Opinion

Sometimes it can be hard to get away from home. Headline in the opinion section of the July 3 Irish Times we picked up in the Dublin airport: “Brought to our knees by bankers and developers.” It was a scathing piece by one Morgan Kelly, identified as professor of economics at University College, Dublin, documenting in exhaustive detail the relationship between Ireland’s building boom and its current disastrous economic bust. -more-

HOW BERKELEY CAN YOU BE? -more-

The Oakland City Planning Commission that was appointed by Jerry Brown (the two new commissioners from Dellums are no improvement) wasn’t dubbed the Approval Commission for nothing—the commissioners supported Condomania developers with unbridled passion. Some market rate condo projects were built, some are half-built—the most notorious being “CityWalk” in the shadow of City Hall with its torn Tyvek wrapping flapping in the breeze. -more-

California is insolvent and in every corner of every county and city we are feeling the pain. Draconian measures have been taken at all levels of civic governance to cut expenditures and boost falling revenues in order to balance budgets. -more-

The current aspect of the “Trader Joe’s” project soon coming up for consideration before the City Council—a traffic diverter on Berkeley Way—is the last recognizable shred of the original requests the neighborhood had made in October of 2002. The mitigation of excessive traffic on a residential street with a full traffic diverter, in this case Berkeley Way, is not a special request on our part. -more-

“We are taught from a young age not to see Palestinians, because to see Palestinians would only complicate our lives.” Yahav, our guide from the Israeli Coalition Against House Demolitions (www.icahd.org), said this to us on the first day of a recent delegation to Palestine-Israel with the Interfaith Peace Builders. -more-