The announced topic of the big March 15 community meeting at the Berkeley Adult School was the suitability of housing at the North Berkeley BART station. That’s a long term issue. But anyone who cares about democratic planning process has to be alarmed right now by two bills that are advancing in the California Legislature, SB 827 and AB 2923. As Mayor Arreguín explained at the meeting, if SB 827 passes, Berkeley’s say in zoning—heights, density, parking—within a half-mile of the station will be severely diminished. If AB 2923 passes, that say will be eliminated altogether. 

SB 827 is San Francisco State Senator Scott Wiener’s most aggressive assault yet on local democracy, fiscal responsibility, and social justice.  

One of its co-authors is Berkeley’s State Senator, Nancy Skinner. 

The bill slashes cities’ authority over land use by exempting housing projects within a half-mile of a major transit stop or a quarter-mile radius of a transit stop on a “high-quality” transit corridor (defined as “fixed route” bus service no less than every fifteen minutes during peak commute hours) from local controls on: 

 

• density
• minimum parking spaces
• maximum heights
• and zoning that limits additions onto existing structures that comply with the bill’s own maximum height limitations of 55 of 85 feet, depending on the width of the street.

As Wiener, has it: “Developers can choose to build shorter, but cities can’t force them to build shorter…” According to the San Francisco Planning Department, when the state’s Density Bonus kicks in, under certain conditions, buildings could go as high as 105 feet. 

AB 2923 is the brainchild of another San Francisco state legislator, Assemblymember David Chiu, and AssemblymemberTim Grayson (D, Concord). It authorizes BART to impose new Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) zoning guidelines over contiguous BART-owned land larger than a quarter acre and within a half-mile of BART stations in San Francisco, Alameda and Contra Costa Counties. (San Mateo County escapes, because its voters have no elected BART representative.) Within two years of such imposition, local jurisdictions would be required to adopt an ordinance that approves the application of the agency’s guidelines. BART’s current TOD Guidelines call for a minimum seven-story building at the North Berkeley BART station. SB 2923 is scheduled for a hearing at the Assembly’s Local Government Committee on April 11. 

Until March 8, the supporters of SB 827 were all private members of the state’s growth machine: 

• real estate interests that will cash in on the speculative frenzy that would be triggered by the bill’s loosened restrictions on development
• burgeoning tech companies whose highly-paid employees have bid up the Bay Area’s residential real estate values to their current obscene levels
• academics at California universities, including UCB, who lend their credentialed expertise to the growth machine
• pro-growth non-profits, including think tanks and philanthropies with housing, environmental, and/or equity agendas.
• the growth machine’s new “shock troops” (Wiener’s term): the highly educated young professionals who call themselves YIMBYs for Yes in My Backyard but really mean Yes in Your Backyard. SB 827 was drafted by CA YIMBY Executive Director Brian Hanlon.

On March 8, the BART Board gave SB 827 its first endorsement from a public agency, voting 5-4 to support the bill with undetermined amendments that address tenant protections, affordability, incentives for developers, and prevailing wages. The five Ayes included Rebecca Saltzman, whose District 3 includes the North Berkeley and Downtown Berkeley BART stations, and Lateefah Simon, whose District 7 includes Ashby BART. 

The Board also voted 7-2 to remain neutral on AB 2923, but asked its staff to work with State legislators to identify possible funding sources for subsidies to housing in areas where the market does not currently support market rate housing. If the maker of the motion, Director Josefowitz, had returned my requests for an interview, I would have asked him to clarify his intention, since subsidies are usually sought for housing that’s priced below market rates. Once again, Saltzman and Simon both voted Aye. 

BART Board followed staff’s lead  

The agenda for the BART Board’s March 8 meeting included a memorandum, “State and Federal Legislative Update” (Item 6A), written by Rodd Lee, the manager of BART’s Government and Community Relations Department, that recommended support for SB 827. The associated one-page “analysis and recommendation” is stunning in its superficiality. 

Summarizing the bill’s provisions, Lee noted that SB 827 expands on two laws enacted in 2017, Chiu’s AB 73 and Wiener’s SB 35, that addressed California’s “severe housing shortage” by “establishing state minimum zoning near high quality transit.” He offered no assessment of this legislation. 

Lee also marked “[r]ecent amendments” to SB 827 that “seek to address early concerns regarding displacement and affordability.” 

• the adoption of local mandatory inclusionary housing requirements and voluntary programs that grant zoning bonuses and waivers for affordable housing
• local control over demolition bans and [demolition] permitting
• and a Right to Remain Guarantee for all displaced tenants provided by the developer

According to Lee, the amendments “provide some assurance against the loss of low-income housing.” How much, he didn’t say. 

Most revealing is his sanguine analysis of the bill’s impact on BART. “By incentivizing the building of housing near transit,” Lee wrote, 

“SB 827 provides many potential benefits to BART. BART stations by nature are “major transit stops” and could see an increase in housing built within a half-mile radius. Denser housing near BART could increase ridership as data show that residents within a half-mile of BART are twice as likely to walk, bike or take transit for their commute trip, and own fewer cars.” 

That data comes from the U.S. Census American Community Survey, 2010-2014 and consultant Nelson/Nygaard. It’s displayed in bar charts on the BART website. 

“In addition,” Lee wrote, 

“housing next to BART and high-quality transit offers a sustainable way to ensure ongoing ridership, which helps reduce freeway congestion and greenhouse gas emissions related to vehicle trips. SB 827 compliments [sic] many aspects of BART’s TOD Policy and performance targets.” 

BART certainly needs more riders and more revenue. Even with the region’s megagrowth and voters’ 2016 approval of a $3.6 billion BART bond, the agency is losing patronage and money, as Item 2E on the March 8 agenda, the “FY18 Second Quarter Financial Report,” makes clear: 

“Total Ridership was 3.2% under budget for the second quarter of FY18, compared to 2.4% under budget in the first quarter, and 3.4% lower than ridership in the same period of FY17. Despite reduced budget expectations for FY18, monthly ridership in FY18 is still trending below the lower budget. Second quarter FY18 weekday trips were 2.7% below budget and weekend/holiday trip were 5.3% below budget. Passenger revenue in the second quarter was $3.6M (2.9%) unfavorable, more than the first quarter negative budget variance of $1.0M.” 

The financial report ends with a dreary prediction: 

“The ridership decline is expected to continue into the second half of FY18, with a negative impact on operating sources. BART’s focus on filling only critical operating positions has helped manage labor expenses, however, the second half of the year is expected to be more financially challenging due to pressure to increase staff to address service and quality of life issue. The ridership and expense trend may result in an operating deficit of FY18 YearEnd.” 

TOD = Transit-Oriented Displacement 

A crucial question, then, is whether SB 827 would likely increase BART’s ridership and revenue. A satisfactory answer requires more than data about how car ownership and commuting modes positively correlate with residential proximity to BART. We also need to know whether transportation-oriented development reliably increases transit use and reduces driving. BART’s staff and its board assume that it does. That assumption is not borne out by scholarly research. 

The 2010 study from Northeastern University’s Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy, “Maintaining Diversity in America’s Transit,” analyzed socioeconomic changes in 42 neighborhoods in twelve metropolitan areas first served by rail transit between 1990 and 2000. The “predominant pattern,” the researchers found, was that TOD inflated real estate values, driving out low-income people who use transit the most while drawing in new, wealthier residents into the transit-accessible neighborhood who were more likely to own a car and to use it to commute. 

With that pattern in mind, it’s hard to take seriously the claim, put forth in the YIMBYs’ letter to BART urging support for SB 827, that “reliable high quality transit” such as BART, is “an effective anti-poverty program.” 

But what about the recent amendments to SB 827 addressing displacement and affordability? 

Unfortunately, the amendments are sops. 

• Most California cities lack inclusionary ordinances, that is, requirements that housing developers include a certain amount of affordable housing in their projects.
• “[V]oluntary programs that grant zoning bonuses and waivers for affordable housing” cannot be enforced.
• Respecting local control over demolition means little because many cities, including the state’s biggest, Los Angeles, have no such controls.
• The “Right to Remain Guarantee” for all displaced tenants is more accurately labeled the “Right to Come Back After You’ve Been Forced Out of Your Home For Up to Three and a Half Years.” The bill provides no funding to enforce or monitor the temporary relocation process. In any case, moving is a burden, especially for people of modest means. Most tenants won’t return.
• The amended bill does not mandate the creation of a single unit of affordable housing.

Above all, by raising heights and densities, SB 827 will set off a flipping boom and strengthen the major force behind displacement: real estate speculation. In the words of former LA Councilmember and LA County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, SB 827 “isn’t a housing bill; it’s a real estate bill.” That’s why 37 affordable housing, tenant rights, and transit equity groups signed ACT-LA’s letter opposing the bill. Wiener’s amendments haven’t changed their opposition. 

During public comment at the BART Board’s March 8 meeting, Public Advocates Senior Staff Attorney David Zisser said that the tenants rights community is “extremely concerned” about the SB 827’s silence on affordable housing and land value capture (returning to the public some of the jump in property values resulting from public investment in transit). Zisser asked the Board to oppose or at least not support the bill. 

SB 827 has other big problems that the staff report ignored: it says nothing about funding the myriad new services—police, firefighters, sewers, water, parks, schools, and, yes, transit—for the new housing it would presumably foster. It bypasses the state’s premier environmental law, the California Environmental Quality Act. And it eliminates due public process—notifications, workshops, rights of appeal—for all properties in its coverage areas. 

What pro-SB 827 BART Directors said 

There are nine BART districts. Annoyingly, the district numbers are not displayed on the map proper that’s posted on the agency’s website. Going from west to east, the five BART Directors who voted to endorse SB 827 were Nick Josefowitz (District 8, orange); Bevan Dufty (District 9, deep pink); Lateefah Simon (District 7, yellow, which covers parts of San Francisco, Alameda and Contra Costa Counties); Robert Raburn (District 4, magenta); and Rebecca Saltzman (District 3, green). 

Speaking in favor of SB 827, Josefowitz averred that the bill would not give BART new powers. He made that claim after having commented that SB 2923 is “not an attempt by BART to grab more power.” Later in the meeting, General Manager Crunican stated that “none [i.e. neither] of these bills were BART-initiated.” 

Whatever its origins, both SB 827 and AB 2923 would greatly aggrandize BART’s land use authority. According to the agency’s 2017 “Transit-Oriented Development Guidelines,” BART owns about 250 acres of “developable land” spread across 27 current and under construction stations. 

In 2017, the state Legislature approved SB 680, which extended the distance in which BART may engage in TOD projects from one-quarter mile to one-half-mile from a transit facility. The agency already had the authority to acquire property, including by eminent domain, in order to operate its transit system within its jurisdiction. Introduced by Fremont Senator Wieckowski, SB 680 was sponsored by the Bay Area Council. Its supporters included BART, the Building Industry Association of the Bay Area, SPUR, YIMBY Action, and the YIMBY legal arm, the California Renters Legal Advocacy and Education Fund (CaRLA). Both Skinner and Assemblymember Tony Thurmond voted for SB 680. 

Under SB 827, BART, like any other owner of property within a half-mile of a major transit center or a quarter-mile radius of transit stop on a high-quality transit corridor, would have the legal right to build housing at least 55 to 85 feet high (and higher with the State Density Bonus), with no parking minimums or residential density maximums. 

Stating that SB 827 was a work “in progress,” and that “various concerns will be addressed,” Josefowitz said that “it would be a shame” to oppose the bill, and that if his colleagues “want to see how it evolves,” he wasn’t “in a massive rush” to vote on it. Once it had become obvious that a bare majority of the Board was willing to support the embryonic measure, he voted to endorse. 

After citing California’s “tremendous housing shortage and the “audaciousness” of SB 827, Lateefah Simon expressed support for the bill, pending strong amendments for tenant protections. “I’m not willing to say No about either [SB 827 or AB 2923],” she said, adding that she was “open to further conversations before we vote.” Apparently, subsequent discussion swayed her to say Yes on SB 827. 

Director Raburn lavished praise on SB 827. After reciting boilerplate—“w’ere in a [housing] crisis”—he declared: 

“We need an Apollo-like program to house the two million people that, ABAG projects, will be living next to us in the Bay Area over the next twenty years….Will they be living in Tracy or Manteca, or will they be living over a BART station?....I look at 827 and personally wonder, what’s not to like? Maybe something about labor.” 

But labor “isn’t an issue for BART,” Raburn opined, alluding to “labor project-specific agreements” that “have been in place since 2011. 

Given BART’s recent labor history, this was a confounding statement. In reply to my emailed query, Raburn explained that he was referring to the BART policy that requires a project stabilization agreement (PSA) with local hire provisions on the agency’s TOD projects. The agreements are negotiated by BART staff between the developer and the building trades council of the county in which the project is located. 

Raburn did express concerns about TOD-fostered displacement of small businesses and non-profits as well as tenants. Overall, however, he deemed SB 827 to be “incredibly elegant,” because it “doesn’t burden any one jurisdiction with development.” 

At the meeting, Rebecca Saltzman provided a clarifying voice, as the deliberations threatened to dissolve into chaos, due to chair Raburn’s failure to direct discursive traffic. Her ultimate vote to support SB 827 was predictable, given that on January 4, the day after Wiener had introduced the bill, she tweeted thanks to him for “a bold proposal that would increase and accelerate housing production on BART property and around stations. BART is committed to dense TOD but does not control zoning: this bill would help us meet our ambitious goals.” 

Saltzman and I spoke after the March 8 meeting. When I noted that the Board hadn’t detailed the amendments it wanted to see in SB 827, she said that writing those amendments wasn’t the Board’s responsibility. But when the Board voted 7-2 to remain neutral on AB 2923, it directed it staff to work with State legislators on changes to the measure. In any case, the prudent move would have been to wait and see what, if any, additional changes Wiener and Skinner make in their bill, before supporting it. 

Saltzman also demurred when I asked about SB 827’s failure to address the provision of new services and infrastructure—including transit—for the explosion of new housing that the bills’ authors hope it will prompt. In January, I’d asked Wiener the same question at the UCLA Extension’s Land Use and Law Conference. He ducked the issue, and so did she, in words that echoed his. “People are coming to California,” she said. “The population is growing. They’re here, and we need to accommodate them.” So all they’re going to need is a place to live? 

Saltzman seemed unaware of TOD-instigated gentrification, displacement, and reduced transit use. I sent her links to a few studies. 

Anti-SB 827 BART Directors  

The four BART Directors who voted not to support SB 827 were Debora Allen (District 1, blue), Joel Keller (District 2, brown), John McPartland (District 5, pale pink), and Thomas Blalock (District 6, charcoal). Allen and McPartland also voted against remaining neutral on AB 2923, which they adamantly oppose. 

Allen began by acknowledging that the combination of high density and transit is good for housing. That was the last positive thing she said. BART, she observed, is already “at capacity,” and is going to remain that way for awhile. More importantly, “this agency should not be the anointed redevelopment agency for the Bay Area…..We are a transit agency” that “has struggled and still struggles to accomplish that mission.” BART needs to continue addressing “crime, cleanliness, modernization of our stations, and infrastructure improvements.” Building housing, she said, would be “a diversion from all of those priorities.” Moreover, due to shortages in the building trades, “we don’t have the labor available.” Staff recently told the Board that it would take “seven years to replace all of our escalators.” 

McPartland gave Wiener a nod, saying that he “appreciate[s] the senator’s “perspective.” He does not, however, appreciate SB 827, which he called “cookie-cutter legislation for TOD that works in San Francisco not in Piedmont.” As for AB 2923: “I can’t overstate how viscerally offended I am by this legislation. We want to be partners with our municipalities” and “should be sharing concerns about the amount of density we can put on this property.” Then, a line you rarely hear from an elected official: “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” 

Commenting on both SB 827 and AB 2923, Keller referred to “the inability of local jurisdictions to get [housing] projects approved.” But he also voiced his “strong conviction” that “these decisions are best made at the local level.” In any case, “the market does not support this kind of housing.” The Pittsburg Bay Point station has “acres of land” nearby, but “the numbers don’t pencil out.” 

Voters can weigh in via BART Board elections and RM3 

As more and more people find out about SB 827, opposition is growing. The bill has become a major factor in San Francisco’s mayoral election. It may well figure in the city’s supervisorial races and in the BART Board elections as well. BART Directors have staggered four-year terms ending in even years. This November, neither of the Directors with Berkeley constituents, Saltzman and Simon, will be up for re-election. The four who whose terms will expire are Keller, Raburn, Blalock, and Josefowitz. 

Raburn is running. His East Bay district covers Alameda and southern Oakland. The endorsers listed on his campaign website include Bay Area Council CEO Jim Wunderman, the Building and Construction Trades Council of Alameda County, and Oakland City Councilmembers Rebecca Kaplan and Dan Kalb, who’s running for the 15th District Assembly seat being vacated by Tony Thurmond. 

In June, Regional Measure 3 will be on the ballot in all nine Bay Area counties. RM3, as it’s familiarly known, would raise tolls on all the region’s bridges but the Golden Gate by three dollars. The $4.45 billion measure includes nearly a billion dollars for BART: $500 million for “expansion BART cars,” $375 million for Phase 2 of BART’s expansion to Silicon Valley, and $50 million for new transbay BART tube and approaches—in all, $925 million. It also authorizes the agency in effect to choose the new inspector general who will oversee its expenditures of the funds. 

Will voters who object to the BART Board’s support for SB 827 register their protest by voting No on RM3? 

 

In the 1980s, when we were toiling in the high-tech vineyards as an unfunded mom-and-pop startup, this quip was making the rounds:

If you look around the table and don’t know who the sucker is, it’s you.

Turns out this maxim originated with poker sharks, but it works for tech too.

In the dustup around Cambridge Analytica, Dr. Alexandr Borisovich Kogan, Facebook and Facebook users, it’s hard to figure out exactly who’s the sucker.

Let’s work our way back to figure it out. 

I’d be willing to concede that there’s a fair percentage of suckers in the Facebook user group. As someone who’s been around the software industry since before there was an Internet and even before personal computers, from a technical perspective I’ve never expected that anything I put online was my enduring secret. It’s just too easy to copy code, and after that too hard to control where it goes. Genie back in bottle, etc. 

Could Facebook, represented by founder Mark Zuckerberg, be the sucker? Surely not, such a Harvard-admitted Prize Boy must know what he’s doing? If he thought he was protecting the user information he was collecting, should his heartfelt apology be accepted? 

Well, when I was a manager in a software company, my motto was that “anyone who believes a programmer deserves what they get.” That quip usually applied to those wild under-estimates by programmers (now elevated to “software engineers”) about when their projects would be finished, but I’m sure it could also apply to guesses by Facebook managers about how secure their data is. 

“Not very” is almost always the true answer. Zuckerberg surely knew and still knows that. 

And yet… contracts. Those who have access to Facebook data must promise not to use it in the wrong way (whatever that might mean), right? 

Yeah sure. My law school Contracts professor hammered on one slogan, perhaps the only thing I remember from that class after some 40 years: “What’s your remedy?” If a licensee has done wrong with your data, what can you do about it after the fact? 

Sadly, the usual answer is my favorite Yiddish word, bupkes….nada..nothing. Or as close as makes no difference. 

Because money, because time, because a whole bunch of variables can’t be controlled. Lawsuits for breach of contracts like these are very rare, and only happen when the stakes are much higher and the parties are equally matched before they square off. 

So then, was there evil intent disguised as naiveté on the part of the academic who had access to Facebook’s user data and sold / gave it away to a for-profit company? Some commentators though so, but maybe he’s really as clueless as he claims to be. 

From The Guardian’s profile of the conduit between Facebook and Cambridge Analytica: 

“Aleksandr Kogan, a Moldovan-born researcher from Cambridge University, admits harvesting the personal details of 30 million Facebook users via a personality app he developed…While at Cambridge Kogan accepted a position at St Petersburg State University, and also took Russian government grants for research. 

“Kogan laughed off suspicions that he is linked to the Kremlin. He said: “This one is pretty funny … anyone who knows me knows I’m a very happy-go-lucky goofy guy, the last one to have any real links to espionage.” 

When this story started to heat up, the Internet was awash in speculation about the mysterious professor who had somehow delivered Facebook users to the Trump campaign. Much of this was perhaps fueled by the guy’s propensity to use different names and personas. 

According to his Tumblr profile, there’s even a Berkeley connection: 

“I have been a psychology professor at the University of Cambridge since 2012 and the founder/CEO of Philometrics.com since 2015. Much of my research focuses on well-being and kindness, but more recently, I’ve been interested in understanding how we can scale survey research without scaling the costs. 

“I received my BA in psychology from UC Berkeley in 2008 and a PhD from the University of Hong Kong in 2011. Before going to Cambridge, I worked as a postdoc at the University of Toronto. 

“Born in the Soviet Union, I split my childhood half there and half in NYC where my family immigrated. I currently live in the Bay Area.” 

No online clue to where he lives now, though quotes in stories seem to reference Cambridge. WhitePages.com reports an address in El Sobrante in December of 2017. 

About his name(s). For most of the time, the one he’s used most often, Aleksandr Borisovich Kogan, shows that he’s still got one foot in the former USSR. “Borisovich”, only sometimes included, is his patronymic, not his middle name, and is a version of his father’s given name. His last name, Kogan, is simply a Russian-style transliteration of the common name most English-speakers render as Cohen. Yet on Tumblr he’s called Alex Spectre and at Cambridge he’s been known previously as Dr. Aleksandr Spectre, per his CV as a Psychology Department Research Associate.  

The name Spectre seems to have originated with his marriage. 

Heavy.com found this explanation on, yes, Facebook: “We chose Spectre as a derivative of Spectrum…We wanted to find a last name tied to light because (a) my wife and I are both scientists and quite religious and light is a strong symbol in both, (b) we got married in the international year of light, (c) we are a multi-ethnic family (so multiple colors of the spectrum) and (d) we just thought it sounded really cool. Changing our last name was a symbol of partnership and unity across racial, cultural and philosophical perspectives.” 

But his recent return to “Kogan” might be explained by this item found in California court records, which looks like a sad outcome to a touching tale: 

“On 04/10/2017 a Family - Marriage Dissolution/Divorce case was filed by Crystal Ying Spectre against Aleksandr Spectre in the jurisdiction of Contra Costa County Superior Courts…” 

If he’d been plain old Alex Cohen all along instead of experimenting with names, he might have avoided a lot of unnecessary drama in media reports of the Cambridge Analytica affair. 

It’s not clear amidst all the online debris surrounding his various soubriquets what he actually has been doing for the last few years. A wistful 2017 blog post, The Ph.D.’s dilemma: Academia or Industry?, reveals a bad case of start-up envy which he eventually acted upon. 

He wore his academic hat to glean potentially valuable user data from Facebook which he sold to Analytica, which they then peddled to the oligarchic Mercer family to deploy on behalf of a couple of pet candidates, first Ted Cruz and then Donald Trump. The content in these transactions at this point looks an awful lot like junk science, especially as packaged, branded and marketed by Cambridge Analytica. 

In the Guardian interview, Kogan himself poo-pooed the value of what he’d sold: 

“The accuracy of this data has been extremely exaggerated. In practice my best guess is that we were six times more likely to get everything wrong about a person as we were to get everything right about a person. I personally don’t think micro-targeting is an effective way to use such data sets.” 

“It could have only hurt the campaign. What Cambridge Analytica has tried to sell is magic. And it made claims that this is incredibly accurate and it tells you everything there is to tell about you, but the reality is that it’s not that. If you really work through the statistics … those claims quickly fall apart.” 

So it was just a lot of cleverly merchandised snake oil? 

Well, let’s get back to that Berkeley connection. 

In my old email I found a link to a 2011 UC Berkeley press release with this lead: 

“There’s definitely something to be said for first impressions. New research from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests it can take just 20 seconds to detect whether a stranger is genetically inclined to being trustworthy, kind or compassionate.” 

Really? 

The lead author of the study was Aleksandr Kogan, a postdoctoral student at the University of Toronto at Mississauga. Co-authors came from his undergraduate alma mater, U.C. Berkeley. Kogan quote: “It’s remarkable that complete strangers could pick up on who’s trustworthy, kind or compassionate in 20 seconds when all they saw was a person sitting in a chair listening to someone talk.” 

Indeed it is. 

I haven’t checked, but I doubt that this study has been replicated. I’m a believer in Dr. Joyce Friedman’s rule of psychology results: “if it’s not intuitively obvious, it’s wrong.” 

It’s a field that attracts snake oil peddlers. Let’s just say that a whole lot of psychology results can’t be replicated for whatever reason . See, further, Wikipedia on the replication crisis in psychology. 

If Kogan knew that it was snake oil, and Cambridge Analytica probably did too, who’s the mark at this table? Maybe it was the Mercer family, though Robert Mercer made his fortune doing fancy math for hedge funds and should have been able to figure this one out. 

Of course, the pilfered Facebook data could have been mostly wrong but still right enough to tip the scales in 2016. It’s possible that Mercer et al. accurately assessed the small number of voters in the three key states who gave Trump their electoral votes by narrow majorities fueled by tailored “fake news” on Facebook. 

It’s a close call, but my candidate for the suckers in 2016 are all those trusting souls who endow commercial social media of all sorts with their intimate personal and political data. I’m reminded of the story of King Midas’s barber, who whispered into some reeds that Apollo had turned the king’s ears into ass’s ears, and the reeds amplified the story far and wide. If you don’t want it spread around, keep it to yourself. 

And while we’re on the subject of misplaced trust, the City of Berkeley is now inveigling residents to record their opinions on hot topics with an online app called here, “Berkeley Considers”. Yes, yes, I know it comes with effusive guarantees of anonymity, but it would be oh-so-easy to hack. Voters, citizens, residents should tell their councilmembers and the city staff that they express themselves when they vote by secret ballot in the real elections, period. Quasi-scientific polls like this one are garbage. 

------------------------------------------------ 

Amusing P.S.: when I was googling around with Kogan’s name on a rainy day to figure out what all these clowns were up to, I came upon this example question on a translation website: 

“Нужно было вам оставаться в Сан-Франциско, доктор Коган. You should have stayed in San Francisco, Dr. Kogan.” 

Good advice—if he’d followed it his professional reputation might have been in better shape today. 

 

 

 

 

 

Mr. Martinot in his article Housing as a Human Right states that housing is a human right and "homeless people in the US makes this country a mass violator of human rights.” Unfortunately, the United States, though a signatory to several international human rights conventions, has not ratified any convention that would make the right to adequate housing enforceable; and the United States does not explicitly recognize a right to adequate housing in its Constitution or in federal law.  

While it is true that the United States does not explicitly recognize the right to adequate housing, elements of the right are manifested in various federal, state, and local laws and programs. Any protections of this right, or programs to support this right, are important. However, this ad hoc approach to the right to housing does not comply with the international legal standards and obviously has serious shortfalls. 

Instead of a right to housing, we should at the minimum have a goal to ensure adequate housing for all of our citizens, which requires monitoring, measuring, and policy planning—to the best of the governments' abilities given their particular situation. 

As far as raiding homeless encampments, I would point to the case of Cobine v. City of Eureka where an Oakland federal court judge enjoined the City of Eureka from removing eleven homeless individuals and their belongings from their encampment on the Eureka waterfront until the city identifies housing for the eleven and provides assurances that the homeless plaintiffs' possessions will be stored and accounted for. This raises the question as to what constitutes “adequate housing.” Is a temporary shelter considered adequate housing?  

A corollary must be that cities cannot enact restrictions on homeless encampments except to maintain hygiene, safety, and lawful conditions. As homeless encampments are here to stay at least for the foreseeable future, local governments may have to 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.

For many years I thought that the Robin Hood Syndrome (taking from the rich to give to the poor) was a no- brainer. It wouldn’t make sense to steal from the poor to give to the rich, would it? The wealthy have the resources and the money, so who would waste their time robbing people who have little to give to the rich who have more than they need? Seems logical, right? Boy, was I naïve! It seems that the practice of the rich taking from the poor has been the norm worldwide, throughout history, cutting across most cultures, governments, and religions. Robin Hood’s crime of taking from the rich was actually compounded because he came from the aristocracy, was actually championing poor people, and was breaking the good old boy tradition of getting all you can get. If people have nothing to take, put them in debt or bondage. That was the way then, and too often it’s still that way now! 

Meanwhile Prince John, I mean Donald Trump and the republicans, are reluctant to raise taxes on the rich, but have chosen to eliminate programs that help our poor, our school children, and the disabled. I once watched a program titled, “Untold Wealth: The Rise of the Super Rich”. It was striking to learn that the Super Rich are becoming wealthy faster than ever before. In 1985 there were 13 billionaires in the US, and now there are well over 1,000 billionaires. Over 49,000 US households are worth between $50 million and $500 million; 125,000 households have a net worth between $25 million to $50 million. The top 400 taxpayers in the US have an average income exceeding $214 million. The breadth and depth of the staggering number of super-rich households has no precedent in the history of the United States. There has never been such an explosion of wealth, extravagance and conspicuous consumption against a back drop of unemployment homelessness and program cuts for the working class and the poor. 

Now we see Politicos, especially right-wing conservatives, who, while they preach their moral, religious superiority and authority, continue to be exposed for their corrupt and greedy behaviors. These people also refuse to be accountable and resign their positions of power. They believe that they are entitled to be our leaders while enriching themselves, all the while blaming the poor for their own poverty, and immigration for destroying the American Dream. As I watch the haves debate the economy, healthcare, taxes, the environment, and immigration, I see an uneven and deliberate strategy to take as much from the have nots as possible in order to feed the greed of the wealthy. For some enough is never enough! 

Where’s Robin Hood when you need him? Obama could never qualify as the next Robin Hood because he came from a low income household to begin with and was never a part of the privileged establishment like Sir Robert of Locksley (Robin Hood). 

My father used to say, “If money grew on trees we would all be in the woods!” Right now I’m feeling that many of us need to unite, rise up, and gather in Sherwood Forest instead. 

---

Winston Burton is a Berkeley resident.

The fifteenth anniversary of the disastrous invasion of Iraq has just passed. None of the architects of the war have been held responsible. 

The invasion was launched on the false pretense that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction. The attack came despite worldwide protests and without the approval from the United Nations Security Council. The ongoing war has devastated Iraq and destabilized the region. The dismissal of the Baathist party was a monumental blunder and a pivotal moment. The disaffected soldiers united to form ISIS which has menaced the region. 

While President G.W. Bush enjoys his painting and his co-conspirator, Tony Blair circles the globe amassing huge amounts of money as a “consultant,” Iraq and the surrounding region has descending into appalling sectarian violence and a magnet for terrorists. 

Other supporters of the war enjoy lucrative contracts with major US networks. 

Saddam Hussein’s removal was replaced by a thoroughly corrupt governing council which went on to loot the country. 

War crimes, widespread torture, human rights abuses, massacres have been committed at Haditha, Mahmudiyah and Balad. John Bolton who was one the main architects of the war is being courted by the Trump administration as national security advisor. 

The defense establishment and their contractors made a huge killing from the killing and mayhem. Such is the legacy of President G.W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney.

Berkeley has an opportunity. As more and more communities try to accommodate the need for decriminalization and safe access to marijuana, they face decisions regarding how to respect all citizens' right to clean, breathable air and the special hazards marijuana poses for underage populations. 

The cannabis industry cannot be expected to have a clear perspective. The overwhelming promotions of marijuana products from manufacturers are everywhere, from coy ads in free newspapers to sticker campaigns at child's height in local playgrounds. 

The public health community has the most relevant experience, and the most important advice for those who wish to comply with Proposition 64's mandate to protect underage populations and those wishing to avoid exposure. The Cannabis Commission, on the other hand, is making recommendations which pay little attention to concerns about exposure and promotions to children; 32 dispensaries for our small community, for instance, is an absurd ratio compared to Los Angeles' suggested ratio. 

It's time for voters in Berkeley to communicate their concerns about clean air in their apartment buildings, bus stops, parks, and other public places to the Berkeley City Council to recommend to the City Manager that marijuana smoke, listed by the State of California's Proposition 65 as a carcinogen along with tobacco smoke and benzene, be prohibited in multi-unit housing. The current exemption might have made sense years ago when edibles, oils, and patches were less available, but makes little sense today. The legally dubious decision our City Attorney has made to let the exemption stand, even in the light of Proposition 64's redefinition of qualifications for medical use, threatens all of us who value clean air. 

The Cannabis Commission's focus, perhaps understandably, favors making access easy for citizens wishing to smoke or ingest marijuana for recreational or medical purposes. But despite smoking being currently prohibited in parks, playgrounds, and commercial districts, Berkeley citizens are constantly subjected to secondhand smoke of every kind in smokefree locations. It is long past time for the Berkeley City Council to direct the City Manager's attention to the fact that exposure issues are treated with very little gravity by a largely indifferent police department tasked with protecting the public from unwanted exposure. 

Workers should never be exposed in their workplaces, including dispensaries. All workers, whether they use marijuana or not, have the right to control their exposure, and others who use marijuana for medical purposes should have the right to enter a dispensary without having their lungs assaulted by particulates or their bodies affected by active ingredients not intended for people who, for instance, need to safely drive. 

Proposition 64 goes out of its way to insist that only people over 21 who agree to be personally exposed to the effects of marijuana get access to it. How that plays out in Berkeley is up to us, and should use science as its foundation, not hype from an industry with clear conflicts of interest. 

---

Carol Denney is an East Bay writer and musician who successfully instituted smokefree policies in music venues before California's protective smokefree legislation was passed.

1. Never, ever blame the poor for being in poverty. They are not responsible for their genetic deficiencies. 

2. As a landlord, rent your vacant apartment to 5 to 10 tenants. You will be doing a good deed by enhancing their social life and creating community. 

 

3. Also, keep the rental security deposit if the vacated tenants fail to adequately dust the apartment shelves. 

4.Those with lots of money to spare should contribute at least $25 every year to tax deductible charities.  

5. Is unemployment high in your community? If you own a business, pay job seekers around $1.50 an hour provided they keep your generous offer strictly confidential. 

6. As intelligent and caring well-to-do people realize, except for defending our country from the high risk of a military attack, taxes are very bad for our society and economy. Be principled. See if you can incorporate as an individual, like many corporations, and pay no taxes at all. 

7. Since the poor benefit the most from the government's wasteful spending habits, it is about time to compel the poor to pay their fair share of taxes. 

8. It is silly to pity the homeless for living outdoors. The boy and girl scouts as well as many hikers have always enjoyed the outdoor life, particularly their overnight camping activities. It is only a matter of attitude. 

9. Poor folks and others who cannot afford health insurance whine about it. But if the poor take good care of themselves they would qualify for the nation's best health insurance, which is the cost free, very American "Don't Get Sick Plan". 

10. Money Talks: To the well-to-do it says: how good to see you so often. 

To the poor it says: goodbye, goodbye, and goodbye!

Until Robert Mueller publishes the results of his investigation into Russian intrusion in the 2016 election, David Corn and Michael Isikoff's new book, "Russian Roulette," will be the preeminent source for information about what happened; what did Russia do and why did they do it. There are four takeaways from this well-researched and disturbing book. 

Russia has declared war on the United States: During the October 22, 2012, presidential debate, Mitt Romney called Russia America's "biggest geopolitical threat." At the time, many observers scoffed, but it turns out that Romney was right. Corn and Isikoff's book indicates that Russian Premier Vladimir Putin has declared cyberwar on the United States and its allies; the 2016 political campaign was the most evident manifestation of the new Kremlin offensive. 

Russia cannot compete against the United States economically or militarily. Because the US has, historically, opposed many Russian political initiatives -- such as the annexation of Ukraine -- Putin has decided to retaliate by undermining our democracy: he seeks to destabilize our political system and sow discontent. In 2016 Russian operatives interfered in the U.S. political process by meddling in the voting process, selectively leaking hacked information, and spreading disinformation via social media. The Russians did this to cripple Hillary Clinton's campaign and to aid Donald Trump. 

Russian Roulette makes it clear that Putin hated Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and, therefore, deliberately set out to hurt the Obama Administration, the Clinton campaign, and Democrats in general. (The Russians not only interfered in the presidential election but also in Senate and Congressional races.) 

Trump idolizes Putin. Tellingly, Trump shares Putins's hatred for Obama. What jumps out from Russian Roulette is that there's abundant evidence of Russian cyberattacks and Trump has steadfastly denied this. 

Donald Trump threatens our national security: Corn and Isikoff's book doesn't contain a "smoking gun;" there is no new information that proves that Trump personally colluded with Russian operatives. Nonetheless, Russian Roulette reports that before November 8, 2016, the Kremlin had been trying to "cultivate" Trump for at least a decade. 

The Russian effort to enlist Trump is said to take two forms: one is to provide him with funding for his various projects; the other is to threaten him with blackmail with evidence of sexual misbehavior. 

Trump has repeatedly claimed that he has no business interests in Russia. However, Russian Roulette reports that during the campaign Trump's representatives tried to arrange for a Trump tower to be constructed in Moscow. In addition, there's abundant evidence that Trump has done business with Russian oligarchs -- on projects located outside Russia. During the nineties, Trump was in deep financial trouble and there's information that Russian money bailed him out. 

Russian Roulette discusses the possibility that Trump was sexually "compromised" during his visit to Moscow for the 2013 Miss Universe pageant. There's plenty of innuendo but, so far, no proof. 

At the conclusion of Russian Roulette we're left wondering if Trump is a dupe or a doofus; is he denying that the Russians interfered in the election because he's following Putin's lead or because he's too vacuous? For whatever reason Trump is ignoring two existential threats to the United States: Russian cyber warfare and global climate change. 

Even though the US intelligence community believes that the Russian interfered with the 2016 election, Trump discounts this. He continues to lobby for "normalization" of our relationship with Russia. (As this was being written, Trump fired Secretary of State Tillerson and National Security Adviser McMaster; both had advocated a hard line with Russia.) 

Trump's associates met with Russians: Corn and Isikoff's new book provides ample evidence that members of the Trump campaign -- Carter Page, George Papadpoulos, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner, among others -- met with Russian operatives during the campaign. It appears that the Trump campaign was aware that the Russians had hacked the DNC and John Podesta's emails. Nonetheless, there's no evidence that the Trump campaign and the Russians planned joint operations; for example, that the Trump campaign asked the Russian operatives to disrupt voter turnout in Wisconsin. (There's nothing about the Trump campaign that's comparable to the purported link between the Russians and the NRA: the FBI is investigating allegations that Alexander Torshin, an official at the Central Bank of the Russia and life member of the NRA, funneled money through the gun lobby group to the Trump campaign.) 

The Obama Administration was too soft with Russia: Russian Roulette makes it clear that the Obama Administration was informed that the Russians were interfering with the 2016 election. In hindsight it's clear that the Obama Administration was way too soft with the Russians. (At the last minute, when they wanted to go public with what they knew about the Russian interference with the election, the Obama Administration was thwarted by Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.) 

 

Summary: For the moment, David Corn and Michael Isikoff's new book, "Russian Roulette," is the preeminent source for information about how Russia interfered in the 2016 election. Bottom line: we're at war with Russia and Donald Trump isn't doing anything about it. 

Bob Burnett is a Berkeley writer and activist. He can be reached at bburnett@sonic.net