoasthost.info  

FRIDAY, DEC. 5 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Dave Weinstein on “It Came from Berkeley: How Berkeley Changed the World” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $14.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 524-7468. www.citycommonsclub.org  

Edwardian Holidays at Dunsmuir Hellman Historic Estate Community Tree Lighting at 6p.m. Also open on weekends, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. to Dec. 21. Admission is $7-$12. For reservations call 925-275-9490. www.dunsmuir.org  

AK Press Winter Sale from 4 to 10 p.m. at AK Press, 674-A 23rd. St., Oakland. 208-1700. www.akpress.org 

“Artisticana” Artisan’s bazaar and festival from 3 to 10 p.m. at The Red Door Gallery and Collective at the Warehouse, 416 26th St., Oakland. Free. 292-7061. 

Affordable Art Exhibition and Sale from 7 to 10 p.m. at The Compound Gallery, 6604 San Pablo Ave, Oakland. 655-9019. www.thecompoundgallery.com 

World of Good Holiday Sale benefitting international artisan communities from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. at 6315 Doyle St., Emeryville. worldofgoodinc.com 

Berkeley Women in Black weekly vigil from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. Our focus is human rights in Palestine. 548-6310. 

SATURDAY, DEC. 6 

Berkeley Path Wanderers: Holiday Power Walk from the Rose Garden up to Atlas Path, high in the hills and return. Meet at 10 a.m. at the Rose Garden sign on Euclid near Eunice. 848-2944. www.berkeleypaths.org  

Holiday Crafts Fair at the Berkeley Farmers’ Market with live music, hot lunches and a variety of handcrafted gifts, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Civic Center Park, Center St. at MLK Jr. Way. 548-2220, ext. 227. www.ecologycenter.org 

California College of the Arts Holiday Fair with unique gifts handmade by the students, alumni, faculty, and staff from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at CCA Oakland campus, 5212 Broadway , at College Ave. 594-3666. 

Alternative Gift Fair: Give Outside the Box with gifts and information from local, national and international non-profit organizations working for the common good, from 2 to 5 p.m. at Church on the Corner, 1319 Solano Ave., at Pomona, Albany. http://giveoutsidethebox.org 

Berkeley Potters Guild 38th Holiday Sale Sat. and Sun. from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 73 Jones St. at Fourth St. www.berkeleypotters.com 

Berkeley Open Studios Sat and Sun. from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. through Dec. 21. 845-2612. www.berkeleyartisans.com 

The Jingletown 3rd Annual Holiday Art Walk Sat. and Sun. from 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. in Jingletown, which is situated between the Park and Fruitvale Street bridges bordered by the estuary separating Oakland from the island of Alameda. www.jingletown.org 

World of Good Holiday Sale benefitting international artisan communities from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at 6315 Doyle St., Emeryville. worldofgoodinc.com 

Toy Clinic with Free Lead Testing Come find out the latest news on lead and phthalates in toys from noon to 3 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. Sponsored by the Alameda County Lead Poisoning Prevention Program and the Center for Environmental Health. 548-2220, ext. 233. ecologycenter.org 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tending the Winter Heirloom Garden Learn what old-world plants grow best in our winter climate from 2 to 3:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Wear boots and dress to get dirty. 525-2233. 

Volunteer at Schoolhouse Creek Help turn a former garbage dump into Bayshore habitat and park with Friends of Five Creeks from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. We supply tools, gloves, and snacks. Dress in layers for all weather. Walk 5 minutes north on the Bay Trail from University Ave. and West Frontage Rd., just west of I-880/580. You will see our signs at the small turnout between University and Gilman. 848-9358. www.fivecreeks.org 

Fungus Fair “Fungi and Fire” with exhibits, talks, tastings and marketplace from 10 to 6 p.m. at Oakland Musesum of California, 10th and Oak sts., Oakland. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

Winners of the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles 18th Annual National Literary Awards & 12th Annual PEN Oakland Censorship Award, with keynote address by poet Michael McClure at 2 p.m. at the Rockridge Branch Library, 5366 College Ave., Oakland. Free. 681-5652. 

Holiday Wreaths—Naturally Learn to make wreaths, garlands and other decorations using natural materials, from noon to 3:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Please bring a small pair of hand clippers, and large flat box and a bag lunch. Cost is $25-$56. Registration required. 1-888-327-2757. 

Recycled Glass Wreath-Making from 1:30 to 4 p.m. at Studio One Art Center, 365 45th street, off Broadway, Oakland. To register call 597-5027. www.oaklandnet.com/parks 

“Paws and Claus” Santa visits the Oakland Zoo Sat. and Sun. from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at 9777 Golf Links Rd., Oakland. 632-9525. www.oaklandzoo.org 

“Yes we did!” – Now What? with Sam Webb, national chair, Communist Party USA at 3 p.m. at Niebyl-Proctor Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. $5 suggested donation, no one turned away. A People’s Weekly World event. 251-1050. mbechtel@pww.org 

Edwardian Holidays Dunsmuir Hellman Historic Estate Weekends through Dec. 21 with costumed docents, festive trolley, live music, entertainment, cozy tea in the cottage, and Breakfast with Father Christmas, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Cost is $7-$12. For reservations call 925-275-9490. www.dunsmuir.org  

“Shine Your Light” Learn fo make a candleholder for the winter celebrations Sat. and Sun. from 1 to 4 p.m. at Museum of Children’s Art, 538 Ninth St., Suite 210, Oakland. Cost is $7. 456-8770. www.mocha.org 

Make Your Own Bike Bag Beginning class for those with little or no sewing experience. We will cover the basics of sewing on the home machines, several important bag making techniques, an intro to bag design, as well as a brief look at the industrial machines. From noon to 4 p.m. at Waterside Workshops, 84 Bolivar Drive, at Berkeley'’s Aquatic Park. Cost for beginning and advanced class is $85. To register call 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org 

“Ancient Tools for Successful Living” Workshops from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. at 2929 Summit St., Suite 103, Oakland. Cost per workshop is $10. 536-5934. 

Tree of Life Qi Gong Workout at 10 a.m. at 2929 Summit St., Ste. 103, Oakland. Cost is $15. 253-8120. 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden Sat. and Sun. at 2 pm. Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

SUNDAY, DEC. 7 

International Craft Bazaar from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. at Ashkenaz, 1317 San Pablo Ave. at Gilman. Cost is $1 and up. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Richmond Holiday Arts Festival from noon to 5 p.m. at Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Ave., Richmond. 620-6772. www.therichmondartcenter.org 

Fungus Fair “Fungi and Fire” with exhibits, talks, tastings and marketplace from noon to 5 p.m. at Oakland Musesum of California, 10th and Oak sts., Oakland. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

Winter Wanderland Hike Series An invigorating fast-paced hike from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. This week we will visit Kennedy Grove. Call for meeting place. Bring water, layered clothing and a snack to share. 525-2233. 

“Spirit of Activism” Silent auction, raffle, appetizers and music by Peg Millet and others, from 6 to 10 p.m. at La Peña, 3105 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $8 and up. Benefit Bay Area Coalition for Headwaters. 548-3113. 

23rd Annual Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners Fundraising party with dinner for Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier and 14 others, from 1 to 5 p.m. at 2939 Ellis St. Cost is $5-$10. 839-0852. pdcbayarea@sbcglobal.net 

“Printmaking: Holiday Cards” Stamp printing and simple screen printing activities for the whole family from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. in Oakland. Cost is $25-$40 per family. To register call 431-9016. 

“Sample This!” Children’s Community Center Sample Sale from 1 to 5 p.m. in the Gym at Martin Luther King Middle School, 1871 Rose St. Cost is $5, includes raffle entry. 528-6975. www.cccpreschool.org 

Holiday Card Show & Sale from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 398 Colusa Avenue at the Kensington Circle. 

Berkeley Rep Family Series “Discovering Dr. Seuss” from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at Nevo Education Center, 2071 Addison St. Free, but bring a book to donate to a school library. 647-2973. 

“Scientific Revolutions and Religion: The Darwinian Revolution” with Prof. Bill Garrett at 10 a.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302, ext. 306. 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Tilden Park Sat. and Sun. at 2 p.m. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Peace walk around the lake every Sun. Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712. lmno4p.org 

Berkeley Chess Club meets every Sun. at 7 p.m. at the Hillside School, 1581 Le Roy Ave. 843-0150. 

CITY MEETINGS 

Council Agenda Committee meets Mon., Dec. 1, at 2:30 p.m., at 2180 Milvia St. 981-6900. 

www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil/agenda-committee 

Commission on the Status of Women meets Wed., Dec. 3, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5190.  

Disaster and Fire Safety Commission meets Wed., Dec. 3, at 7 p.m., at the Emergency Operations Center, 997 Cedar St. 981-5502.  

Community Environmental Advisory Commission meets Thurs., Dec. 4, at 7 p.m., at 2118 Milvia St. 981-7461.  

Housing Advisory Commission meets Thurs., Dec. 4, at 7 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5400.  

Landmarks Preservation Commission meets Thurs., Dec. 4, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7419.  

ONGOING 

Help Low-wage Families with Their Taxes United Way’s Earn it! Keep It! Save It! needs Bay Area volunteers for its 7th annual free tax program. No previous experience necessary. Sign up at www.earnitkeepitsaveit.org


Arts Calendar

Thursday November 20, 2008 - 10:12:00 AM

THURSDAY, NOV. 20 

EXHIBITIONS 

“The Theater of Insects” Photographs by Jo Whaley. Reception at 6 p.m., lecture and slides at 7 p.m. at UC Graduate School of Journalism, North Gate Hall UC campus. 

FILM 

International Latino Film Festival “Cuba, el valor de una utopia” at 6 p.m. “Matar a Todos”/”Kill Them All” at 8:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$7 each film. 849-2568.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Anna Deavere Smith “We Are What We Say” at 4 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum Theater, 2621 Durant Ave., access via sculpture garden. Sponsored by Townsend Center for the Humanities. 643-9670. 

Linda Williams and Kristen Whissel discuss their new books on film “Screening Sex” and “Picturing American Modernity” at 5:30 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585.  

Poetry Flash with Michael McGriff and Andrew Grace at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

“Fall Forward 2008” Mills College Repertory Dance Concert Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at Lisser Hall, Mills College, 5000 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland. Tickets are $12-$15. 430-2175. 

Bay Area Classical Harmonies “Incarnation: Advent and Christmas Music of Eastern Orthodox Traditions” at 7:30 p.m. at Greek Orthodox Cathedral of the Ascension, 4700 Lincoln Ave., Oakland. Suggested donation $20. www.bayareabach.org 

The Rubber Souldiers, The Rowan Brothers, David Gans at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

The Rova, Nels Cline Celestial Septet at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Kelly Park & Friends at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Tim Mooney at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Dogwood Speaks, Alex Lee, The Knockout Brothers, progressive fink and hip hop, at 9 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Dave Ridnell & Friends, Brazilian jazz, at 7:30 p.m. at 33 Revolutions, 10086 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito. 898-1836. 

Adrian Gormley Jazz Ensemble at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

McCoy Tyner Trio featuring Mac Ribot at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $20-$35. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

FRIDAY, NOV. 21 

THEATER 

Aurora Theatre “The Devil’s Disciple” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 7 p.m. at 2081 Addison St. through Dec. 7. Tickets are $40-$42. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org 

Actors Ensemble of Berkeley “Doctor Faustus” Fri. and Sat at 8 p.m. at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave., at Berryman, through Nov. 22. Tickets are $10-$12. 649-5999. www.aeofberkeley.org 

Berkeley Rep “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” at 8 p.m. at the Roda Theater, 2015 Addison St, through Dec. 14. Tickets are $13.50-$71. 647-2949. b 

Berkeley Rep “The Arabian Nights” Tues.-Sun. at the Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St., through Jan. 4. Tickets are $27-$71. 647-2949. berkeleyrep.org 

Central Works “Blessed Unrest” by Paul Hawken, Thurs, Fri, Sat at 8 p.m., Sun at 5 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. through Nov. 23. Tickets are $14-$25. 558-1381. centralworks.org 

Contra Costa Civic Theater “Greater Tuna” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at 951 Pomona Ave., El Cerrito, through Dec. 7. 524-9132. www.ccct.org  

Impact Theatre “Tallgrass Gothic” Thurs.-Sat at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean, to Dec. 20. Tickets are $10-$17. 464-4468. impacttheatre.com 

Masquers Playhouse “Do I Hear a Waltz?” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2:30 p.m. at 105 Park Place, Pt. Richmond, through Dec. 20. Tickets are $20. 232-4031. www.masquers.org 

UC Dept. of Theater “Top Girls” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Durham Studio Theater, UC campus. Tickets are $10-$15. 642-8827. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“The Gift of Art” group show of smaller works in various mediums. Reception at 6 p.m. at Cecile Moochnek Gallery, 1809-D Fourth St.  

“Pistils & Petals: The Art of Flowers” Group show. Opening reception at Jan Rae Communiy Art Gallery, Women’s Cancer Resource Center, 5741 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. 601-4040, ext. 111. www.wcrc.org 

FILM 

International Latino Film Festival “Utopía 79” at 6 p.m. “Calle Santa Fe” at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$7 each film. 849-2568.  

Movie Classic “Singin’ in the Rain” at 8 p.m. at Paramount Theater, 2025 Broadway. Tickets are $5. 625-8497. 

The Films of Robert Aldrich “Vera Cruz” at 6:30 p.m. and “The Last Sunsert” at 8:45 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Leslie Carol Roberts reads from “The Entire Earth and Sky: Views on Antartica” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

The Berkeley Poetry Review’s monthly reading series presents “The Beat Generation” at 7 p.m. in 330 Wheeler Hall, UC campus.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Bay Area Classical Harmonies “From Constantinople to Tblisi: An Armenian Legacy” at 7:30 p.m. at St. Vartan Armenian Church, 650 Spruce St., Oakland. Tickets are $15-$35. 868-0695. www.bayareabach.org 

“Music of War for Harpsichord and Organ” at 8 p.m. at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, 1501 Washington Ave., Albany. Donation $10. 525-1716. 

San Francisco City Chorus at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $20-$25. www.sfcitychorus.org 

Marcus Shelby Quartet at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$18. 845-5373.  

Mads Tolling Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ.  

Sila & The Afrofunk Experience at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is tba. 525-5054.  

Monica Pascal at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Sean Johnson and the Wild Lotus Band from New Orleans “Calling the Spirits - An Evening of Mystical Mantra Music” at 8 p.m. at Sacred Space at Rudramandir, 830 Bancroft Way, at 6th. TIckets are $15-$20. 486-8700. 

Ellis Paul at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50-$20.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Izabella, 2Me at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Jerry Kennedy, acoustic soul, at 7:30 p.m. at 33 Revolutions, 10086 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito. 898-1836. 

Rhonda Benin at 9 p.m. at Maxwell’s, 341 13th St., Oakland. Cost is $15. 839-6169. 

Nathan Clevenger Trio at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Voetsek, Mind of Asian, Lack of Interest at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $8. 525-9926. 

GG Tenaka Band at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Soul Magic, roots, rock, reggae at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $10. 548-1159.  

SATURDAY, NOV. 22 

CHILDREN  

Los Amiguitos de La Peña with Gary Lapow at 10:30 a.m. at La Peña. Cost is $5 for adults, $4 for children. 849-2568.  

“Coppelia, the Doll with the Porcelain Eyes” a puppet show at 11 a.m., 2 and 4 p.m. at Children’s Fairyland, 699 Bellevue Ave., Oakland. Cost is $6. 452-2259.  

The Bubble Lady at 11 a.m. at Studio Grow, 1235 10th St. Cost is $7. 526-9888. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Art from the Heart” Reception at 2 p.m. at NIAD Center for Art and Disabilities, 551 23rd St., Richmond. Exhibition runs through Dec. 19. 620-0290. www.niadart.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Literary Works on Trial” with David Green, Exec. Dir. of the First Amendment Project at 3 p.m. at African American Museum and Library, 659 14th St., Oakland. 637-0200. 

Peter Glazer, co-editor, reads from James Neugass’s “War Is Beautiful: An American Ambulance Driver in the Spanish American Civil War” at 4 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

The Interdenominational Community Choir at 4 p.m. at the 75th Anniversary Gala of St. Paul AME Church Berkeley, 2024 Ashby Ave. 848-2050. 

San Francisco Taiko Dojo International Taiko Festival at 7 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $38-$49. 642-9988.  

“Fall Forward 2008” Mills College Repertory Dance Concert at 8 p.m. at Lisser Hall, Mills College, 5000 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland. Tickets are $12-$15. 430-2175. 

“Works in the Works 2008” dance performance series by Choreographers’ Performance Alliance Sat. and Sun. at 7:30 p.m. at Eighth Street Studio, 2525 Eighth St. Tickets are $10 at the door. 527-5115. 

Garrett McLean, violin, Jenness Hartley, viola, Ting Chen, ‘cello, Marvin Sanders, flute, perform music of Bach, Haydn, and Mozart. Nov 22 at 8 p.m. at Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. Cost is $10. 848-1228. www.giorgigallery.com 

Afsaneh Art and Culture Society “Miriam’s Well” Sacred dance, music and poetry at 8:30 p.m. at Julia Morgan Theater, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $24-$28. 848-2192. 

Rhythm & Muse spoken word and music open mic series features singer/songwriter Olmec at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. behind Live Oak Park. 644-6893.  

The Function at 9:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $7-$8. 849-2568.  

Ed Reed & His Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ.  

Mark St.Mary Lousiana Blues & Zydeco Band at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10-$13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

All Ones, jam band, at 7:30 p.m. at 33 Revolutions, 10086 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito. 898-1836. 

Woody Guthrie Tribute with Country Joe McDonald at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $20.50-$21.50. 548-1761.  

The German Projekt at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $15. 845-5373.  

Gaucho Gypsy Swing Music at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $5. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Midnight Train at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

Dave Matthews Blues Band at 8:30 p.m. at Royal Oak Pub, 135 Park Place, Pt. Richmond. 232-5678. 

Gooferman, The Fuxedos, Party of Ten at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082.  

McCoy Tyner Trio featuring Mac Ribot at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $20-$35. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Stitches, Bodies, The Forgotten, Wild Weekend at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $7. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, NOV. 23 

CHILDREN 

Asheba at Ashkenaz at 3 p.m. Cost is $4-$6. 525-5054.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Tellabration” Celebrate National Storytelling Day with Randy Rutherford and others at 3:30 p.m. at Arts First Oakland, 2501 Harrison St., Oakland. Tickets are $10. 444-4755. www.stagebridge.org 

“Inside/Outside: The Great Wall of China” a conversation with Michael Meyer and David Spindler at 3 p.m. in the Berkeley Art Museum Theater. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

The Prometheus Orchestra at 3 p.m. at Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church, 114 Montecito Ave., Oakland. Free. www.stpaulsoakland.org 

“Kafka Fragments” Music of Gyorgy Kurtág at 7 p.m. at Zellerbach Playhouse, UC campus. Tickets are $68. 642-9988. www.calperformances.net 

University of California Alumni Chorus “Voices of Light/The Passion of Joan of Arc” An oratorio with silent film at 7:30 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC campus. Tickets are $6-$15. 

“Works in the Works 2008” dance performance series by Choreographers’ Performance Alliance at 7:30 p.m. at Eighth Street Studio, 2525 Eighth St. Tickets are $10 at the door. 527-5115.  

Family Fall Concert “Music & Dance” with San Francisco Chamber Orchestra and San Francisco Ballet School Training Program at noon at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Free.  

Annabelle Chvostek at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Thangs Taken: Rethinking Thanksgiving with music, poetry and film at 7 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $8-$25, sliding scale. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Tammy Pilisuk & Friends at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

San Francisco Taiko Dojo International Taiko Festival at 3 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $38-$49. 642-9988. www.calperformances.net 

Birol Topaloglu with George Chittenden, Lisa Liepman and Ruth Sali Shopov at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $12-$15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Johannes Wallmann Quintet at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $15. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

MONDAY, NOV. 24 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Aurora Theatre Company Script Club discusses Miller’s “The Crucible” and Shaw’s “The Devil’s Disciple” at 7:30 p.m. at 2081 Addison St. Free. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org 

“Public Art and Media: From Spectacle to Political” with Anne Pasternak at 7:30 p.m. at 160 Kroeber Hall, UC campus. Sponsored by Berkeley Center for New Media. 642-0635. atc.berkeley.edu 

Poetry Express Theme night on “water” at 7 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. 644-3977. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

“Kafka Fragments” Music of Gyorgy Kurtág at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Playhouse, UC campus. Tickets are $68. 642-9988. www.calperformances.net 

Acoustic Mandolin Ensemble traditional Italian music, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198.  

Classical at the Freight with Michael Taddei & Friends at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $8.50-$9.50. 548-1761.  

Downtown Jam Session with Glen Pearson at 7 p.m. at Ed Kelly Hall, Oakland Public Conservatory of Music, 1616 Franklin St., Oakland. Cost is $5. www.opcmucsic.org 

Head Royce School Benefit at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$16. 238-9200.  

TUESDAY, NOV. 25 

FILM 

“Canyon Cinema: The Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor” with Scott MacDonald at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Tom Rigney & Flambeau at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054.  

Randy Craig Trio at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

WEDNESDAY, NOV. 26 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Berkeley Poetry Slam with host Charles Ellik and Three Blind Mice, at 8 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Tangonero at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Tango dance lesson at 7:30 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

La Verdad at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Salsa dance lessons at 8:30 p.m. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

THURSDAY, NOV. 27 

HAPPY THANKSGIVING 

FRIDAY, NOV. 28 

THEATER 

Aurora Theatre “The Devil’s Disciple” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 7 p.m. at 2081 Addison St. through Dec. 7. Tickets are $40-$42. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org 

Berkeley Rep “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” at 8 p.m. at the Roda Theater, 2015 Addison St, through Dec. 14. Tickets are $13.50-$71. 647-2949. berkeleyrep.org 

Berkeley Rep “The Arabian Nights” Tues.-Sun. at the Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St., through Jan. 4. Tickets are $27-$71. 647-2949. berkeleyrep.org 

Contra Costa Civic Theater “Greater Tuna” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at 951 Pomona Ave., El Cerrito, through Dec. 7. 524-9132. www.ccct.org  

Impact Theatre “Tallgrass Gothic” Thurs.-Sat at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean, to Dec. 20. Tickets are $10-$17. 464-4468. impacttheatre.com 

Masquers Playhouse “Do I Hear a Waltz?” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2:30 p.m. at 105 Park Place, Pt. Richmond, through Dec. 20. Tickets are $20. 232-4031. www.masquers.org 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Melissa Rivera in a birthday tribute to Silvio Rodriguez at 8:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12. 849-2568.  

Golden Dragon Acrobats at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $24-$46. 642-9988.  

Moodswing Orchestra at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $10-$13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Blame Sally at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50-$20.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Loose Ends at 9 p.m. at Maxwell’s, 341 13th St., Oakland. Cost is $15. 839-6169. 

Pomegranate, The Patrick Winningham Band at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Jerry Kennedy, acoustic soul, at 7:30 p.m. at 33 Revolutions, 10086 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito. 898-1836. 

Nine Wives at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Jinx Jones Trio at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Eric Benet at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $26-$30. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SATURDAY, NOV. 29 

CHILDREN  

“Coppelia, the Doll with the Porcelain Eyes” a puppet show at 11 a.m., 2 and 4 p.m. at Children’s Fairyland, 699 Bellevue Ave., Oakland. Cost is $6. 452-2259. www.fairyland.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Out of Darkness” A show of Winter Solstice altars at Oakopolis, 447 25th St., Oakland. 663-6920.  

FILM 

“Our Hospitality” A Buster Keaton film for all ages at 3 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Golden Dragon Acrobats at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $24-$46. 642-9988. www.calperformances.net 

Yancie Taylor Jazztet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Glen Washington, reggae, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $20. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Laurie Lewis, Tom Rozum & Friends at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50-$20.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

The Luke Thomas Trio at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

The Melatones, Spidermeow, Dave Gorssman at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Hatchet, Fog of War, Witchaven at 7 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $8. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, NOV. 30 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Chamber Music Sundaes, featuring San Francisco Symphony musicians and friends, at 3 p.m. at St John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Tickets are $20-$25 at the door. 415-753-2792. www.chambermusicsundaes.org  

Golden Dragon Acrobats at 3 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $24-$46. 642-9988. www.calperformances.net 

Jane Lenoir & Calvin Keys Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Mahea Uchiyama, at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Irish Christmas at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $22.50-$23.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

 

 


‘Do I Hear a Waltz?’ at Masquers Playhouse

By Ken Bullock Special to the Planet
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 10:49:00 AM

Leona Samish, an American secretary (played by Alison Peltz), bursts into song (“Someone Woke Up”) as she finds herself on vacation in Venice, so excited she falls into the canal—“but only up to here!”—continuing her dance around the Pensione Fioria veranda, holding her dripping shoes high. 

Do I Hear a Waltz?, the Rodgers and Sondheim musical from 1965, with book by Arthur Laurents from his play The Time of the Cuckoo (Summertime, the Katherine Hepburn movie, was also based on it), is playing at the Masquers Playhouse, directed by Dennis Lickteig in his maiden run for the Pt. Richmond company. Lickteig asks the question in the program: why is this musical so little done, so little known? A reasonable answer he provides is that the later ’60s brought different concerns to entertainment in general. And Do I Hear a Waltz? is very much of its time, in a pleasing way. 

A gaggle of tourists are roosting at the pensione: the Middle American enthusiasts, the McIlhennys (Anna Albanese and Scott Alexander Ayres); a Guggenheim fellow “trying to be a painter” (William Giammona as Eddie Yeager), who wants to go home, while his wife (Beverley Viljeon as Jennifer) doesn’t; and by turns pixie-ish, spunky and suspicious Leona (the adjectives also describe Peltz’s performance), who hopes to have an experience, maybe an affair—but most of all, to be loved. Senora Fioria (Ellen Brooks, veteran of both the old Mime Troupe’s Commedia and Theatre of Yugen’s Japanese comedy and tragedy) chides her for her pickiness, like a starving child, offered ravioli and demanding a beefsteak: “Miss Samish, eat the ravioli!” 

Fioria becomes the counter-moralist (and the most chic-ly dressed, in Maria Graham’s costumes), later proclaiming “I can forgive bad behavior from agony, not from morality!” When Eddie and Jennifer argue (Eddie later tells Jennifer he wants to go home to avoid temptation by the real women in Italy!), Jennifer goes off to a movie—and Eddie climbs into a gondola with Fioria, raising the bubbly Leona’s eyebrows. 

Leona finds some masculine solace in the form of shopkeeper Renato (Paul Macari). Their dalliance overcomes obstacles and Leona’s compulsive suspicion (Renato later tells her the only thing she received without suspicion was a thing, an expensive necklace), at least until Leona, lit by martinis, lets loose on all and sundry, breaking up the idyll, Renato finally pronouncing her “too complicated,” though with sympathy, more than Leona can muster for herself. 

There’s whimsicality and wit, and that self-awareness of American callowness those times bore. There’s charm and some clever (Giammona, a Lamplighter, singing a tongue-twister, “Bargaining,” or joining in with a flirtacious Fioria and a hilariously incomprehensible maid, played by Diane Ratto, in an English lesson, “No Understand”) and some tuneful (“Moon in my Window,” passed between the women, ending in a trio, or Macari singing “I am not a dream come true—but stay!”) Rodgers numbers with Sondheim lyrics, the title song an achieved hit in its time. 

It all takes place on John Hull’s set, overlooking the Gran Canal, lit by Renee Echavez, with Joanne Gabel leading a quintet in the pit and choreography by Jayne Zaban. Sylas Cooper alternates with Christopher Urquhart as boy-on-the-street Mauro and Nick Hauser is Renato’s gentlemanly son, Vito.  

It’s sprightly and entertaining, and as Lickteig notes, it “cleverly flips the conventions of the musical comedy romance.” Saying, “They don’t make ‘em like that anymore” usually refers to prewar classics or the most popular stuff of the late ‘40s-early ‘50s. It can be said of the knowing fare of the early-mid ‘60s, too. Do I Hear a Waltz? is a refreshing look back at Americans abroad—“wash and wear Americans” as Fioria sings—looking at themselves in the mirror.  

DO I HEAR A WALTZ? 

Presented by Masquers Playhouse at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and at 2:30 p.m. Sundays through Dec. 20. $20. 105 Park Place, Point Richmond. 232-4031. www.masquers.org.


Aurora Presents Bernard Shaw’s ‘Devil’s Disciple’

By Ken Bullock Special to the Planet
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 10:49:00 AM

A small, spartan New Hampshire town during the Revolutionary War—directly in line of the march of British redcoats from Canada, aiming to meet Howe’s army moving north from New York, to cut New England off from the other colonies—is the scene of a father’s amended will being read, where Dick Dudgeon (Gabriel Marin), self-styled Devil’s Disciple (title character in Bernard Shaw’s 1897 play at the Aurora), finds himself master of his ramrod-stiff Puritan mother’s (Trish Mulholland) house, as he is oldest son and she but a woman, meeting with her exit-line curse (better than living with her blessing, Dick will later declare) as she storms out, leaving him with only the illegitimate daughter (Tara Tomicevic) of an uncle just hanged by the British as an example to rebels. 

Dick is shunned as naysayer, a role he takes on with zest, though the extent of his evil seems to be the wearing of his convictions, if not his heart, on his sleeve. His smile seems twisted quizzically rather than cunningly; more whimsical than calculated, he allows himself to be arrested for treason in place of the local Calvinist minister (Soren Oliver) when redcoats come into the house where he’s sitting at tea with the minister’s wife. 

Here’s where Shaw’s magnificent comic sense sparks a few satirical blazes. The minister’s upright young wife (Stacy Ross as Judith), who fancies herself as hating Dick, finds her passions mysteriously reversed after he walks away, calmly in custody, and her husband, whom she expects to rush to effect his release, instead hurries away into hiding, without the tender (if wry) kiss that Dick, pretending to be the minister, had impishly bestowed on her. Later, this 180-degree turn will rotate another 90, as Judith will resent Dick for not going to the gallows loving her! 

(It’s a very early indication of the somehow levelheaded, yet comic, genius of Shaw that captivated Brecht when he was preparing his own political theater of discernment: the very different actions two characters take, faced with the same situation-actions opposite what their roles would seem to dictate.) 

What seems scurrying, self-serving cowardice turns out to be a hurried plan of action on behalf of all, accomplished offstage and revealed only at the climax, while Shaw hilariously sends up the conventions of romantic comedy in the shadow of the noose—a fact not lost on the first reviewer of the play, Shaw’s original commercial success and his only play set in America (where it had its premiere in New York). Again, the dramatist—usually styled a follower of Ibsen, but well aware of other trends—helped show the way to 20th century Modernism by taking Oscar Wilde’s dictum of The Mask another step in a new social comedy which wasn’t Wilde’s comedy of manners in a mirror, as well as using his fellow Dubliner’s sense of an actor speaking a bon mot epigrammatically, a little bit out of character and situation, to comment on the proceedings onstage and in the world. Brecht noticed that too. 

Adroit with the bon mots is British commander “Gentlemanly” Johnny Burgoyne (“But my friends call me General,” he intones), played with appropriate deadpan by David Warren Keith, knowing he is already defeated by the colonials, but telling his second-in-command that the true enemy of the English soldier is the War Office, reassuring him that “History, sir, will tell lies as usual.” 

The play ends with a handshake and an invitation to lunch, after much travail and amid hoopla. Barbara Oliver, Aurora’s founder, has directed one of the better Bernard Shaw productions in otherwise arid years of his works being wrenched around into other comic conventions. Her actor son Soren and costumer daughter Anna join her and a well-cast company and well-chosen production team for a little Election Year Spirit of 1777. 

 

THE DEVIL’S DISCIPLE 

Presented by the Auorora Theatre at 8 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday and at 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays through Dec. 7. $40-$42. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org.


Berkeley Rep Stages August Wilson’s ‘Joe Turner’

By Ken Bullock Special to the Planet
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 10:50:00 AM

 

Around the table of an African-American boardinghouse in the Hill District of Pittsburg during the early years of the 20th century are the faces of people of all ages in transit, in transition or just looking for something, a milieu drama of what folks do differently, facing the rigors of a common situation of discrimination and uprootedness. They’re in August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, directed by Delroy Lindo on Berkeley Rep’s Roda Stage, in association with the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, the Rep’s first Wilson show. 

Jeremy (Don Guillory) is a young laborer from the rural South, looking for a place to play his guitar and a woman to keep him company while he wanders to “see all the places.” Bynum (Brent Jennings)—a “heebie-jeebie” man who binds people with his song—is looking for his Shining Man who showed him the meaning of life one day on the road. 

Joining them are Molly Cunningham (Erica Peeples), who, it turns out, is looking for a man to spend his money on her, though she declared she loves nobody but her mother; Mattie Campbell (Tiffany Michelle Thompson), looking to make sense of things after her man just walked away in search of something else; and Herald Loomis (Teagle F. Bougere), the role Lindo originated, hovering mysteriously about in heavy coat and hat with the crown pushed up and brim pulled down, who arrives with his daughter (Nia Renee Warren or Inglish Amore Hills), searching for the wife who left years before when he was forced into a work gang, rounded up by the semi-mythic Joe Turner of the title, a governor’s brother, whose name Bynum keeps intoning in snatches of a blues. 

Only their host Seth Holly (Barry Shebaka Henley) and his wife Bertha (Kim Staunton) aren’t wandering in spirit. Seth is the son of a Free Man who built the house and taught him to make pots and pans—though he’s chafing at the bit, looking for someone to back a manufacturing concern. And Rutherford Selig (Dan Hiatt), who takes his wares on the roads to sell, wanders, but only to bring back those he’s found.  

Loomis, haunted and diffident, finally tells his story, urged on by Bynum—and later acts out his vision of “bone people” from underwater, who surface and walk on the waves, while Loomis witnesses and finds he cannot stand. His passion erupts as the others happily celebrate a “Juba” dance.  

Readers and spectators of Wilson’s other plays—especially his lifework, completed just before his untimely death, a sequence of Pittsburgh Hill District dramas covering every decade of black life last century—will find much that’s familiar, both in the structure of action and in the hints and more explicit references to and appearances of folklore and spiritual wisdom, historical events and fictional characters that wend their way through his series of tableaux. The “bone people,” for instance—and at one point, Loomis shoots Bynum a look and says, “Now I know who you are, one of those bone people!”—are the spirits of slaves buried at sea on the infamous Passage from Africa, evoked as an initiatory ritual to “the city of bones” in Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean, and in other moments in other plays. 

Wilson started out a poet, and there’s something of the esoteric knowing of the poet in his weaving of themes and events, of serving as voice for the unrepresented, telling them parables of their history. 

The cast is a very good one, professional actors in the realest sense, dedicated to their characters and the story. They lend their aura to what is always an interesting, if not always gripping, telling.  

Part of that is in the direction. Lindo, who worked with Wilson as an actor in productions of his plays, directed the successful Blue Door for The Rep, a flexible, lyrical memory play with a cast of two. With a more formal production, as well as a bigger cast and broader historical and metaphysical themes, the solid portrayals of the actors in ensemble don’t seem to add up to more than the sum of their parts, don’t “bind together” in the heat of the big moments that arise suddenly from much expository (as well as humorous and touching) dialogue. 

But part of the flatness, the vestigial sense in much of what’s said and done, comes from the somewhat academic, schematic formalism of the play itself, something that seems to dog other plays in Wilson’s admirable project, an inability to overcome or fuse the stolid form with the fluid events and sometimes furtive shape of untold stories, folk history confronting the harshness of a society with a “fix” on the major social means of transmission. Wilson calls Joe Turner a blues play; the astringent taste of the blues crops up here and there. But it doesn’t premeate the action, or serve to reveal it. 

JOE TURNER’S COME AND GONE 

Through Dec. 14. $13.50 - $71. at the Roda Theater, 2015 Addison St. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org. 


About the Hous: Freeing Aesthetics from the Constraints of Economics

By Matt Cantor
Thursday November 20, 2008 - 10:58:00 AM

If the terriers and bariffs are torn down, this economy will grow.—G.W. Bush (Heck if I know what a bariff is but if the terriers get torn down, I’m moving to Canada—M.C.) 

 

From high atop North America (if you accept the Mercator Projection), the Royal Bank of Canada tracks consumer confidence with their program “Consumer Attitudes and Spending by Household” (amusingly acronymed C.A.S.H.) These ratings have plummeted from nearly 70 percent in September ‘08 to about 35 percent this November. In other words, they’ve crashed. Perhaps more than the various stock markets—none of which I understand—the perceived safety or prudence of spending has fallen dramatically this year, foreshadowing a Christmas season that will have Target missing its mark and Amazon up the creek without a blowgun.  

I can’t say that I’m entirely unhappy about all these happenings any more than I’m entirely unhappy about recently high gas prices. I think that our consumer cult(ure) is unhealthy on several levels, including those of our spiritual life (not religious or even theistic … just spiritual), the health of the planet and the health of our true economy (working people producing good and vital services). Spending is the not the basis of either a healthy economy or a healthy personal life. We all know this but we tend to forget, so I’m here to act, once again, as an annoying but a relatively benign reminder. 

Americans don’t save. Using credit cards they can’t afford, they try to impress people they don’t like by buying things they don’t need. The instability of our economy started at home and that’s where it continues to crumble. The housing crisis is certainly as good an example of misguided spending as any and it is clearly near the core of the current economic crisis. While home ownership is a very desirable thing when it’s within our means, when it’s beyond our means, it’s beyond our means. Selling someone a mortgage they can’t afford to keep up is a crime that should be punishable by business failure. Don’t get me started—well, that ship would seem to have sailed, so my apologies. 

The other day I met a young woman who impressed me very much. Her name is Hyland. She does own a home and she has paid the mortgage. She bought her house on the other side of the tracks, as it were, and she’s just fine with that. It’s part of living within her means, which she does uncommonly well. The house is sparse and clean and I was so envious at this alone that it was actually physically painful in much the way that one yearns for ice cream or youth or the ability to undo a really nasty faux pas. Her house is full of color and light and not too much of anything else. Without spending a lot of money, she has achieved a kind of perfection. 

Her attic is one of those that cannot be called a proper living space for reasons including ceiling height, floor strength and proper ingress (stairway.) But it is lively, being neatly arrayed with a score of clear totes containing the archive of her life. Things that would have been piled up in my home (and yours, perhaps?) are filed away and labeled with amusing cards in the front that make it easy to see what each contains. Clearly, she has not voided her life of all memorabilia but she has wrangled them in such a way as to allow for breath, space and clarity.  

This allows her living room, kitchen, the bedroom and bath to be nearly empty of extra stuff. These rooms feature thoughtfully chosen textures and colors, bits of ancient memory in the form of a deliberately remaindered bit of linoleum (evoking history almost reverentially) and various delicious bits of wonder culled from the salvage yards. These include common vessels of glass (I share this love of glass) and cans with labels from 70 years ago. 

She commissioned her long-time friend Brian to construct several pieces of very simple built-in furniture, each cleverly designed to serve exactly as needed. None look fancy or ostentatious but each seems as though it belonged there from the time that this very simple 800-to-900-square-foot house was built.  

Color and light are emphasized in each small item and nothing is fancy. In other words, Hyland made no purchases to please the neighbors or a buyer. She was filling specific needs and providing stewardship of a craftsman and a friend.  

Hyland is not afraid of color, and what a blessing this is. There is color everywhere and it’s so very refreshing. (How I ache from looking at white, white, white.) The front is a scheme of two colors, the back a different pair. Each room has its own set of colors and each evokes its own feeling. Again, there are very few objects/furnishings and there is plenty of room to dance, to plop down on the floor or to start a project. 

Now, Hyland is not without her many bits of salvage and discovery. The basement—thank goodness for basements—is filled with tools and art objects. There’s an enormous wooden mold for a ship’s propeller, for example, probably from the Kaiser Richmond shipyards of WWII. She somehow obtained several massive chests of drawers of the kind used in industry for parts storage. Opening one revealed a nutcracker. I imagine that the others contain marbles, upholstery tools, pink-pearl erasers and paint brushes. 

While seeming lavish and, sensually, almost opulent, this home contains virtually nothing bought new at any store in recent years. The luxury comes from space, color, light and order; from a joy found in ordinary immemoria. An old toy, some beaded-board planks lining a wall, an ancient jar. 

With this aesthetic, Hyland is pretty recession-proof. Yes, she does need to pay the mortgage, but she’s not working her life away. She doesn’t make a financier’s earnings and doesn’t need to. She earns a living by selling houses, doing graphic design and editing copy—and she has time and has crafted a life for herself that leaves me somewhat dumbfounded. (And I don’t generally lack for words as you, dear reader, can attest. If you’d like to join me in admiring her home, you can see bits of it at hylandbaron.com.)  

So back to my initial point. With respect to our houses, there are many things we can do to avoid going bankrupt whilst making these places serve us. First is to give up on doing it the way the Joneses do. Leave the granite in the ground (I hear some of it’s radioactive, anyway). The green cost of shipping granite across the sea is untenable and it’s also becoming so common that Formica is starting to carry the shock of the new by comparison.  

Second: Visit the salvage yards. Once you’ve begun to see what’s missing in your space, see if something used can fill the bill. If it needs alteration, you can invest in the local economy by hiring a craftsperson to shape, install and paint something that’s one quarter the cost of new. You can give Kermit a run for his greenness when you use something old, as you will be combating dozens of significant ways in which the manufacture of new goods is ravaging this planet (deforestation, shipping and manufacturing CO2, land filling, to name just a few.)  

A client of mine, Lara, a scientist, mother and homeowner, is currently rehabbing much of her house. She has elected to reuse her cabinets, feeling that they are still perfectly adequate. She also plans to not to install a new one as she builds out a new kitchen. Why not? Her current dishwasher idles in mechanical indolence below the counter where hand-washed dishes rest in a disk rack. She is making reasonable choices based on actual need-how refreshing!  

If you must buy new, consider where things are made (shipping being a major element in the destructive impact of each new thing, especially if it is weighty.) Consider that what makes a space wonderful may be less a function of what you put into it than what you take out of it; and less a function of money than of good fundamental design.  

For those acquiring new homes, My friend, realtor Leif Jenssen, likes to cite that it’s best to wait a year or so before doing any major remodeling simply because it will take that long to begin to discern the real deficiencies in the new place. Also, it can take a year to figure out where you spend most of your time, where it’s too dark, and so forth.  

The recession isn’t likely to leave us any time soon and the value of your home—if you’re lucky (lucky?) enough to own one—may remain static or even drop in the coming years. Further, many will have to make do with smaller incomes and all of us would be wise to save more and spend less.  

Hyland’s lesson—which she lives but does not preach—is that happiness, aesthetic gratification and sensible home maintenance need not break the bank. In fact, none of these things can be found at the bank. They are obtained through the interest and engagement of active minds and eager hearts. 


Community Calendar

Thursday November 20, 2008 - 10:05:00 AM

THURSDAY, NOV. 20 

Green Gathering V + Sustainability Summit on ways to make Berkeley sustainable at 4 p.m. at Bancroft Hotel, 2680 Bancroft Way. Tickets are $35. To register see www.ecologycenter.org/GGSS 

“Sustainability and the Living Roof at the Cal Academy of Sciences” with Dr. Frank Almeda at 12:30 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

“Closer to Home: Eating from Local Foodsheds” A panel discussion on the opportunities and challenges of eating locally grown food from the perspectives of public health, food access, school food service, and regional farmland vitality, at 7 p.m. at 112 Wurster Hall, near the intersection of College Avenue and Bancroft Way, UC Campus. http://enviro.berkeley.edu/amr/foodsheds 

Tilden Tots Join a nature adventure program for 3 and 4 year olds, each accompanied by an adult (grandparents welcome)! We’ll look for signs of animals, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8. Registration required. 1-888-327-2757. 

Tilden Explorers An after-school nature adventure program for 5-7 year olds. We will learn about the mammals that live in Tilden Park from 3:15 to 4:15 p.m. Cost is $6-$8. Registration required. 1-888-327-2757. 

“Save Our Sandhill Cranes” A talk by Gary Ivey, researcher on cranes in the Pacific Flyway, and Mike Eaton, crane habitat conservation expert at 7 p.m. at the Oakland Zoo, Marian Zimmer Auditorium. Cost is $5-$20. amy@oaklandzoo.org 

“It Came from Berkeley” A slide show and talk by Dave Weinstein at 7 pm. at El Cerrito Library, 6510 Stockton Ave., El Cerrito. 526-7512. 

LeConte Neighborhood Association meets at 7 p.m. at Mudraker’s Cafe, Telegraph and Stuart. To submit agenda items or get information contact karlreeh@aol.com 

Easy Does It Board of Directors Meeting at 6:30 p.m. at 1636 University Ave. 845-5513. 

Circle of Concern Vigil meets on West Lawn of UC campus across from Addison and Oxford, Thurs. at noon and Sun. at 1 p.m. to oppose UC weapons labs contracts. 848-8055. 

Baby & Toddler Storytime at 10:15 and 11:15 a.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043.  

Three Beats for Nothing South Mostly ancient part music for fun and practice meets every Thurs. at 10 a.m. at the South Berkeley Senior Center, Ellis at Ashby. 655-8863. asiecker@sbcglobal 

Fitness Class for 55+ at 9:15 a.m. at Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. 848-0237. 

Avatar Metaphysical Toastmasters Club at 6:45 p.m. at Spud’s Pizza , 3290 Adeline at Alcatraz. namaste@avatar.freetoasthost.info  

FRIDAY, NOV. 21 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Paolo Gianturco, photographer, writer on “Women Who Light the Dark” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $14.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 524-7468. www.citycommonsclub.org 

Tilden Tots Join a nature adventure program for 3 and 4 year olds, each accompanied by an adult (grandparents welcome)! We’ll look for signs of animals, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8. Registration required. 1-888-327-2757. 

“The Price of Fire” with Ben Dangl on the new social movement in Bolivia at 7 p.m. at AK Press, 674-A 23rd. St., Oakland. 208-1700. www.akpress.org 

Demonstrate for Peace! Bring your signs and determination to bring our troops home now at 2 p.m. at Acton and University aves. Sponsored by Berkeley-East Bay Gray Panthers and Strawberry Creek Lodge Tenants Association and the Iraq Moratorium. 841-4143. 

New Deal Film Festival Artists at Work “Housing, Farm and Rural Electrical Cooperatives of the 1930s” at 1 p.m. at North Oakland Senior Center, 5714 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Oakland. Sponsored by the Berkeley-East Bay Gray Panthers. 548-9696. 

Red Cross Blood Drive from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Children’s Hospital, Outpatient Center basement, 747 52nd St., Oakland. To schedule an appointment go to www.BeADonor.com 

Kol Hadash Humanistic (non-theistic) Judaism Shabbat service at 7:30 p.m. at the Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin Ave. Please bring finger dessert or snack to share for the Oneg, and non-perishable food for the needy. 428-1492. 

Berkeley Women in Black weekly vigil from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. Our focus is human rights in Palestine. 548-6310. 

Three Beats for Nothing Mostly ancient part music for fun and practice meets every Fri. at 10 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, Hearst at MLK. 655-8863.  

SATURDAY, NOV. 22 

St. Paul AME Church Berkeley 75th Year Anniversary Gala with the The Interdenominational Community Choir at 4 p.m. at 2024 Ashby Ave. 848-2050. 

Berkeley Historical Society Walking Tour of Aquatic Park from 10 a.m. to noon. Cost is $8-$10. For reservations and starting point call 848-0181. 

Cerrito Creek Work Party Help Friends of Five Creeks plant natives on Cerrito Creek at Albany Hill. Meet at 10 a.m. at Creekside Park, south end of Santa Clara Ave. (internet maps 3499 Santa Clara; AC Transit 72 or 52L). Wear clothes that can get dirty and shoes with good traction. 848-9358. www.fivecreeks.org 

Reptile Rendevous Learn about the reptiles that live in Tilden Park, and meet some up close, from 2 to 3 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center. 525-2233. 

East Bay Baby Fair with information on pregnancy, birth and parenting, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Albany Veterans Memorial Building, 1325 Portland Ave., Albany. www.eastbaybabyfair.com 

Emeryville Marina Sunset Walk Meet at 3 p.m. for an hour walk through the Marina, with quiet views of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge, on paved trail, wheel chair accessible. Optional early dinner after walk at the Emery Market. Meet at the back of Chevy’s Restaurant, by picnic tables. 234-8949. 

Demonstration of Mayan Backstrap Weaving with Celia Sántiz Ruiz and Maria Gutierrez, members of the Jolom Mayaetik weaving cooperative in Chiapas, Mexico, at 5 p.m. at Talavera Ceramics, 1801 University Ave., at Grant. 665-6038. 

Health & Science Festival with hands-on activities for children and families from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Hall of Health, 2230 Shattuck Ave., lower level. Cost is $5. Children under three free. 705-8527. 

Math and Science Classes from the Lawrence Hall of Science for families with children in kindergarten through fifth grade from 1 to 2:30 p.m. at Richmond Public Library, 325 Civic Center Plaza, Richmond. Free. 620-6557. 

Santa Paws Benefit for Berkeley-East Bay Humane Society Have your pet photographed with Santa from 10:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Redhound, 5523 College Ave., Oakland, and Sun. from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at Dog Bone Alley, 1342 Park St., Alameda. Cost is $30. 845-7735, ext.13. cshelby@berkeleyhumane.org 

Origami Workshop with Nga Trinh for all ages, at 2 p.m. at the North Branch, Berkeley Public Library, 1170 The Alameda at Hopkins. 981-6250. 

“Rebel Shamans: Indigenous Women Confront Empire” with Max Dashu of the Suppressed Histories Archives at 7 p.m. at Redwood Gardens Community Room, 2951 Derby St. Donation $15-$20, sliding scale. www.suppressedhistories.net 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden Sat. and Sun. at 2 pm. Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Call to confirm. 841-8732.  

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

Car Wash Benefit for Options Recovery Services of Berkeley, held every Sat. from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Lutheran Church, 1744 University Ave. 666-9552. 

SUNDAY, NOV. 23 

Memorial for Peter Camejo at 2 p.m. at International House, 2299 Piedmont Ave. 831-246-1888. 

Thangs Taken: Rethinking Thanksgiving with music, poetry and film at 7 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $8-$25, sliding scale. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Tilden Mini-Gardeners Explore the wonderful world of gardens for ages 5-8 from 10 to 11:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8. Registration required. 1-888-327-2757. 

Mayan Woman Weavers with Celia Sántiz Ruiz and Marla Gutierrez on the Jolom Mayaetik weaving cooperative in Chiapas, Mexico, at 2 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. 843-8724. 

Working with Wool Watch as the spinning wheel turns wool into yarn, try a drop spindle and create a felted holiday ornament, from 2 to 3:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

“Tellabration” Celebrate National Storytelling Day with Randy Rutherford and others at 3:30 p.m. at Arts First Oakland, 2501 Harrison St., Oakland. Tickets are $10. 444-4755. www.stagebridge.org 

SOA Watch Candlelight Vigil Against Torture in memory of the six martyred Jesuits and their housekeeper and her daughter and thousands of unnamed others in El Salvador at 5 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker, 1640 Addison St. Please bring a candle. 499-0537. 

Tour of the Berkeley City Club from 1 to 4 p.m. at 2315 Durant St. Offered by the non-profit Landmark Heritage Foundation. Free, but donations accepted. 848-7800. 

“Garden Inspired Holiday Decoration” with Leslie Piels and Ann Leyhe at 4 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

“Where Do We Go From Here?” Ecumenical Peace Institute’s Autumn Gathering with Byron Williams, pastor of the Ressurection Community Church, at 6 p.m. at Redwood Gardens, 2951 Derby St. Suggested donation $15-$35, includes dinner. RSVP to 655-1162. www.epicalc.org 

“Getting Unblocked” with Ann Wise Cornell at 10 a.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302, ext. 306. 

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Peace walk around the lake every Sun. Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712. lmno4p.org 

Tibetan Buddhism with Judy Rasmussen on “Gratitude for the Simple Life” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 809-1000. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

Increase Your Social and Moral Intelligence: Read a Play! Bagel and coffee brunch sponsored by Kol Hadash, Jewish Humanistic congregation at 10 a.m. at the Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin Ave. Suggestion donation $5. To register email info@kolhadash.org  

Jewish PJ Party For Very Young Children Songs, puppets, bubbles, snacks, crafts for children up to age 5 and their parents, Jewish or just curious at 10:30 a.m. at Jewish Gateways. To RSVP email rabbibridget@ 

jewishgateways.org  

Sew Your Own Open Studio Come learn to use our industrial and domestic machines, or work on your own projects, from 4 to 8 p.m. at 84 Bolivar Dr., Aquatic Park. Also on Fri. from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Cost is $5 per hour. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org 

MONDAY, NOV. 24 

“Voices of Dissent: Activism & American Democracy” Local filmmaker Karil Daniels will introduce her film and lead the discussion afterwards at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalist, 1924 Cedar at Bonita, Berkeley Donations appreciated. Wheel chair access. 

“Dark Energy Rules the Universe (and Why the Dinosaurs Don’t)” A talk by Dr. Eric Linder, Director of the Institute for Nuclear and Particle Astrophysics at Berkeley Lab at 5:30 p.m. at Berkeley Repertory Theater, Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St. Free. 486-7292 

Kensington Library Book Club meets to discuss “Confederacy of Dunces” by John Kennedy Toole at 7 p.m. at 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. 524-3043. 

East Bay Track Club for girls and boys ages 3-15 meets Mon. at 6 p.m. at Berkeley High School track field. Free. 776-7451. 

World Affairs/Politics Discussion Group, for people 60 years and over, meets at 9:45 a.m. at Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave, Albany. Cost is $3.  

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. Volunteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

Dragonboating Year round classes at the Berkeley Marina, Dock M. Meets Mon, Wed., Thurs. at 6 p.m. Sat. at 10:30 a.m. For details see www.dragonmax.org 

Free Boatbuilding Classes for Youth Mon.-Wed. from 3 to 7 p.m. at Berkeley Boathouse, 84 Bolivar Dr., Aquatic Park. Classes cover woodworking, boatbuilding, and boat repair. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org 

TUESDAY, NOV. 25 

Tuesdays for the Birds Tranquil bird walks in local parklands, led by Bethany Facendini, from 7 to 9:30 a.m. Today we will visit Point Pinole Regional Shoreline. Call for meeting place and if you need to borrow binoculars. 525-2233. 

Tilden Explorers An after-school nature adventure program for 5-7 year olds. We will learn about the mammals that live in Tilden Park from 3:15 to 4:15 p.m. Cost is $6-$8. Registration required. 1-888-327-2757. 

Hike at Lake Chabot Reservoir Meet at 4 p.m. at boat house for an hour walk, on paved trail, wheel chair accessible. Optional dinner after hike. 351-6247. 

“A Primer on Global Climate Change” A presentation by the League of Women Voters of Berkeley, Albany and Emeryville, at 12:15 p.m. in the Edith Stone Room of the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave., Albany. 843-8824. 

Pacific Boychoir Academy Open House to learn about the academic and music program from 9 to 10:30 a.m. at 410 Alcatraz Ave. Please RSVP to 652-4722. www.pacificboychoiracademy.org 

Berkeley PC Problem Solving Meeting at 7 p.m. at 1145 Walnut St., corner Eunice. meldancing@comcast.net 

Family Storytime at 7 p.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043.  

Tuesday Tilden Walkers Join a few slowpoke seniors at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm for an hour or two walk. 215-7672, 524-9992. 

End the Occupation Vigil every Tues. at noon at Oakland Federal Bldg., 1301 Clay St. www.epicalc.org 

Street Level Cycles Community Bike Program Come use our tools as well as receive help with performing repairs free of charge. Youth classes available. Tues., Thurs., and Sat. from 2 to 6 p.m. at at 84 Bolivar Dr., Aquatic Park. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

Sing-A-Long Group from 2 to 3 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave., Albany. 524-9122. 

Caribbean Rhythms Dance Class begins at 5:30 p.m. at Redwood Gardens, 2951 Derby St., and meets every Tues. eve. Donations accepted for Community Rhythms Scholarship Fund. 548-9840. 

Ceramics Class Learn hand building techniques to make decorative and functional items, Tues. at 9:30 a.m. at St. John's Senior Center, 2727 College Ave. Free, materials and firing charges only. 525-5497. 

Yarn Wranglers Come knit and crochet at 6:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

WEDNESDAY, NOV. 26 

Golden Gate Birding Walk at Lake Merritt and Lakeside Park with Hilary Powers and Ruth Tobey. Meet at 9:30 a.m. at the large spherical cage near Nature Center at Perkins and Bellevue. 549-2839. www.goldengateaudubon.org 

“Health for Sale” A documentary on Big Pharma and their policies and actions at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Donation $5. www.Humanist Hall.org 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes and a warm hat. 548-9840. 

Theraputic Recreation at the Berkeley Warm Pool, Wed. at 3:30 p.m. and Sat. at 10 a.m. at the Berkeley Warm Pool, 2245 Milvia St. Cost is $4-$5. Bring a towel. 632-9369. 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Station, corner of Shattuck and Center. Sing for Peace at 6:30 p.m. followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www. 

geocities.com/vigil4peace/vigil 

Teen Chess Club from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. at the North Branch Library, 1170 The Alameda at Hopkins. 981-6133. 

Morning Meditation Every Mon., Wed., and Fri. at 7:45 a.m. at Rudramandir, 830 Bancroft Way at 6th. 486-8700. 

THURSDAY, NOV. 27 

Annual Food Not Bombs Thanksgiving Dinner from 5 to 8 p.m. at at Ashkenaz. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Vegan Thanksgiving Potluck An East Bay tradition for 35 years, from 4 p.m. on in North Berkeley. To RSVP call 562-9934. 

Community Thanksgiving Dinner at 1 p.m. at Lake Merritt United Methodist Church, 1330 Lakeshore Ave., Oakland. Volunteers needed. 465-4793. 

FRIDAY, NOV. 28 

“Back to the Jurassic” Dinosaur activities all weekend at the Lawrence Hall of Science, Centennial Drive below Grizzly Peak. Open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Cost is $6-$11. 642-5132. www.lawrencehallofscience.org 

Circle Dancing Simple folk dancing in a circle, no experience or partners needed. Potluck at 7 p.m., Dancing at 8 p.m. at Hillside Community Church, 1422 Navellier St., El Cerrito. Donation of $5 requested. 528-4253. www.circledancing.com 

Berkeley Women in Black weekly vigil from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. Our focus is human rights in Palestine. 548-6310. 

 

 

SATURDAY, NOV. 29 

3rd Annual Arts & Crafts Benefit Show and Sale of antiques and new items in the Arts & Crafts style from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Cost is $5, $20 for 10 a.m. opening. www.HillsideClub.org  

Womyn of Color Arts and Crafts Show, Sat. and Sun. from 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Berkeley Open Studios Sat and Sun. from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. through Dec. 21. 845-2612. www.berkeleyartisans.com 

Artisan Faire Handcrafts and artwork from 40 local artists in the East Bay. from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Claremont, 41 Tunnel Rd. Free.  

Close the Farm Help us close the Little Farm and tuck in the animals for the night, from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. at Tilden Little Farm, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Mini-Farmers in Tilden A farm exploration program, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. for ages 4-6 years, accompanied by an adult. We will explore the Little Farm, care for animals, do crafts and farm chores. Wear boots and dress to get dirty! Fee is $6-$8. Registration required. 1-888-EBPARKS. 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden Sat. and Sun. at 2 pm. Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

Around the World Tour of Plants at 1:30 p.m., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

Oakland Artisans Marketplace Sat. from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sun. from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Jack London Square. 238-4948. 

Car Wash Benefit for Options Recovery Services of Berkeley, held every Sat. from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Lutheran Church, 1744 University Ave. 666-9552. 

SUNDAY, NOV. 30 

Little Farm Goat Hike Join a short hike with the Little Farm goats as we explore the historic connections between humans and our ungulate friends. For ages 6 and up, at 10:30 a.m. at Tilden Little Farm, Tilden Park 525-2233. 

Children’s Holiday Tea with children’s authors and ilustrators at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Seatings at 2:30 and 3 p.m. Tickets are $30 for adutlts, $20 children 12 and under. 848-7800. 

“Scientific Revolutions and Religion: The Copernican Revolution” with Bill Garrett, Prof. of Religion and Philosophy, JFK Univ., at 10 a.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302, ext. 306. 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Tilden Park Sat. and Sun. at 2 p.m. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Peace walk around the lake every Sun. Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712. lmno4p.org 

Berkeley Chess Club meets every Sun. at 7 p.m. at the Hillside School, 1581 Le Roy Ave. 843-0150. 

Tibetan Buddhism with Jack Petranker on “Dealing with Uncertainty” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 809-1000. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

CITY MEETINGS 

Design Review Committee meets Thurs., Nov. 20, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7415.  

Fair Campaign Practices Commission meets Thurs., Nov. 20, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-6950.  

Transportation Commission meets Thurs., Nov. 20, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7010. 

ONGOING 

Help Low-wage Families with Their Taxes United Way’s Earn it! Keep It! Save It! needs Bay Area volunteers for its 7th annual free tax program. No previous experience necessary. Sign up at www.earnitkeepitsaveit.org