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In this election, there is one incumbent member of the Berkeley City Council who truly deserves to be re-elected – Cheryl Davila of District 2. Cheryl Davila is by far the most progressive candidate in the field, consistently demonstrating her dedication to enlightened politics since her election in 2016. It was with heavy heart that I learned that Max Anderson would retire in 2016. Max was the Conscience of the Council. Who would fill his shoes? The answer became clear only a few months into 2017. Cheryl Davila became the new Conscience of the Council. She has championed causes for South Berkeley, spoken out against the gentrification policies pushed by the City Manager, advocated for the homeless, fought for affordable housing, and denounced police militarization and police harassment of POC, the homeless, and those in mental crises. Her voting record is exemplary – always choosing the moral position over pandering to the wealthy and developers. She has the strongest environmental voting record on the Council. Most recently, Cheryl pushed the Council to eliminate tear gas and other pain compliance devices from the police, and she had the foresight to make the only “defunding police” proposal that didn’t just kick the can down the road.

Cheryl has shown courage in standing up to the Mayor and other Council members who have regularly marginalized and disrespected her during Council meetings. As the Conscience of the Council, Cheryl frames her vote in terms of a moral choice rather than a bureaucratic, business decision. Such framing has left the mayor and some Council members embarrassed and angry. Attempts to silence her during Council meetings are legend, with the public often erupting in protest, demanding to “let her speak.” And unlike previous elections where Council members cross-endorsed each other, in this election the majority of Council members are determined to rid themselves of this thorn in their side. They want to remove Cheryl because she dares to identify the moral underpinnings of decisions that impact the community. But the real progressive community leaders know better, which is why Cheryl has the endorsements of Max Anderson, Gus Newport, Jovanka Beckles, Barbara Brust, Moni Law, Rev. Michael Smith, and Ms. Richie Smith - just to name a few. For a complete list of her endorsements, see her website https://cheryldavila.vote/endorsements/.  

It is important to understand why the Berkeley City Council so desperately need a conscience. This will require me to digress from the specifics of this election to the general operation of our systems of governance.  

The world has become so corporatized, so branded, so commodified, that we sometimes fail to recognize that the tendrils of corporate-machine-thinking have infected Berkeley. Berkeley is incorporated. Berkeley is a corporation that employs a staff of bureaucrats whose job is to make sure the city continues to run. The staff are cogs in the machine, each one following rules to make the machine efficient and keep the machine running. The machine’s primary purpose is to maintain itself in the hope that this maximizes the general welfare of the people of Berkeley. But such machine thinking lacks compassion. It is reptilian. Staff become atomized agents operating in a market – doing their job but not viewing the big picture. Short-term thinking is the general rule – thinking that discounts the future and discounts people who are not seen to contribute to the operation of the machine.  

Berkeley, like all corporate machines, has no moral center, no emotions, no compassion. Staff must follow the rules, not their hearts. It is not that staff don’t have compassion as individuals. It is just that in their bureaucratic roles, they have put on the straight jacket of corporate operations that prevents them from acting outside those rules. This corporate structure simultaneously absolves them of any blame for enforcing those rules that can hurt members of the public. C. Wright Mills describes the operation of this machine in his book “The Power Elite.” Those who follow the rules are promoted and move up the corporate ladder, move higher on the pyramid of rule-based decision making. The assumption is that the mechanical rule-based operation of the machine is always beneficial to the public. However, there is a check on that machine logic embodied in the City Council. Part of the Council’s job is to look at the big picture and provide compassionate guidance that prioritizes the general welfare of the community over efficient operation of the machine. But the machine will resist what it views as outside interference.  

The City Manager is the CEO of the machine. She does not want the Council, the city’s Board of Directors, interfering with her machine’s efficiency. This conflation of efficient operation with beneficial operation is the root cause of the dysfunctional response by the city to society’s problems. With machine logic, the homeless are problems, not people. So when a complaint happens, in go the police to move them and confiscate their property – viewed as an efficient solution to solve the complaint. Protesters are problems to efficient operation of the city, so tear gas is demanded as the most efficient mechanism to disperse the problem. The struggling poor, who often do the majority of necessary work, are not contributing enough to city finances with this machine logic, so gentrification and market-rate housing is the solution. Aging equipment is replaced with more fossil fuel-based vehicles as the cheapest, most efficient solution, discounting a future that includes climate chaos via machine logic. And a shortage of city finances is viewed as a problem that requires waivers of environmental codes to maximize construction (and city income), discounting the problems of gentrification and climate change. The myopic, compassionless operation of the machine requires a conscience - and the City Council must be that conscience.  

Unfortunately, the mayor seems have become a cog in another machine – the Democratic Party political machine. Like the corporate machines described by C. Wright Mills, the local Democratic Party demands rule-based conformity that benefits the Party first and foremost, not the community. There seems to be an underlying assumption that what is good for the Dem Party is good for the community – a variation on “What's good for GM is good for America.” Benefiting the Party means benefiting the major donors to the Party – developers, landlords, businesses. Therefore the mayor finds bureaucratic reasons to justify his votes for money interests, ignoring Cheryl Davila’s appeals for compassion and morality. Other members of the Council justify their votes as beneficial to their district’s narrow interests – which appear to be a new form of red-lining. Gentrification of District 2 will move the red-line to the city’s borders, making property values higher and adding revenues that can be used to benefit the wealthier sections of the city without requiring them to accommodate change. District 2 is a sacrifice zone for these council members.  

These conflicting interests will go unnoticed without a Council conscience. The city of Berkeley needs someone with the moral fiber to defend District 2 from the money interests. For the last four years that person has been Cheryl Davila. She deserves to be re-elected. But even more so, the people of Berkeley need her on the Council. We so desperately need a Conscience of the Council in these chaotic times. Please support Cheryl Davila for District 2. We need her moral center.