With more than 8100 ballots counted in Berkeley’s District 2, Cheryl Davila has won the city council race, becoming the first candidate to unseat a sitting council member in nearly a quarter century. Davila, a 35 year resident of West Berkeley, has served on the City’s Human Welfare Commission since 2009. 

In a campaign focused on a growing affordable housing crisis, Davila promised to promote “beautification without gentrification” noting “when development caters to only constituents who are new, high-income residents that can afford above-market-rate housing, we push out the existing business owners, homeowners, and renters. The outcome is a Berkeley without diversity – large corporations own the businesses and wealthy people dominate the neighborhoods.” Davila repeatedly pointed out that the previous city council allowed agreements with developers that produced new apartment buildings with little or no affordable units, and paltry community benefit packages. Davila has also proposed funding mental health crisis response teams that would include mental health professionals trained in de-escalation; they would deploy instead of police officers, insisting “when someone is in crisis, they need a counselor, not a fire truck.” 

Local residents, two-thirds of whom voted against incumbent Darryl Moore, expressed enthusiasm for Davila. Kathy Horsely, a longtime resident of District 2, said, “Cheryl won my support because of her personal qualities: honesty, modesty, sense of responsibility to the community, and reverence for culture—her own and the cultures of people around her. At all of her campaign events, she made a place for music, dance, and poetry.” 

Rochelle Gause, West Berkeley mother of two, pointed to the larger council swing from moderate to progressive in this election: “I hope this new council can start to address Berkeley's affordable housing crisis in a real way. I know Cheryl believes in the kind of city I want to raise my kids in: equitable, diverse, and committed to social justice.” 

In a statement, Davila noted the dark national political climate, but expressed hopefulness about the changes coming to Berkeley’s City Hall: “Despite the deeply painful national news, here in Berkeley, progressive values won across the ballot,” adding, “I am deeply humbled by the outpouring of support I’ve received from the neighborhoods of District 2. It will be my honor to serve as your councilwoman, and I’ll do my very best to make sure that your voices are heard at City Hall.

William Marx "Bill" Mandel (born June 4, 1917 in New York City), a former Bay Area broadcast journalist, left-wing political activist and author, best known as a Soviet expert, died this morning, Thanksgiving, at 1:15am. Bill was 99. His books, include “Soviet Women,” and the latest, his autobiography, “Saying No to Power (1999).”  

Considered a leading Sovietologist during the 1940s and 1950s, Mandel was a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, but lost his position there due to the political pressures of the McCarthy era. He is perhaps best known for standing up to Senator Joseph McCarthy during a televised 1953 Senate committee hearing in which Mandel pointedly told the senator, "This is a book-burning! You lack only the tinder to set fire to the books as Hitler did twenty years ago, and I am going to get that across to the American people!" 

In 1960, Mandel was again subpoenaed, this time by the House Un-American Activities Committee. He testified on May 13 in a hearing held at the San Francisco City Hall. Outside the hearing, hundreds of protesting Bay Area college students were blasted with firehoses and dragged down the marble steps by police officers, leaving some seriously injured.^[3] Newsreel cameras recorded Mandel's scathing response to the question posed by Lead Counsel Richard Arens, "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?": 

Mandel replied: “Honorable beaters of children, sadists, uniformed and in plain clothes, distinguished Dixiecrat wearing the clothing of a gentleman, eminent Republican who opposes an accommodation with the one country with which we must live at peace in order for us and all our children to survive. My boy of fifteen left this room a few minutes ago in sound health and not jailed, solely because I asked him to be in here to learn something about the procedures of the United States government and one of its committees. Had he been outside where a son of a friend of mine had his head split by these goons operating under your orders, my boy today might have paid the penalty of permanent injury or a police record for desiring to come here and hear how this committee operates. If you think that I am going to cooperate with this collection of Judases, of men who sit there in violation of the United States Constitution, if you think I will cooperate with you in any way, you are insane!" 

For over 10 years, Mandel hosted a weekly radio program on KPFA-Berkeley until 1995 as commentator and interpreter on Soviet affairs. He died peacefully at his home in Kensington. 

On the morning of October 30, 2016, Edith Erlene Monk Hallberg passed away peacefully in her apartment at the Redwood Gardens in Berkeley, CA. She was 69 years old. 

Edie was born in San Francisco, CA on February 7, 1947, the third daughter of Edgar and Cledyth Monk. She grew up in the East Bay and graduated from Harry Ells High School in Richmond, in 1964. Soon after graduation she met her husband, Michael John Hallberg, moved to Berkeley, where they had two children together: Carl in 1967, and Helen in 1969. 

Edie’s experience with her kids’ preschool sparked a lifelong passion for education. She earned a degree in childhood education from SFSU, and worked as a substitute teacher in the Berkeley Unified School District for nearly 30 years; a generation of Berkeley kids will remember her as “The Cat Lady” thanks to the festive feline theme she brought to the classroom. 

Everyone who knew Edie knows she was a tireless champion for the rights of workers, teachers, the elderly, and the homeless. She became active in Berkeley politics and was a proud member of the Berkeley Federation of Teachers, the Labor Commission, the Homeless Commission, the Commission on Aging, the East Bay Gray Panthers, the Rockin’ Solidarity Chorus, the California Alliance for Retired Americans, the Peace and Freedom Party, and countless other groups dedicated to justice for the underprivileged and underserved. Her tenacious activism will be missed by all. 

Edie is survived by her sisters Maxine Wood and Pam Railsback, her long time companion Bob Magarian, her children Carl Hallberg and Helen Hallberg, and 4 grandchildren. 

Friends and family are invited to attend a memorial service on Sunday December 11th, 1:00 pm at the North Berkeley Senior Center 1901 Hearst Ave, Berkeley. 

Looking through my enormous pile of meaningless unread political mail after election day, I came across a small but thick envelope from Emily’s List. Normally I don’t subscribe to that organization, since over the years it’s backed some truly awful women out of a misguided—I was going to say “feminist patriotism”, but that’s a linguistically foolish construct, so let’s call it—“matriotism”.

In this case however, the envelope contained four small square black-and-white bumper stickers saying “Women can stop Trump.” I’d ordered them on the internet at the Emily’s List site after seeing one on a car, and I really hoped they were true.

Wrong.

Since I never got around to handing them out to my daughters or putting one on my own car, I now have to decide what to do with them. Throw them away? No. They’re a valuable historic artifact which should be passed on to my all-female descendants, as a reminder that we’re all in this soup together, women and men both.

As I promised last week, this week I’ll indulge in some brief ruminations on what went wrong in the presidential race on November 8, and where we go from here.

First, of course, we won. 

That is to say, Hillary Clinton was chosen by the majority of voters, perhaps a couple of million more than chose Herr Drumpf. But thanks to the archaic electoral college system, he nonetheless gets the prize. There have been suggestions that the electors exercise their putative constitutional right to vote for whomever they want. That came up on my neighborhood NextDoor thread, but it was greeted there with horror, much to my surprise, by the renowned Joe Grodin himself, per Wikipedia “ lawyer, law professor, and a former Presiding Justice on the California Court of Appeal and an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court of California.^[1]” And one of the very best liberal justices of all time, I might add. I'm pleased to see he’s still a neighbor. 

He spoke up for not changing the rules after the game has been played, and I must agree: “Strikes me as a very bad idea to ask electors to ignore the vote of the people who selected them: contrary to the premise of the electoral system, a very bad precedent, and, if it were to succeed, certain to produce violent opposition.” 

Though the consequences could easily be epic, as far as the election was concerned it was statistically just about a tie. What concerns me about the race is not just who won, but the apparent fact that roughly half of the country voted for a lunatic narcissist whose campaign featured, among other things, breathtaking vulgarity, blatant sexism and hitherto unseen racism. 

However. As I told my weepy granddaughters, I’ve seen many presidents elected who I was sure would bring the end of the world upon us, and it didn’t happen. 

Tom Lord’s piece in this issue about The Graduate reminded me of the night we saw the first-run movie in Ann Arbor, and came out to hear on the car radio that Lyndon Johnson had decided not to run for another term. We were gleeful, having spent most of his term organizing against the war in Vietnam—we thought we’d won. 

Well, not so fast. His successor turned out to be Richard Nixon, not such a prize after all—but he did end the war. Only a good bit later, I, along with others, learned to appreciate how much Lyndon Johnson had done to advance civil rights, the other cause which I devoted most of my twenties to promoting. It’s not over until it’s over, is it? 

And then in 2000 we went to the inauguration in Washington with the late and much lamented Patti Dacey to protest the outcome of the Bush-Gore election. It was bitter cold, and our presence made not a whit of difference, and now the president-elect makes awful old W-Bush look like a statesman. 

What happened this time? In the more than half century since I’ve inhabited the revolving door between journalism and politics (with an 18-year break to make a living) I’ve learned that there’s one slogan which always works: “It’s time for a change.” I don’t know if it was invented by Plunkitt of Tammany Hall (“I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em”) but it affects almost every election where there’s a previously-elected candidate in the running. 

In this race, DT won by using the Xtreme version: “Throw the rascals out !”. He and his operatives managed to convince enough suckers on the Trump/Sanders right-left axis that Hillary Clinton was a crook that it won the election. 

This is where I get so angry as to be incoherent. Hillary Clinton, like most politicians, is not without flaws, but she’s much more sinned against than sinning. I have absolutely no patience with the fringe pseudo-leftists who have a sacramental view of what voting’s all about, who consider it just another opportunity to express their inner selves instead of a consequential decision. 

Luckily, Kurt Eichenwald has summed up my opinion exactly in his Newsweek column, The Scoop. Rather than foaming at the mouth myself, I’ll just quote his piece at length here: 

 

 

“Could Sanders still have won? Well, Trump won, so anything is possible. But Sanders supporters puffing up their chests as they arrogantly declare Trump would have definitely lost against their candidate deserve to be ignored.  

“Which leads back to the main point: Awash in false conspiracy theories and petulant immaturity, liberals put Trump in the White House. Trump won slightly fewer votes than Romney did in 2012—60.5 million compared with 60.9 million. On the other hand, almost 5 million Obama voters either stayed home or cast their votes for someone else. More than twice as many millennials—a group heavily invested in the “Sanders was cheated out of the nomination” fantasy—voted third-party. The laughably unqualified Jill Stein of the Green Party got 1.3 million votes; those voters almost certainly opposed Trump; if just the Stein voters in Michigan had cast their ballot for Clinton, she probably would have won the state. And there is no telling how many disaffected Sanders voters cast their ballot for Trump.

“Of course, there will still be those voters who snarl, “She didn’t earn my vote,” as if somehow their narcissism should override all other considerations in the election. That, however, is not what an election is about. Voters are charged with choosing the best person to lead the country, not the one who appeals the most to their egos.

“ If you voted for Trump because you supported him, congratulations on your candidate’s victory. But if you didn’t vote for the only person who could defeat him and are now protesting a Trump presidency, may I suggest you shut up and go home. Adults now need to start fixing the damage you have done.” 

 

 

Don’t believe him? Read his whole piece here: The Myths Democrats Swallowed That Cost Them the Presidential Election. He’s got the goods on Sanders. 

 

And if he’s talking about you, hang your head in shame and weep. 

We must take some responsibility for giving space to the paranoid left, I suppose, but as a free speech advocate I think it's better to help irrational people put their silly ideas right out front where they can be refuted by cooler heads. 

My partner in crime call it a “Trotsky Moment”—from the belief that enhancing the contradictions might bring on the revolution. He told this to our friend the Petaluma chicken farm heiress, who describes her parents as having different old leftist tendencies which they endless debated at the dinner table when she was growing up. The slogan she remembers from that era is “The worser the better.” 

How can we grown-ups fix things? That’s a topic for later. Judging by today’s news on Trump’s appointments, it’s not going to be easy. We’ll see what happens, but don’t hold your breath. 

---

P.S. On Sunday after this was published I had a visitor, a bouncy pig-tailed second-grade girl, African-American, about eight years old. She noted with approval the Clinton sign on the fridge and complained loudly about the election results. Then she noticed my mail stack, with the above-mentioned "Women Can Stop Trump" sticker and seized on it with glee. She read it aloud a couple of times, then asked if she could have it. Of course! She peeled off the backing and stuck it to her teeshirt, saying that she'd put it on her mom's car when she went home. And you know, she might just just be right. She will be old enough to vote in only ten years, and if we haven't stopped Trump (or his ilk) by then she and her sister and their mom and some friends might just take care of him themselves. 

 

 

 

 

 

I know there will be photos from a drone of the aerial view of the early morning human peace sign in Martin Luther King Civic Center Park today, November 18, 2016, which was a lovely event. I wore tie-dye, I raised my hands in peace signs, I helped make the human peace symbol for the bemused seagulls nearby to see. 

But my favorite photos are these of only two of the many people who brought their sense of shared purpose, their willingness to cross political divides to help organize positive change in this post-election moment, but also their clear voices of concern about the repeated raids of First They Came for the Homeless, the peaceful, drug-free group which has spent years doggedly illustrating the crying need for a legal place to sleep. 

First They Came for the Homeless was raided twice on the night before the human peace sign event; chased in the middle of the night from an area within the park back to within a few dozen feet of the same place they were evicted from only the day before. They were raided again early in the morning and forced to move about a dozen feet away by the same city police and staff which continues this curious sleep-confounding custom even in the wake of an apparent change in political leadership. 

So who's running this carnival which has left so many with so little with even less? One of the young men flushed from location to location has a serious eye infection which jeopardizes his eyesight, an injury linked in part to the caustic cleaning fluids used in heavy quantities near the group; the workers wear protection, but the people closest to the spray, which becomes an aerosol, have none. 

Mayor-elect Jesse Arreguin and a small committee ostensibly looked into, but did not recommend, two sites for possible campgrounds far from the city center near the freeways in districts one and two. But the logical site is exactly where First They Came for the Homeless set up camp in the first place years ago: near City Hall, where there are bathrooms, services, transportation, YMCA showers, library resources, and social service outreach groups. 

City Hall, in its flush of progressive victory, needs prodded now, not later, to stop wasting community resources, tens of thousands of dollars per raid, accomplishing nothing. The resolve of First They Came for the Homeless is as strong now as it was four years ago, if not stronger. 

To paraphrase Commissioner George Lippman, who joined me in the early morning human peace sign event and was willing to chat briefly about the ongoing human rights violations just around the corner, "it is always a good time to talk about human rights."

With each passing day, Congress and the American people get a clearer look into the Trump White House.

People of conscience are horrified by what we’ve seen.

The Justice Department is our nation’s best instrument for protecting our civil rights and voting rights. I am appalled by the decision to nominate Senator Jeff Sessions, a man rejected from serving on the federal bench for his racist comments, as Attorney General. His confirmation would put much of our progress as a nation at grave risk. I strongly urge my colleagues in the Senate to reject his nomination. 

Likewise, the decision to name Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as National Security Advisor is another step in the wrong direction. Gen. Flynn was forced out of his role at the Defense Intelligence Agency for insubordination and has made a career out of denigrating Muslims. Time and time again, we’ve seen dangerous comments like his used to recruit terrorists abroad. The decision to hire Lt. Gen. Flynn to oversee our national security is worrisome and baffling. 

Finally, President-elect Trump’s decision to name Steve Bannon, an alt-right nationalist, extremist and alleged domestic abuser, as chief White House strategist is simply unacceptable. As I said in The Hill, ‘we are better than this.’ 

President-elect Trump should be reminded that the majority of Americans, by more than a million-vote margin, rejected him and his dangerous flirtation with racism, xenophobia, sexism and hyper-nationalism. 

Once again, I call on President-elect Trump to live up to his Election Night promise to be ‘a President for all Americans’ and rescind the nominations of these dangerous individuals.

At the end of the movie "The Graduate", Benjamin stands in the vestibule of the church pounding a single demand on its grand glass entryway: "Elaine!"

As Elaine abandons the altar, her eyes fixed on Ben, she takes her hypnotic walk back down the aisle. We see arrayed around her an older generation's bondage: middle class conformity, consumerism, patriarchy, sex (furtive and transgressive) as a social weapon, a business world distilled to a single word - "plastics".

For a moment, the soundtrack mutes the angry voices of those who came to see her wed. There are only red faces, teeth bared in awful grimaces. We see them shouting but their words are gone. The sound returns only as anger turns to violence when the soldiers of the social order try to snatch back the youths from the brink of terrible freedom.

In one of the most overwrought visual metaphors in cinema -- striking in an otherwise low-key film -- Ben drives back the angry mob by swinging wildly at them with a cross from their own church. As Ben and Elaine flee, they bar the door with that very cross, trapping inside the society they reject.

The pair make their getaway in the back of a public bus -- the closest the 1967 film comes to acknowledging the existence of Black people. As the wistful music swells before the final credits roll we see in their young faces a progression of emotions. The moment settles in and weighs upon them: giddy excitement, laughter, and romance give way first to uncertainty and then -- is that fear? "What next?", we see them think in unison.

-*-

Two eras ended in Berkeley last week:

On the political scene, 25 years of rule over City Council by a so-called moderate faction came to a decisive end as moderates lost all but one race they entered. Local wonks are calling it the first progressive sweep of an election in as long as anyone cares to remember. 

And on the mytho-poeic side, Cafe Mediterraneum ("Cafe Med") announced that its 60th year of business will be its last. It is among the least, yet most widely mentioned, significances of the Cafe that it is featured briefly in the "The Graduate"; Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) sits at a table and stares out the front window. ("The Dustin Hoffman table," the regulars call it.) 

The local election was widely portrayed as an epic clash between two forces. On one side, an old guard who was (depending on who you ask) either pragmatic and hard-nosed or else corrupted by big development money and cruel towards poor people. On the other side (depending on who you ask), either bold new leadership for a greener, more humane Berkeley for Everyone or else a clumsy gang of bleeding-heart idealists who are now poised to bankrupt the city and fill parks and sidewalks with homeless encampments. 

Whatever else may be said about the election, the voters ran away from the altar of the past in no uncertain terms. As Berkeleyans, we now sit on the back of the only bus that happened to be passing, headed to points unknown, wondering to ourselves: "What next?" 

-*- 

With the hindsight of 50 years we have some idea what came next for Benjamin and Elaine, or at least the society for whom they were avatars. 

In '68, a year after they fled the church, cities burned in youthful rebellion around the world. The war and body count in Asia escalated. The Democratic National Convention ended in bloodshed after police and city powers rose to the bait, taking up arms against hippies. After the famous trial, the one Black defendant who alone was put in chains and prevented from speaking by the judge would be all but erased from popular white history, reducing the Chicago 8 to just 7. 

Nixon was the One that year. Two years later, when the country came within days of defaulting on its national debt, Nixon would briefly accomplish for Berkeley (and the nation) something Berkeley radicals had struggled for without success: a freeze on rent increases. 

For a decade, young people who were Ben and Elaine's age hit a brick wall as they tried to enter the economy: Massive unemployment (underplayed in the official numbers) combined with relentless inflation. Middle class life began its long, slow slide into history. 

I tend to imagine that after Ben and Elaine inevitably went their separate and disillusioned ways, Ben wound up somehow as Herman Blume in the film "Rushmore" (1998). Ben/Blume middle aged, looking like his mustachioed father in more ways than one: unhappy marriage, unenjoyable pool in the back yard which serves as a nihilist refuge from unlikable friends and incomprehensible children. Ben/Blume himself a worn out industrialist overseeing a tedious factory that, no doubt, cranks out something made of plastic. 

-*- 

In hindsight the future is always clearer than the past, but in the present: "What next?" 

We live in dark times. An avowed white nationalist will take his seat at the right hand of an operatically charismatic con artist in the nation's highest office. We are promised an increase in the scope and capacity of the police state, a rush to develop environmentally ruinous production, a polarization of the working class into silos of mutual hatred and suspicion. We already have an economy in ruins for the working class, with falling wages, inflation, and high unemployment that official figures lie about. 

Perhaps the damnedest kick in the teeth -- speaking only on the political front -- is that what the losing candidate promised, in her fine print, may have been different from what we're getting -- but it wasn't wildly different. Larger forces are at work than any one politician. 

The new regime in Berkeley, meanwhile, is a loose coalition at best; collectively they have no more of a plan or vision of the future than Ben and Elaine did when they boarded that bus. We know what we've rejected perfectly well. It's where we're headed that leaves us in the dark.

Right-wing Israeli politicians eager to capitalize on Trump’s election gave preliminary approval to a bill that would retroactively legalize illegal settlements built in the West Bank. The bill was rushed through the Israeli parliament to forestall the demolition of an illegal outpost by 25 December.  

Education Minister, Naftali Bennett, expressed his disdain for international law boasting “the era of the Palestinian state is over.” 

Israel’s defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman, went even further urging his government to negotiate a deal with the Trump administration to approve expanded construction in major West Bank settlements. Prime Minister Netanyahu and his Attorney General, Avichai Mandelblit, oppose the bill warning that it violates international law. This development is a monumental failure of successive US administrations who have failed to broker a peaceful two-state settlement. Billions of US tax funds have been squandered rewarding Israel for their bad behavior. 

Senator Patrick Leahy, denounced Israel’s blatant theft of Palestinian land stating, “One of the most effective ways that ISIS and other terrorist groups have attracted recruits is by tarring the United States with Israel’s expanding occupation of the West Bank. This legislation to retroactively legalize illegal settlements will be welcomed by those murderous groups as further evidence that America’s closest ally in the region is bent on destroying a peaceful solution, including the possibility of a Palestinian state.” 

Let us hope that President-Elect Trump will use his deal making skills to broker a peaceful and equitable solution to the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

Donald Trump won the election to the Presidency with promises of "making America great again" in which he seduced voters into believing we could create another post-WWII economy. There are numerous reasons why this isn't realistic, and why any attempt to bring the U.S. back to the late 1940's will have dire consequences for our country and for the world.  

The U.S. relies very heavily on guest workers and on foreign manufacturing. Trying to tamper with this will wreck everything that currently works. The main products for which the U.S. is responsible are innovation, information technology, sales of weapons of mass destruction, and financial control.  

The U.S. is not primarily a manufacturing economy. China is. We should let China do what they are good at, and we should continue doing the things we're good at. Almost all manufactured goods that you purchase at Wal-Mart are from China.  

The U.S. doesn't perform its own dirty work. For that, we rely on guest workers, people whose background is that of far harsher conditions than we can imagine, and who work incredibly hard for us for less than minimum wage. People born in the U.S., especially Caucasian people, would never be willing to do such work. Most people born in the U.S. are raised to aspire to professional employment.  

If we deport all of the undocumented workers and implement the 35 percent trade tariff, both of which Trump promised, things would quickly fall apart.  

One of the first things we might notice will be a food shortage. We might soon discover that no one is available to do our landscaping, to clean our office buildings, to do construction cleanup, to bus tables at restaurants.  

We will see a sharp increase in the price of manufactured goods, and many of the products we are accustomed to buying may be completely unavailable. This is because we are not currently set up to manufacture our own products.  

Because of all of this disruption, the public could go into emotional shock. Conditions could worsen due to widespread panic, and society could spiral out of control. What happens after that, one can only guess. Would Trump institute martial law if people are rioting?  

Of course, none of this is going to happen because saner heads will advise Trump to leave things pretty much as they are while giving some appearance of revolutionizing everything. Guest workers will still be here, but they will have fewer rights than they had before Trump, and they will be criminalized more. But we need them and there is no way that they will be deported.  

We will continue to manufacture in other countries and we will continue to purchase manufactured goods from China, because we have no other choice.  

The other option would be to let all of the people out of the prisons and jails who are doing hard sentences for nonviolent offenses, and put those individuals into the jobs left vacant by deported people. Yet, that will not happen, either.  

In short, not much will change under the new President. This is due to the fact that the people truly in control of things like it the way it is. As President, Trump will have limited power, and any actions that are excessively ill-advised will be blocked by the Republican Congress.  

When the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced that the most recent official unemployment rate is 4.9 percent, the enthusiasm was widespread. According to a survey of economists by the Wall Street Journal, the majority claimed that we are finally close to full employment. The news that the economy is doing very well has been reported not only by the business journals but uncritically by the go-along mass media as well. Moreover, a high level official of the Federal Reserve Bank believes that the economy is doing too well. He complained that "we may not have enough unemployment". Indeed, many public officials and economists agree because they are worried about inflation. But since their sympathies are with business, it is higher wages more than higher prices that makes them anxious. 

However, both unemployment and poverty have been widespread for a long while. In fact, millions of working people have given up looking for work because they have been unable to find a job. So they are not counted as unemployed. If the estimated 13.6 million long term discouraged workers are included, the official unemployment rate would be over 16 percent, which is almost at a depression level. It is not surprising, then, that over 30 percent of the homeless are in the streets because they lost their jobs. 

The Chief Executive Officer of the Gallop Poll, commenting on the absurdly underestimated official unemployment rate, claims that the figures are "extremely misleading" and "it is a big lie". Of course it is a big lie. BLS is certainly aware that millions of unemployed have given up looking for very legitimate reasons. 

Certainly truth is not among the clients of the BLS. But why does the BLS routinely provide the public with false estimates? The unhappy and unavoidable explanation is that the federal government mainly panders to the expectations of private enterprise. What business wants is a low wage workforce and conditions that make labor organizing extremely difficult. These objectives are best achieved not only when there is a substantial labor surplus. The excessively optimist propaganda being presented to the public and to Congress serves to discourage a collective political response. After all, why fix what is not broken. Also, the mythology of full employment justifies the import of foreign low wage workers at the expense of qualified domestic job seekers. 

Thanks to the federal government, which has looked the other way, there are 6.5 million undocumented immigrants who have crossed the border and work in the United States. Many of these workers have replaced domestic employees. Undocumented workers rank among the nation's most vulnerable and exploited workers. These immigrants are victims of unpaid wages, dangerous work, and uncompensated workplace injuries. It is no surprise, then, that business prefers these employees rather than the many available domestic American workers, who had been accustomed to higher wages. Although the federal government has joined business in complaining about a labor shortage, their actual agenda on behalf of business has been to drive down wages 

To recruit skilled foreign labor requires more planning and coordination between business and government. Here is where official government data is particularly important. As an illustration of how business and government work together, let's take a look at how the high tech industry with government cooperation has successfully exploited the myth of full employment. Drawing from government data, the industry has persuaded Congress, or more likely pretended it has been persuaded, that a severe shortage of trained and skilled technology workers exists. In response to the fictitious claims of a skilled labor shortage Congress passed legislation known as H1B, which allows business to hire up to 65,000 foreign workers per year. The law, nevertheless, does not require a business to prove that it is unable to recruit domestic workers. Just as well. If government insisted on evidence, business couldn't provide any. 

Because Hi Tech recruits H1-B workers year after year, the cumulative impact is substantial. In Silicon Valley, foreign workers in the high tech industry constitute 75 percent of the work force. But the industry is still not satisfied. To support its appetite for more foreign workers, it is asking Congress to increase the lid. 

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton supported the industry's request. Rather than siding with skilled domestic workers who were or will be replaced by foreign labor, she instead supported tripling the annual import of skilled foreign labor to 195,000 per year. In fact, in an email released by WikiLeaks she told a group of Wall Street executives that any kind of limit on immigration is "fundamentally un-American". So among the reasons Hillary lost votes was that many workers who were worried about losing their jobs did not think that Hillary as President would attempt to protect them. Unfortunately, it appears that their fears were justified. 

Her request was at odds with the Democratic Party's platform which she endorsed. The relevant section reads "we are committed to doing everything we can to build a full employment economy".  

Several members of the U.S. Senate had a very different perspective. Ten U.S. Senators including Bernie Sanders requested that the H-1B program be investigated. In a letter that they sent to several federal departments, they complained that some of the large corporations deliberately laid off thousands of American workers so that they can be replaced by lower wage workers with H1-B visas. In fact, according to their complaints, many American employees are being forced to train foreign workers who were taking their jobs! Obviously, the industry's insistence that there is a shortage of domestic workers is 100 percent propaganda. Clearly, both the deception and mistreatment of working people are immense. 

So what are the options? Unfortunately, too many Americans, who are deeply concerned about how badly things are going, have been willing to elect a right wing candidate for President. Obviously, Bernie Sanders would have been by far the much better alternative. But the Democratic Party establishment engaged in illegal and unethical practices to deprive Bernie of the nomination. 

However, no matter who is elected, the combined power of government and business against the interests of working people presents tremendous hurdles to overcome. So to stand a chance of successfully addressing the many specific problems that workers and their families confront requires building a formidable political movement. 

But to achieve a morally equitable society in which coping with one crisis after another is no longer the usual situation, we should also consider a vision that poses an alternative to capitalism. Human needs rather than the profit motive should mainly guide how we live. Indeed, we should engage ourselves in a serious campaign to move our society in a socialist direction. If this sounds like pie in the sky, please recall the very positive public response that Bernie Sanders received when he talked positively about socialism. Undoubtedly, achieving a socialist economy would entail a long and arduous climb. However, to believe that the severe and chronic problems that workers and their families suffer can be adequately dealt with in a capitalist society is a delusion

At this writing, Hillary Clinton has won the 2016 presidential popular vote by 1.7 million votes (1.3 percent). Unfortunately, she lost the Electoral College (232 to 290) because Donald Trump carried the 13 swing states by an aggregate 850,000 votes (1.9 percent). Many Democrats think Hillary was cheated; they believe there were nefarious political tricks that cost her the election. There's not a clear-cut case. 

1. Comey's intervention: The Clinton campaign blames her loss on the October 28th intervention by FBI Director James Comey who, in effect, reopened the issue of the Clinton email server. Certainly this was an unprecedented act; one that some Washington observers felt violated the Hatch Act. Coming out of a strong performance in the third presidential debate, Hillary had momentum; some saw her winning by double digits. 

Then the Comey memo was issued and the momentum shifted. Writing in The Guardian veteran pollster Stan Greenberg observed, "The [Clinton] campaign’s close was disrupted by a flood of hacked emails, whose release was linked to Russia, intended to show that friends of Bill Clinton were using the Clinton Foundation to enrich the former president, and then by FBI director James Comey’s letter to Congress... This allowed Trump to close his campaign with a call to 'drain the swamp' and reject 'the Clintons’ big business trade deals that decimated so many communities'." 

Did this shift in momentum cost Clinton the electoral college? Writing in Mother Jones Kevin Drum opined, "My guess is that his last minute intervention swayed the vote by about 2 percent." (The 538 website agreed.) 

Writing in the Washington Post, Aaron Blake observed that last-deciding voters broke strongly for Trump: "In Florida and Pennsylvania, late-deciders favored Trump by 17 points. In Michigan, they went for Trump by 11 points. In Wisconsin, they broke for Trump by a whopping 29 points, 59-30." 

By the way: Hillary's emails were a big deal to many voters. Writing in the Washington Post, Chris Cillizza noted: "Almost two-thirds of Americans (63 percent) said that Clinton's 'use of private email' bothered them 'a lot' or 'some.' Among that group, Trump won 70 percent to 24 percent." 

2. Clinton's Response: Pollster Stan Greenberg argues that, after the Comey memo, the Clinton had time to fight back but didn't do so effectively: "[The Clinton campaign] used its advertising muscle to shift the spotlight from Clinton to Trump. Its ads running right through the very last weekend showed Trump at his worst. By then, nobody could remember that Hillary Clinton was a candidate with bold economic plans who demanded that government should work for working people and the middle class, not corporations. She was no longer a candidate of change." 

Writing in The Nation, Joan Walsh cites Stan Greenberg's study, " The Clinton campaign stopped making a strong case for her populist economic policies in the closing weeks of the campaign, research by Greenberg’s Democracy Corps found. A poll of 1,300 voters—including 400 who are considered part of the rising American electorate of black, Latino, and other nonwhite voters plus unmarried white women (also known as the Obama coalition)—found they never heard her strongest economic pitches throughout the long campaign." 

3. Disgruntled Bernie voters: Perhaps it is the case that Clinton lost key swing states because of disgruntled Bernie Sanders voters. In Pennsylvania, Clinton lost by 68.000 votes while Gary Johnson and Jill Stein got 190,000 votes. In Wisconsin, Clinton lost by 27,000 votes while Gary Johnson and Jill Stein got 136,000 votes. In Michigan, Clinton lost by 11,000 votes while Gary Johnson and Jill Stein got 223,000 votes. 

There are not definitive studies in Michigan and Wisconsin, however in Pennsylvania the prestigious Brookings Institute felt there was a clear reason for Clinton's loss: "Although Clinton’s statewide total in Pennsylvania fell just short of Obama’s in 2012, this modest shortfall was not why she lost the state. The real story is that Donald Trump ran up the score in every Republican-leaning rural and small-town county, besting Mitt Romney’s statewide total by nearly 300 thousand votes." 

4. Stolen votes: Rumors persist that Hillary's stunning losses in supposedly solid swing states was due to various forms of voter suppression. Writing in Alternet, Steve Rosenfeld examined five states including Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. In Pennsylvania and Wisconsin there are questions about results in areas that use electronic voting machines that provide no paper trail. In Michigan, there will be a recount due to the fact that "87,000 ballots did not show a presidential vote," a result that could indicate faulty optical scanners. 

Clinton lost Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin by a total of 106,000 votes. An excellent analysis by German Lopez concludes that voter suppression does not explain Clinton's loss in Michigan and Pennsylvania: "In Pennsylvania, Clinton got 2 percent fewer votes than Obama did in 2012, while Trump got 11 percent more than Mitt Romney. In Michigan, Clinton got 11 percent fewer votes than Obama did in 2012, while Trump got 8 percent more than Mitt Romney. Clinton simply got fewer people to turn out for her than the last Democrat who ran, while Trump appeared to get more than the previous Republican." 

Conclusion: On October 27th, Hillary Clinton was ahead in the polls but a significant number of voters did not trust her because of her email problem. FBI Director Comey's October 28th memo reminded these voters of their concerns about Hillary and they began to move towards Trump. In the remaining 10 days, Clinton had an opportunity to blunt Trump's new momentum -- with an economic message -- but failed to do this. As a consequence, late-deciding voters went with Trump, seeing him as an agent of change, even though they didn't like him. 

Given his electoral-college victory, Donald Trump has amassed short-term political capital. Early indications are that he will fritter it away.

Beginning January 20, 2017, Americans should expect an ultra-conservative government accentuated by Trump's impetuousness and irascibility. We can count on the Trump Administration to overreach. That's why Trump will misuse his political capital. 

Trump was elected because his supporters believed he would shakeup the economic order. Before the election, Democratic pollster Pat Caddell's survey of likely voters found 87 percent of respondents believed, "The country is run by an alliance of incumbent politicians, media pundits, lobbyists and other powerful money interests for their own gain at the expense of the American people." The New York Times exit poll indicated that of those voters whose most important candidate quality was "can bring needed change," 83 percent chose Trump. 

Jobs: Trump should use his political capital for a massive job-creation initiative. 

In his election night speech, Trump said: "We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals. We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none. And we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it." 

What Trump is suggesting seems to be the same program that President Obama suggested after the initial recovery from the great recession. This was blocked by congressional Republicans.  

Now Trump is proposing a similar infrastructure-based jobs program but with a different method of financing: "The American Infrastructure Act leverages public-private partnerships and private investments through tax incentives to spur $1 trillion in infrastructure investment over the next ten years." For example, in Trump's plan, America would finance new highways by giving construction companies tax incentives up front and, after the highway was completed, letting the builder charge tolls. 

It seems unlikely that Trump will get the support of establishment Republicans. 

If Trump really is a transformational President -- if he really is serious about changing a rigged system -- then he will use his political capital to push through a real infrastructure program. For an early reading of Trump's intention, watch what happens when the Indianapolis Carrier factory closes. (For comparison six months into the Trump Administration: as of 11/8/16, the U.S. unemployment rate was 4.9 percent, the number of manufacturing jobs was 12.2 million, and quarterly GDP growth was 2.9 percent.) 

Immigration: Rather than focus on jobs, Trump will likely settle for some sort of immigration initiative. 

During his campaign, Trump made three immigration-related promises: build "a wall" along the US Mexico border, deport all of America's undocumented immigrants, and block immigration of all Muslims. Early indications are that Trump has softened his position on each of these. 

Initially Trump said his wall would be 1000 miles long, rise 35-40 feet, and cost $8 billion. The Washington Post studied Trump’s wall design and estimated that it would cost $25 billion for design and material; in addition, the construction would require “40,000 workers per year for at least four years.”  

Trump has backed off his demand that Mexico pay for the wall which leaves its funding an open question. One way to finance the wall would be to hide it in the Department of Homeland Security budget -- estimated at more than $40 billion in FY 2017. If packaged in this fashion, the Trump Administration could try to sell the wall as a "twofer," a combination security measure and jobs initiative -- even though the construction jobs would not help workers in the rust-belt states. 

Trump has also softened his position on deporting illegal immigrants. Pew Research says there are actually 11.3 million illegal immigrants (who comprise about 5.1 percent of the US labor force)  

Now Trump says he would initially deport "two million to three million immigrants" he sees as criminals or "dangerous." Fact checkers say there are only "820,000 undocumented immigrants living in the US with a criminal record."  

Finally, in December Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Once again his position has evolved and now Trump calls for banning immigrants from "terrorist countries." 

It's clear that Trump could ban immigrants from countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Syria without much congressional opposition. 

Trade: Rather than focus on jobs or immigration, Trump might take the easy way out and focus his political capital on trade, 

During his campaign Trump railed against trade deals such as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and NAFTA. While the TPP is already dead -- it can't get the necessary congressional votes, NAFTA continues. Trump could kill it without getting congressional approval by invoking article 2205 on January 20th -- US withdrawal would happen six months later. It's unclear what the impact would be. 

Prediction: Trump's presidency will be defined by his first 100 days in office. Rather than govern as an outsider, and enact a radical populist initiative, such as an infrastructure-based job program, Trump will succumb to the Republican establishment and settle for xenophobic immigration programs. It will be his first big mistake and one that is likely to scuttle Republican prospects in 2018. 

The Berkeley police have conducted raids on homeless camps as members of the homeless community continue to protest the Hub — the city’s homeless services system — for its alleged inefficiency in providing homeless Berkeley citizens with housing and other services. 

It is illegal to criminalize someone's status rather than their conduct, and therefore enforcing no-camping laws when homeless people don't have viable alternatives is criminalizing their state in life. A shelter is a basic human right and efforts to remove the homeless self-help shelters -- including tents -- are likely to run afoul of the law.  

Earlier this year, an Oakland federal district court judge, in Cobine v. City of Eureka, prohibited the city of Eureka from evicting eleven homeless unless the city provided them with adequate shelter and assurances that their possessions would be stored and safeguarded. The Court found that the eviction of these eleven homeless violated the 4th, 8th, and 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. 

While this case applies only to these eleven plaintiffs, the Court's reasoning is sound. And remember this district court is in the Ninth Circuit, which covers Berkeley. This places the constitutionality of Berkeley's anti-homeless program in doubt. 

That does not mean, of course, that Berkeley cannot enact restrictions on homeless encampments to maintain hygiene, safety, and lawful conditions. As homeless encampments are here to stay at least for the foreseeable future, instead of violent raids on such encampments, Berkeley should provide portable toilets, trash bins, trash, trash removal, other amenities to make the encampments more livable, and enforce laws preventing blocking of streets, sidewalks, and entrances to businesses.  

Whether we like it or not, homeless encampments are now part of the urban environment. 

 

 

“We have fallen into a self-defeating spiral of reaction and counterterror. Our policies, meant to extirpate our enemies, have strengthened and perpetuated them.”

-Mark Danner

Danner—an award winning journalist, professor and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, who has covered war and revolutions on three continents—begins his book “Spiral” with the aftermath of a 2003 ambush of U.S. troops outside of Fallujah, Iraq. The insurgents had set off a roadside bomb, killing a paratrooper and wounding several others. “The Americans promptly dismounted and with their M-16s and M-4s began pouring lead into everything they could see,” including a passing truck, he writes. “By week’s end scores of family and close friends of those killed would join the insurgents, for honor demanded they kill Americans to wipe away family shame.”

The incident encapsulates the fundamental contradiction at the heart of George W. Bush’s—and with variations, that of Barak Obama’s—“war on terror”: the means used to fight it is the most effective recruiting device that organizations like Al Qaeda, the Taliban, the Shabab, and the Islamic State have. Targeted assassinations by drones, the use of torture, extra-legal renditions, and the invasions of several Muslim countries has been an unmitigated disaster, destabilizing several states, killing hundreds of thousands of people and generating millions of refugees. 

 

Danner’s contention is hardly breaking news, nor is he the first journalist to point out that responding to the tactic of terrorism with military forces generates yet more enemies and instability. But Spiral argues that what was once unusual has now become standard operating procedure, and the Obama administration bears some of the blame for this by its refusal to prosecute violations of international law. 

Torture is a case in point. In the aftermath of the 2001 attack on New York and Washington, the Bush administration introduced so-called “enhanced interrogation” techniques that were, in fact, torture under both U.S. and international law. Danner demonstrates that the White House, and a small cluster of advisors around Vice-President Dick Cheney, knew they could be prosecuted under existing laws and carefully erected a “golden shield” of policy memos that would protect them from prosecution for war crimes. 

In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Obama announced that he had “prohibited torture.” But, as Danner points out, “torture violates international and domestic law and the notion that our president has the power to prohibit it follows insidiously from the pretense that his predecessor had the power to order it. Before the war on terror official torture was illegal and an anathema; today it is a policy choice.” 

And president-elect Donald Trump has already announced that he intends to bring it back. 

There is no doubt that enhanced interrogation was torture. The International Committee of the Red Cross found the techniques “amounted to torture and/or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.” How anyone could conclude anything else is hard to fathom. Besides the water boarding—for which several WWII Japanese soldiers were executed for using on allied prisoners—interrogators used sleep depravation, extreme confinement and “walling.” Abu Zubaydah, who was water boarded 83 times, describes having a towel wrapped around his neck that his questioners used “to swing me around and smash repeatedly against the wall of the [interrogation] room.” 

According to a 2004 CIA memo, “An HVD [high value detainee] may be walled one time (one impact with the wall) to make a point, or twenty to thirty times consecutively when the interrogator requires a more significant response to a question.” There were, of course, some restraints. For instance, the Justice Department refused to approve a CIA proposal to bury people alive. 

And, as Danner points out, none of these grotesque methods produced any important information. The claim that torture saved “thousands of lives” is simply a lie. 

There was a certain Alice in Wonderland quality about the whole thing. Zubaydah was designated a “high official” in Al Qaeda, the number three or four man in the organization. In reality he was not even a member, as the Justice Department finally admitted in 2009. However, because he was considered a high up in the Al Qaeda, it was assumed he must know about future attacks. If he professed that he knew nothing, this was proof that he did, and so he had to tortured more. “It is a closed circle, self-sufficient, impervious to disobedient facts,” says Danner. 

The logic of the Red Queen. 

The Obama administration has also conjured up some interpretations of language that seem straight out of Lewis Carroll. In defending his use of drone strikes in a 2014 speech at West Point, the President said he only uses them “when we face a continuing, imminent threat.” But “imminent” means “likely to occur at any moment” and is the opposite of “continuing.” A leaked Justice Department memo addresses the incongruity by arguing, “Imminent does not require the U.S. to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.” 

Apparently the administration has now added, “elongated” to “imminent,” so that “a president doesn’t have to deem the country under immediate threat to attack before acting on his or her own.” As Humpty Dumpty says to Alice in Through the Looking Glass, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean.” 

Danner turns the phrase “American exceptionalism” on its head. The U.S. is not “exceptional” because of its democratic institutions and moral codes, but because it has exempted itself from international law. “Americans, believing themselves to stand proudly for the rule of law and human rights, have become for the rest of the world a symbol of something quite opposite: a society that imprisons people indefinitely without trial, kills thousands without due process, and leaves unpunished lawbreaking approved by its highest officials.” 

The war has also undermined basic constitutional restrictions on the right of intelligence agencies and law enforcement to vacuum up emails and cell phone calls, and has created an extra-legal court system to try insurgents whose oversight and appeal process in shrouded in secrecy. 

The war on terror—the Obama administration has re-titled it a war on extremism—has not been just an illegal and moral catastrophe, it is a failure by any measure. From 2002 to 2014, the number of deaths from terrorism grew 4,000 percent, the number of jihadist groups increased by 58 percent, and the membership in those organizations more than doubled. 

The war has also generated a massive counter terrorism bureaucracy that has every reason to amp up the politics of fear. And yet with all the alarm this has created, a total of 24 Americans were killed by terrorism in 2014, fewer than were done in by lighting. 

Terrorism, says Danner, is “la politique du pire,” the “politics of the worst” or the use of provocation to get your enemy to overreact. “If you are weak, if you have no army of your own, borrow you enemy’s. Provoke your adversary to do your political work for you,” he says. “And in launching the war on terror, eventually occupying two Muslim countries and producing Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib celebrating images of repression and torture, the United States proved all too happy to oblige.” 

Danner argues that idea you can defeat terrorism—which is really just a tactic used by the less powerful against the more powerful—with military force is an illusion. It can and does, however, make everything worse. 

Even the Department of Defense knows this. In 2004, the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board found that : 

 

• American direct intervention in the Muslim world has paradoxically elevated the stature and support for radical Islamists while diminishing support for the United States.
• Muslim do not “hate our freedoms,” they hate our policies, including one-sided support for Israel and for tyrannies in the Arab world.
• American talk of bringing democracy to Muslim countries is self-serving hypocrisy.
• The occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan has not brought democracy to those countries, but chaos and destruction.

Increasingly the war on terrorism/extremism is a secret war fought by drones whose targets are never revealed, or by Special Operations Forces whose deployments and missions are wrapped in the silence of national security. 

 

And as long as Obama calls for Americans “to look forward as opposed to looking backward,” the spiral will continue. As Danner argues, “It is a sad but immutable fact that the refusal to look backward leaves us trapped in a world without accountability that his [Obama’s] predecessor made. In making it possible, indeed likely, that the crimes will be repeated, the refusal to look backward traps us in the past.” 

 

 

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Conn Hallinan can be read at dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com and middleempireseries.wordpress.com 

 

 

 

 

Many persons are traumatized by a lengthy, nasty, and awful election and by its outcome in which we seem to have someone who could end up being a very harsh, nasty and mean leader. Mentally ill people are often more sensitive to fear-provoking stimuli, and this election may have already taken a heavy toll on the mental condition of many.  

If mentally ill, if subject to greater than normal levels of anxiety, and if you feel pessimistic about the fate of the country and about your own fate, I suggest exercises of mindfulness, and other techniques that could be loosely termed as meditation, to adapt to new conditions.  

If you can adapt to being mentally ill, to being forced to take psychiatric medications for the rest of your life, and to all of the other baggage, financial and social, that come with being categorized as mentally ill, you should be able to adapt to a new and very different administration in the White House.  

To begin with, I suggest keeping your options open. This could be difficult if you are just barely eking by month to month. However, research could be done on the internet concerning things like job possibilities, housing possibilities, and alternatives concerning where and how you get treatment for mental illness. The knowledge you gain could come in handy in a pinch. Also, getting on some waiting lists, (even if you plan to continue living where you are) or other waiting lists, is a good idea. Then, when your name comes up, if you are fine where you are, you could just tell whomever it is to cross off your name.  

Your routine--of paying bills, keeping appointments, if you have a job, showing up for work, and other things that you do to survive on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis--should be continued.  

Concerning maintaining your mental health, seek additional counseling as needed. Secondly, try to put the presence of a possibly malicious president in perspective within your thoughts. Persons with psychiatric disabilities will probably be affected by the new President at some point, but we don't yet know how and when. As soon as you gain more knowledge of what will transpire, you can work on adapting to that at the time.  

I believe that we should continue to have a positive attitude. As individuals, we can not control everything. We do not yet know what the ramifications will be of Trump being in office. Rather than panicking, bemoaning, or retreating into a psychological shell, we should do what we can to make our situations continue to work, and we should continue to try to make things better for ourselves.  

We don't have to welcome a President whose campaign was based on countless lies, on scapegoating women and minorities, and possibly on collusion of the FBI and Russia. However, we need to acknowledge the reality of Trump being elected. He is likely to be a worse President than Richard Nixon. However, he will have limited power.  

Trump is partly attempting to rule through fear with the revelation that he has an enemies list. We shouldn't be intimidated by that, and we should feel at liberty to speak out and to speak the truth.  

It is not likely that the government will retaliate if you exercise your First Amendment rights. There are far too many people against Trump for small fries and those who are "judgment proof" (meaning you have no assets, therefore no one is likely to sue you) to invoke the wrath of Trump.  

There are encouraging signs, as Trump prepares for the transition, that he is capable of rational thought. This doesn't excuse the fact that his campaign employed racism, misogyny, homophobia, prejudice against disabled people, and any other type of bigotry you can think of. Purely from a pragmatic perspective, this is the government that will come into existence--at least until his four years are up or until we impeach him out of office for some type of misconduct.  

Thus, we'd better prepare for change. Anything you can think of that could buffer your life situation in a crisis, such as saving up a few hundred dollars, strengthening connections with people who could help you, or looking into getting a part time job, could all come in handy if things go south.  

I don't suggest investing, unless such investing is in the form of your own startup, and obtaining the equipment, licensing, advertising, or other resources related to that. Investing in oneself rather than investing in someone else's company is my suggestion, since we do not know what will happen with the stock market.  

Even doing volunteer work is useful, since it looks good on a resume, and it channels your energy into something positive.  

Being afraid can be immobilizing. However, mobilizing in the face of fear, including when this is very uncomfortable, will help defeat the fear. And, for many, our own anxiety, fear and apprehension is our greatest enemy, and not President-Elect Donald Trump. 

Much has been written about the disaffection of likely Democratic voters in the just-held presidential election. But this disaffection began long ago. Consider that in the middle of the Twentieth Century, the working class, once the core of the Democratic coalition began abandoning the Democratic Party. In 1948, 66% of manual laborers voted for Democrats, as did 60% of farmers. In 1964, it was 55% of working-class voters. By 1980, it was 35%.  

The white working class in particular saw even sharper declines. In 2008 Democrats had a 15-point advantage among poor white voters but in 2012 this had slipped to a 2-point advantage. In 2012, among white voters making between $30,000 and $75,000 per year, the GOP had taken a 17-point lead. 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt set up his New Deal in 1933 and forged a coalition of labor unions, liberals, religious, ethnic, and racial minorities. Unfortunately for the Democrats, the twin forces of the Civil Rights Movement and the counterculture — civil rights, the Vietnam War, affirmative action — caused a fracture in the party in the northern states. 

Then came the GOP's "Southern Strategy," popularized by Richard Nixon, whereby the Republican Party consciously appealed to many white southerners' racial resentments in order to gain their support. Under this strategy, the GOP didn't need or actively seek the African-American vote. From 1948 to 1984 the Southern states, once a Democrat stronghold, became key swing states, providing the popular vote margins in the 1960, 1968, and 1976 elections. Note that Trump won every state except Virginia below the Mason-Dixon line while Barack Obama won only Virginia and Florida. 

In 1965, the Voting Rights Act was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson. The Act's aim was to overcome legal barriers at the state and local levels that prevented African Americans from exercising their right to vote. However, in 2013, the Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder, essentially gutted the Voting Rights Act where the Court argued, “it wasn't necessary anymore.” The Shelby decision led to sweeping changes in voting rules across states that had historically discriminated against minorities. These changes included new voter ID requirements as well as closing or changing locations of possibly thousands of polling sites, that used to require federal approval. Studies and some court rulings have said that ID laws have disproportionately impacted racial minorities, a group that tends to vote Democratic. 

In 2015, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the percentage of wage and salary workers who were members of a union was 11.1 percent, down from 20.1 percent in 1983. Consider that union membership peaked in 1954 at 28.3 percent. Union membership is down partly due to the enactment of right-to-work laws. The 1947 Taft-Hartley amendments to the National Labor Relations Act permitted a state to pass laws that prohibit unions from requiring a worker to pay dues, even when the worker is covered by a union-negotiated collective bargaining agreement. Twenty-five states have right-to-work laws. Thus, workers in right-to-work states have less incentive to join and pay dues to a union. And unions have been a bulwark of the Democratic Party.  

Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had for decades voted for Democrat presidential candidates and pre-election polling pegged them for Hillary Clinton in 2016. The last time a Republican carried Michigan and Pennsylvania was in 1988, and Wisconsin last in 1984. But on Tuesday, the three "blue firewall" states went to Trump. In the Democratic primaries, Bernie Sanders won Michigan and Wisconsin. Clinton did not even visit Wisconsin during the general election. 

Today, some eight years after the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression, the nation's economy was once again central to both parties' appeal to voters. Under Obama, the economy continues to slowly expand. As of the first quarter of this year, the U.S. economy is nearly 15 percent bigger than when Obama took office in 2008, adjusted for inflation. The Obama administration, which began in the midst of massive layoffs from the Great Recession, has presided over a job market turnaround. Overall employment is about 7 % higher than when he took office. Yet, voters forgot that the George W. Bush and the Republicans were responsible for the recession and failed to connect Clinton to the economy turnaround under Obama. 

There is now a definite urban-rural divide in this country. Rural and small-town workers voted for Trump while in urban areas, where black and Hispanic voters are concentrated along with college-educated voters, already leaned toward the Democrats. Clinton, however, did not get the turnout from these groups that she needed. African American voters did not show up in the same numbers they did for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. 

People tend to forget, however, the closeness of this past election. While the final vote counts are not in, it appears that Hillary Clinton is on course to receive more popular votes than any other U.S. presidential candidate in history except Barack Obama – despite losing the Electoral College vote to Donald Trump 306 to 232. Alas, close only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades. 

This is the fifth time the popular vote winner did not win in the Electoral College. Thus, calls for eliminating the Electoral College altogether and instead, electing a president on the popular vote. The Electoral College is set forth in our Constitution and getting rid of it would require a constitutional amendment with a two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate and the ratification of three-fourths (38) of the 50 states. Consider that republicans have been the beneficiary of winning the Electoral College vote but not the popular vote in 2000 and 2016 and would be less likely to want to eliminate the Electoral College. It is unlikely that a Republican-controlled House and Senate would vote to eliminate the Electoral College. And Republicans now control both the governor's mansion and legislature in 24 states, 70 of the 99 state legislative chambers, both chambers in 30 states, plus Nebraska's single chamber, and 31 governor's mansions and you can see how difficult it would be to get ratification by 38 states. 

How did Trump get elected president? In a few words, it was Clinton’s real and perceived baggage coupled with Trump’s successful appeal to Americans’ emotions and prejudices rather than on their rational side. In defeat, Clinton blamed the FBI Director’s October 28, 2016 letter to Congress "in connection with the Secretary Clinton email investigation." This letter and the FBI’s election-eve absolvement came too late. 

What should the Democratic Party do now? It is time for the Democratic Party to undergo a fundamental reassessment. The Democrats will shortly choose a new Democratic National Committee chairman, which could be a fight between the establishment wing of the party, embodied by Clinton, and the party’s more liberal members, many of them aligned with Bernie Sanders. Hopefully, the DNC will choose the latter as the DNC needs to be re-imagined as less of an insider’s club focused on raising money and more of an advocate for the working-class. With a new, reinvigorated DNC and a new nominee, the Democrats can take back the White House in four years.

When the curtain goes up in Letter to a Man, a collaboration by director Robert Wilson and dancer/actor Mikhail Baryshnikov based on the diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky, a man in white face, Mikhail Baryshnikov, is seated onstage and spotlighted. He speaks in Russian and a male voice is heard speaking ostensibly the same thing in English. Supertitles also give the English version. The words are, “I understand war, because I talk with my mother-in-law.” These words in Russian and English with their English supertitles are repeated again and again, perhaps ten times. Is this a mother-in-law joke or a sign of Nijinsky’s madness? This is only the beginning of a 75-minute hodge-podge of a one-man show put on by Cal Performances purporting to reveal the genius of Vaslav Nijinsky, who was perhaps the greatest dancer as well as one of the greatest choreographers of the 20^th century, perhaps of all time. It is also the beginning of a show devoted to Nijinsky’s decades-long slide into schizophrenia. Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall hosted this show November 10-13.  

Letter to a Man illuminates nothing about Nijinsky’s art as a dancer or choreographer, and in truth it offers little to illuminate Nijinsky’s mental illness. This show is pretentious and empty; and it is not even technically well-produced. Often, a female voice is heard speaking English. However, while the English-speaking male voice is clear and crisp, the female voice is strangely muffled, making what she says difficult to hear much less understand. So one looks high above the stage at the supertitles rather than at Baryshnikov‘s movements onstage. Even the supertitles, however, are often dimly lit and unreadable, especially when they come and go so quickly one has no time to read them all the way through. Furthermore, why there is a female voice at all is never made clear. Is this supposed to be the voice of Nijinsky’s wife, who took care of him during his long mental illness? Nothing is clear. Everything in this hodge-podge is just thrown together willy-nilly. Nijinsky speaks of sexuality (he was bi-sexual); he speaks of God; there are bits of music hall tunes, a snippet from Arvo Pärt, gospel music, blues, sounds of explosions, and a little girl cut-out pulling a huge chicken cut-out on a leash. Meanwhile, Baryshnikov shimmies, sashays, wafts branches in the air and does a few Charleston moves, all the while avoiding any dance moves associated with Nijinsky. Nothing in this show holds together and makes sense. It’s a portrait, I suppose, of schizophrenia. But who is supposed to be schizophrenic? Nijinsky or Robert Wilson? 

Look, I am no fan of director Robert Wilson. His work rarely moves me. For example, Wilson’s staging of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal at Los Angeles Opera some four or five years ago struck me as outrageously pretentious and empty. Some may say this is only appropriate for Wagner’s pseudo-philosophical ravings in his own Parsifal libretto full of half-baked Christianity, superficial snippets of Buddhism, vegetarianism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and downright fear of female sexuality. But Robert Wilson was not sending up Wagner’s Parsifal; he was taking it seriously and portraying it as profound. Likewise, in Letter to a Man, Wilson and Baryshnikov have explicitly stated that their intention in mounting this show was to illuminate the genius of the gifted but troubled Vaslav Nijinsky.  

Would that they had done so. But they have only shown Nijinsky to be mad without illuminating how or why he became mad or offering more than a bare glimpse of any genius left in Nijinsky by the time he slid into schizophrenia. 

My friend Kathryn Roszak, a noted dancer and choreographer who accompanied me to this show, assures me that Nijinsky’s Diaries are a genuinely inspired work of art. So at the end of this Wilson-Baryshnikov Letter to a Man, I asked Kathryn whether she found this show in any way illuminating of the genius of Nijinsky. 

 

Kathryn Roszak 

Letter to a Man tells us something about Robert Wilson, something less about Mikhail Baryshnikov, and even less about Vaslav Nijinsky. In putting this show together, Wilson and Baryshnikov assume people know about Nijinsky, his achievements and his slide into madness. But by no means everyone is familiar with the story of Nijinsky’s life, and they need to know what this show doesn’t reveal, namely, that Nijinsky was revered as the greatest dancer and also as the greatest innovator in dance of all time. Nijinsky danced with a marvelous, exotic, almost hypnotic quality, and his leap took people’s breath away. Letter to a Man never even hints at this. Though Mikhail Baryshnikov still has magic and expression in his movements onstage, the choreography (by Lucinda Childs) in this piece avoids anything even remotely suggesting the quality of movement Nijinsky brought to his work onstage. Worse, this show is primarily a mish-mash of extraneous music and extraneous visuals that lack the artistic integration and originality that were the hallmarks of Nijinsky’s choreography in works such as Le Sacre du Printemps set to music by Stravinsky and Prelude a l’après-midi d’un Faun and Jeux with music by Debussy. 

Meanwhile, Robert Wilson gives us lighting effects that merely dazzle and distract us, while Nijinsky’s diary, itself a fantastic document of his combination of genius and madness, is butchered into meaningless sound bites. Letter to a Man presents Nijinsky’s madness in cliché form, starting with Baryshnikov’s straight-jacketed figure at the opening and continuing throughout nthis disjointed and fragmented work. As a child, I saw choreographer Maurice Béjart’s Nijinsky, Clown of God, a show in which multiple dancers portrayed Nijinsky in his greatest roles alongside a huge puppet representing the impresario Serge Diaghilev, who played such an important but ultimately disastrous role in Nijinsky’s life. Bejart’s piece probed infinitely deeper into Nijinsky’s life and art than Letter to a Man, which stays superficially on the surface. 

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Armenian soprano Lianna Haroutounian, who made such a sensational debut here in 2014 as Tosca, returned to San Francisco Opera for ten performances November 6-December 4 as Cio-Cio-San in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Haroutounian has been hailed by Opera Today as “one of the major voices of our time,” and her interpretations of Puccini’s soprano roles are already considered benchmarks. Haroutounian’s Cio-Cio-San at the November 15 performance I attended was incandescent, both vocally and dramatically. Haroutounian sings with perfect pitch, precise diction, an exquisite sense of dynamics, and luscious lyricism. Her soprano voice is voluptuous in the lower register and scintillating in the upper register, with no break whatsoever between the chest tones and head tones. Dramatically, she portrays both the delicacy and vulnerability of her Butterfly character and the power and pathos of Butterfly’s love for the American sailor Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton. This interpretation, with its acknowledgment of vulnerabilty, sets Haroutounian’s Cio-Cio-San somewhat apart from the Patricia Racette version of this role that has reigned here from 2006 to the present, for Racette, who sang beautifully, emphasized the steely and unyielding quality of Cio-Cio-San from beginning to end, whereas Haroutounian traces the changing trajectory of her character from vulnerability in Act I to steely albeit desperate resolve in Act II. 

In the role of Pinkerton, Neapolitan tenor Vincenzo Costanzo made his USA debut, and although he has a pleasant voice with a soft timbre, Costanzo’s Pinkerton was simply not in the same class with Horoutounian’s Cio-Cio-San. Moreover, Costanzo’s voice was frequently smothered under Yves Abel’s overly loud conducting of the orchestra. Pinkertons’s Act I aria “Dovunque al mondo, lo Yankee vagabondo” lost much of its usual swagger due to Costanzo’s inability to vocally rise above the orchestra. In fact, Costanzo was by no means the only singer whose voice often got smothered in this production, for other victims of Abel’s conducting were tenor Julius Ahn as Goro and baritone Anthony Clark Evans as Sharpless, the American consul in Nagasaki, Japan, where Madama Butterfly is set. When Evans’ voice was not overwhelmed by the orchestra, he was a superb Consul Sharpless, ever-sensitive to the innocence and vulnerability of Cio-Cio-San. Mezzo-soprano Zanda Švėde managed to hold her own as the faithful servant Suzuki, singing especially well in Act II’s famous “flower duet” as she and Cio-Cio-San decked the house with flowers in preparation for Pinkerton’s expected return after a 3-year absence.  

This production of Madama Butterfly reprised Jun Kuneko’s colorful staging of this opera from the 2014 season, and it held up well. In fact, in the interim, Director Leslie Swackhamer has refined the staging, especially where the figures in black are concerned. These black-clad figures wear boxes on their heads; and this, as I noted in these pages in my review of June 27, 2014, was a puzzling and distracting element in the 2014 staging, especially when they were seen to crawl menacingly outside the house during the night vigil in Act II when Cio-Cio-San, her young son, and Suzuki await the expected return of Pinkerton. For this current revival, Swackhamer eliminated the ominous night vigil action by the black-clad figures, and she relegated them to the role of solemn, ritualized stagehands reminiscent of the kurogo figures in Kabuki and Noh dramas. Though they still inexplicably sported box-heads, their reduced and redefined role constituted a major improvement in the staging of Kuneto’s Madama Butterfly. 

Where vocal highlights are concerned, it was all Haroutounian. The famous love duet in Act I, though beautifully sung was not up to its usual excellence because of the imbalance between Haroutounian’s sumptuous voice and Constanzo’s weaker, more tentative voice. However, nothing could detract from Haroutounian’s gorgeous delivery of Madama Butterfly’s most famous number, Act II’s “Un bel di vedremo,” in which Cio-Cio-San vividly pictures the expected return of her husband. This was singing of the highest caliber.  

In minor roles, bass Raymond Aceto was a powerful, forbidding Bonze; tenor Edward Nelson was an able, albeit frustrated Prince Yamadori; bass-baritone Matthew Stump was an effective Imperial Commissioner; and baritone Jere Torkelsen was more than adequate as the Official Registrar. Finally, Adler Fellow Julie Adams did not have much opportunity to sing as Kate Pinkerton, but she filled the role with grace and winning humility. Ian Robertson’s Chorus made the most of its opportunities, and Choreographer Melissa Noble did a fine job in presenting the arrival of the bridal party at the wedding ceremony of Cio-Cio-San and Pinkerton. Madama Butterfly continues with the same cast through December 4, although Jordi Bernàcer will replace Yves Abel as Conductor for the final performance on December 4. 

Opens at SF's Roxie Theater on November 18

National Bird, executive produced by Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire) and Errol Morris (The Fog of War), is a slow, chilling excursion through the haunted lives of three US drone vets—two women, one young man. Director Sonia Kennebeck's presentation intentionally lacks razzle-dazzle and focuses, instead, on grim silences and intense, quiet monologs.

The film begins simply with a grainy black-and-white aerial video and a woman's voice. We watch as a man on the ground casually walks down a street in his Afghan neighborhood.

"We hover and watch for days," the voice recalls. "Sometimes we get intel that he's a 'bad guy' and we blow him up. Just drop a Hellfire missile on him."

The figure on the screen stops walking. He appears to sit down to rest. In the next second, he's gone—replaced by a volcano of smoke and dust and chared body parts scattered on the ground.

You've just seen the "tip of the spear" in Washington's so-called "War on Terror."

Cost to US taxpayer for this cowardly act of automated assassination? One $47,000 Lockheed/Martin/Raytheon Hellfire missile.

The cost of "counterterrorism" is neither cheap nor effective—drone attacks actually serve to "recruit" new enemies—but, if you're a "defense" contractor, it's damned profitable.

 

 

 

Kennebeck introduces us to three of the people behind the violence. Heather is an unlikely military vet who decided to escape her small-town fate by joining the Air Force. She would see the world and fight for her country by becoming "Big Brother and helping everyone out." Instead, she wound up helping to kill people by remote control. 

Daniel, a desperate young man without a job and homeless chose the military because he "had no other place to go." He wound up as a signals intelligence analyst with a security clearance at Fort Meade. Now a drone-war vet (with an Edward Snowden-like moral intensity), Daniel worries constantly about whether the government will "go after me" for publically criticizing the drone assassination program. 

Lisa is a Bay Area woman who became part of the government's covert drone program because "I thought I'd be on the right side of history but, today, I don't believe I was." 

It's no longer a matter of one individual sitting in front of a console and twisting a joystick to blow up an individual on the other side of the planet. Lisa says. "It's now a huge system. This is global. It's like borders don't matter any more and there's a huge system that spans the globe that con just suck up huge portions of your life, your personal data." 

All three feel constrained by the fear of their own government. Lisa has seen what the secret programs are doing but she doesn't feel free to speak out and warn the public. Lisa's discharge certificates salutes her for identifying "121 insurgent targets" during the course of her "service" in Afghanistan. 

These vets recall how the stress of being forced to kill people on a daily basis caused emotional and mental distress—and how the military refused their pleas to be reassigned. 

It's no easier once these drone-soldiers emerge from their secret world and try to return to civilian life. These stressed-out vets break down in tears and sobs but when family and friends rush to their sides and ask, "What's wrong?" all they are permitted to say is: "I can't talk about it." 

America's forgotten drone vets tend to be nervous, angry, and borderline suicidal. 

Obama Bomber 

Obama is shown defending the drone program by arguing "America was attacked on 9/11/." But the majority of the 9/11 attackers came from Saudi Arabia. So far, not a single Hellfire missile has been shipped to a US drone base within flying range of Riyadh. 

We hear Obama on the TV claiming that the US takes great pains to avoid killing civilians and only "targets those who want to kill us"—i.e., people who pose "a continuing and imminent threat to the American people." But this concern is belied by the increasing counts of dead civilians in foreign combat zones. 

And it seems disingenuous, at best, for the President to suggest that American civilians back in the "Homeland" are at risk of being harmed by individuals who are being secretly stalked by remote-controlled killing machines lurking in foreign skies—often in total violation of local sovereignty. 

Clearly, the only "American people" at immediate risk are the US soldiers who have been flown to distant countries only to be armed and ordered to police the "locals." 

Kennebeck's vets dispute the president's claim that US missiles strike only when there is a "near certainty" that no innocent civilians will be killed. There's always a degree of guesswork involved, we are told. It is "only in the aftermath" that the Pentagon is able to (sometimes) determine who they killed. 

The Rise of Drone-Think 

The drone vets can see where this will lead. These weapons potentially can fly anywhere in the world and kill anyone at will and do it without oversight, without regulation, without accountability. 

The Pentagon is training 18-24-year-olds to commit murder by remote control. 

Consider the euphemisms: "Surgical strike" suggests that the act of blowing someone to bits is somehow akin to providing life-saving medical attention. 

In 2013, Heather became one of the first insiders to publically criticize the Pentagon's secret drone war. But, when she wrote an article that was published in London's Guardian newspaper, she put herself at risk of being imprisoned under the 1917 Espionage Act. (Fearing legal action, the Guardian editors had to include a statement that the op-ed "does not possess any classified material." And Kennebeck, for her own protection, had to include a similar statement at the end of National Bird.) 

After her Guardian article appeared, Heather experienced a torrent of online abuse but what bothered her even more was the total lack of response from Washington's bureaucrats. Heather complains about the frustration of "having to try and stop your own people from killing civilians." 

What's the use, she weeps, if nobody really cares—cares about the victims, cares about drone vets like herself? And if someone knocks on her door some night and she is "disappeared," she agonizes: "What difference does it make?!" 

Lisa lives in the Bay Area. A week after meeting Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal at a Commonwealth Club book tour, she books a flight to Afghanistan to do humanitarian work. 

Haunted by the memories of watching the US deliver death-at-a-distance—after stalking potential victims from 20,000 feet—Lisa hopes to reclaim that part of her humanity that she lost during her time in the drone program by "seeing these people as part of humanity. It will be nice to just see [them] up close." 

America's Drone Victims Speak 

In Kabul, Lisa and the filmmakers hear from the survivors of a notorious February 21, 2010 Predator drone attack launched from Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. The attack killed 23 of their family members, including children. 

The attack was so onerous and unjustified that Gen. McChrystal was compelled to apologize on Afghan TV. He promised it would never happen again. 

(McChrystal ignored the fact that it had already happened before: In 2008, US air attacks killed 27 civilians at a wedding party in Nangarhar Province, at least 47 at a wedding party north of Kandahar, and another 90—including 60 children—at a funeral in the village of Nawabad. In 2009, a US airstrike on a village in Farah Province killed 147. ) 

During the meeting in Kabul, a little boy whose father was killed in the US airstrike, shows the stump of a leg he lost in the US drone attack. Two of his siblings—ages 4 and 7—were killed in the explosions. 

During the interview, a US helicopter flies by overhead. The women look to the sky, terrified. The little boy covers his ears, shuts his eyes and cowers. 

At this point—in a remarkable, and harrowing, match of cinema and reality—National Bird begins to shift between the stories of the wounded and traumatized survivors and the actual footage from the US drone that presided over the deadly attack. 

We watch the emotionless surveillance video, as it follows a convoy of three vehicles. We watch as the passengers stop by the roadside and emerge to pray. We hear the words of the drone operators as they speak disparagingly of the people on the ground turning towards Mecca to pray. 

When young children are identified in the group, the Americans (working in the comfort of their air-conditioned trailers near Las Vegas) begin to complain. At first they try to deny that any children are present. Then they provide excuses to justify an attack. "Teenagers can fight," says one operator. "Pick up a weapon and you're a combatant," says another. (Under US rules of engagement, any male older than 16 years is pre-determined to be a legitimate target.) 

The command comes back—It's party time!"— and swiftly missiles destroy three vehicles filed with unarmed Afghans. Survivors emerge, staggering from the wreckage, waving their arms. One raises the body of a child. 

Back in Kabul, the survivors present the filmmakers with a video that recorded the moment the bodies—wrapped in blood-soaked blankets—were returned to the village. Screams and wails break out as the blankets are pulled back and the remains of the dead are identified. 

Anyone who dares defend the US drone program should be required to watch this video—daily, for the rest of their lives. 

The Uncertain Fate of Drone Vets 

It's hard for drone vets to get treatment for the emotional damage and mental distress that comes with the work. The Pentagon does not consider these "console jockeys" to be "combat vets." An added complication: the vets are cautioned that they could face arrest if they speak to anyone—including mental health professionals—lest they reveal "privileged" details of their covert work. 

FBI and Pentagon agents contacted two of the whistleblowers to inform them that their names were now on a "terrorist kill list." 

Government agents warned Heather's step-dad that a "known terrorist gang" was searching for her. If she valued her security, Heather was warned, she would be well advised to tone down her criticism—no more op-eds and no more complaints on Facebook, Twitter, etc. 

On August 8, 2014, two FBI agents knocked on Daniel's door—backed by 20 combat-armed federal soldiers with weapons drawn. The government justified the raid by claiming Daniel was being investigated for espionage. Over that past 99 years, only 12 people have been prosecuted under the Espionage Act. Daniel could be the next. 

The film ends with a series of direct appeals from the Afghan survivors of US violence. Their message is simple and stark: "They [the Pentagon] apologized but then they continue to bomb us. We are saying to our American brothers: All we want is for the bombing to end." 

Throughout the film, Kennebeck intersperses the vets' personal stories with aerial shots of US neighborhoods. At first, these drones-eye views seem innocuous but, it slowly becomes a sinister insinuation of what our wars abroad could someday bring to our own streets and backyards. 

Other countries have been acquiring weaponized drone aircraft. Eventually, "terrorists"—as well as citizen militias and inner city gangs will acquire their own aerial armadas. Smaller, to be sure, but just as deadly. 

As Lisa observes darkly: "Imagine what it would feel like if this were happening to us." 

Also Worth a Look: 

Unmanned: America's Drone Wars--Brave New Films

 

(April 1, 2015) -- Directed by Tonje Hessen Schei and produced by Flimmer Film, Unmanned features former drone operators as well as people in conflict zones living under threat of drone attack.