The Berkeley Native Sun

I want to hire Ted Friedman - dasht notes

2013-01-31T02:26:27Z

I can't. I want to hire Ted Friedman but I can't. I don't have the money.

This is my own fault, probably. I briefly got pretty rich in the first dot-com boom but I stood up to the wrong bullies and it turned out they didn't play by the same rules. Lost a lot of money in the ensuing chaos. Long story and not for today.

Point is: I'm not rich but I remember what it's like. "I could have been a contender" goes the line from a movie I haven't seen. If I were rich the Berkeleynativesun would have a start-up budget in excess of $9.95 per month and I could spend a bit to try to bootstrap a going concern here.

If I wasn't broke I'd hire Ted Friedman. Probably first. Probably as a stringer with an occasional expense account. A stringer because I'd be rich but still not made of money and, anyway, putting Ted on salary would risk taking the fight out of him.

You might wonder why I'd hire Ted. Well, it's simply because he is The World's Worst Reporter. He says so himself. It's worth a close read.

Buy low and sell high. It's hard to beat the price of the World's Worst Reporter. In the right context, Ted could be a profitable investment. He reminds me of someone...

Ted Friedman is no Hunter S. Thompson

Contemplating a story about Werewolfs, Hunter S. Thompson wrote to his editor at Playboy magazine in 1967

What are you thinking of in terms of expenses? I've given the project just enough thought to see it might involve a hell of a lot of travel. England, for instance, is very big on weird phenomena. Would Playboy go for a round-trip shot to London? Or were you assuming I could do the piece on the basis of whatever research you sent to Woody Creek? I won't be home for at least another week, so I on't know what you sent....but in any case, I'd be reluctant to write any article based entirely on other people's research. I'm sure we'll come up with some very good/weird stories in this area, but the problem is that the most believable ones are going to be the ones I'll want to check out personally. No honest writer, for instance, wrould validate -- with his byline -- a third-hand account of a Scottish gamekeeper who claims to be a wereworlf. You'd have to confront the man (assuming he's alive), and get a fix on his head by discussing other things.

That's smart investegatory thinking, pure and simple.

First, Thompson was demanding money up front. Smart.

Second, Thompson was absolutely right that you don't get to the bottom of a scuttlebut like the werewolf story unless you can "confront the man (assuming he's alive), and get a fix on his head by discussing other things."

Famously and sometimes infamously Thompson was about getting inside of a situation and telling a story from the inside out. That reminds me of Ted.

After all, you don't get close enough to piss off the likes of legend Micah White, and have him declare you "worst reporter", unless you've confronted him and gotten a fix on his head. "Close" is needed to confront and "fix on his head" is the only way to really piss someone off like that. Ted got a lot closer to the camera-and-mic-shy Occupy leader than any other Berkeley reporter at the time.

Ted's no Hunter S., though. Whatever problems may or may not lie in Ted's past with drink he's reached the age of "young side of senior" quite sharp and bright-eyed, not stumbling and slurring and playing with heavy weaponry as a form of dismal self-parody.

Nor, to my knowledge, has Ted found himself a little too closely embedded in any Hell's Angels gang rapes.

I don't think I'd want to hire Hunter if he happened to be still alive and living on the South Side. Thompson never recovered from the crushing blow of celebrity and it killed his talent.

Ted's no Hunter S. Thompson.

You Are Here

I don't recall who but someone once inspired me by saying something like:

It is the role of good journalism to give the readers a truer perception of the world around them, exposing them to significant realities that would otherwise elude them.

That's one of those glib summaries that can be twisted and distorted to mean just about anything, but really it doesn't.

Printing the school lunch menu and captioning crime scenes, fires, and elementary school recitals with pro-forma recitations spreads information but it isn't journalism. Wrap up too much of that kind of information as alleged news and pretty soon you're doing the opposite of journalism, narrowing rather than expanding the world views of readers.

These days Ted longs to get inside and figure out what's going on with all this talk of an Oakland crime wave spilling over into Berkeley. He's got friends in the police department and that's a good start but not enough.

"You need criminal sources, for this story," I advised him, as if I were in a position to hire him.

I didn't say but was thinking it would take money since that kind of access doesn't come free. And I didn't say it but I think he'd need a translator in the field to help, for which purpose I'd offer myself.

(I am no good at code switching and sound stupid if I try but I am reasonably fluent at understanding the mostly-Black vernacular of the toughest streets and at being understood even while talking White. "He's alright. He's a white nigger," went one kindly delivered accolade designed to break some tension.)

There is no point in romanticizing Oakland crime these days but neither can the story really be understood without some insight from the inside about what the players are doing and what they think they're doing and, in a historical context yet to be explored, just why and how they got there.

It'd be a mistake to think Ted would be good for such a story because of the style in which he writes. Ted would be good for such a story because -- if suitably back-stopped by money -- he could help get the story in the first place.

(And Ted, I don't suggest trying to get it on the cheap. There's no point in romanticizing stupid risk-taking, either.)

a note on social welfare programs - dasht notes

2013-01-23T07:37:21Z

The context for this note is the public policy debate that we'll be entering in a few scant weeks when the sequestration debate is taken up in connection to the slightly post-poned debt ceiling debate. Here are some progressive talking points you'll soon be meeting (for the good reason that they are sound):

1) Raising the retirement age is terrible public policy while unemployment is so high for young adults. Asking people to stay on the job longer when there is a shortage of jobs is plainly crazy. (I believe that there are factions of the financial elite who will strongly endorse this argument just as their are factions that would be thrilled to dump employer-provided health insurance entirely. Corporations don't like being in the business of supplying individual pensions when that interferes with their flexibility to change who's on payroll.)

2) Similarly, the flexibility of the younger part of the workforce is obviously tied to the welfare of seniors. Further reducing and delaying benefits directly increases the financial and care giving burden on younger workers, harming their earning and saving potentials at a time when, to cope with the demographic bubble, we need to increase the earning and saving potentials of younger workers. (This part should have a lot of appeal to middle class and working poor younger workers who are currently fretting about what is to become of their baby boomer parents. At least I know that it's on my mind.)

3) This next bit is a little tricky. Put a progressive floor on payroll tax revenues as follows:

Implement generous means testing and a raise on the earnings cap for payroll taxes. If the private sector isn't producing enough employment to cover the programs' costs, but is producing plenty of income, the tax burden needs to go up on higher incomes. If employment improves, the extra burden on high earners can be reduced. In this way, as a matter of policy, we can fairly keep payroll tax revenues stably in proportion to anticipated need for benefits.

The law could actually be written that way: Variable payroll taxes on high incomes could be either or a mix of a variable ceiling on taxable income or progressive but variable rates. The level of the new progressive part of the payroll tax would be varied automatically to hold revenues to some constraint. So there would be an employment-related floor on payroll tax revenues.

(The money party objection to this would be that it implies raising taxes (on high income earners) during contractions in employment so "job creaters durpdy durp" and arguments along those lines. As we saw in the election, though, there is pretty strong popular rejection of that argument. It is in any event a huge retreat from "OMG, the gov't is going bankrupt!")

4) Reducing health care costs is the #1 biggest thing we can do to reduce projected benefits. This is fantastic news because other than the political barriers, it's very easy and painless to make huge progress. The government is paying far too much for prescription drugs, thanks to lobbyists, for example. These are the kinds of hard choices we need to make to bring down cost projections going forward: choices that some of the wealthiest individuals and corporations may not like because where we anticipate excessive governmtent spending, they see themselves as the likely recipients, who will get that spending as windfall revenues and profits. If the government starts paying a fair price for prescription drugs, their profits will be smaller. Well, they can still make a decent profit even if the government is allowed to negotiate on price and now it's very important to move in that direction.

5) The government spends a lot to provide a safety net with the likes of unemployment insurance, housing assistance, foodstamps and WICs support, ... And yet in the pockets of poverty in this country so much of that spending is inefficient because communities are under-served. Access is scarce, for many, to healthy, affordable food. Many of the nation's poorest live in areas from which it is economically hard to escape and where the environment, even the housing in which people live, is unhealthy. These conditions drive up the nation's health care costs and put huge obstacles in the way of kids who should be getting an education and preparing to join the workforce. We should create local citizen commissions to advise local housing authorities and authorize a process for administrating federal tax relief incentives to projects that improve the housing stock and food security in low-income neighborhoods in deep cooperation with the people living in these pockets of poverty, who have the greatest interest in the outcomes. (E.g.: Federal tax incentives to create cooperative groceries, urban farming, brownfield restoration projects, lead paint and other toxic substance removal from residences, installation of modern insulation in regions with cold winters, high-priority small business assistance, and community recreation facilities.)

My intent (failed or not) here is to suggest a positive program that is easy to grok on a naive, intuitive level and that also seems plausibly realistic to a policy implementation wonk. I haven't personally tried to quantify any of it, though (so that's a big weakness, I admit, but then again the alleged quantifications of money-party policy platforms aren't what carries them, I think.).

The GOP has won - dasht notes

2013-01-19T05:17:31Z

This quick note of a post is a bit unusual because of how it came to be:

I had a very brief, pleasant, 140-character chat on Twitter with Dave Winer. This piece continues that conversation which started when Winer tweeted to the world (I've left out a link to the article Dave was talking about):

Dave Winer ☮ Ryan: GOP might not hold the world hostage in an epic hissy fit. [Ryan had spoken to the press suggesting the House Republicans would vote for an unconditional short-term raise of the debt ceiling.]

thomas_lord @davewiner Nah. Ryan is saying they want to tie debt ceiling to sequestration debts ("short term raise"). It's a raise not a fold.

Dave Winer ☮ @thomas_lord -- he's chickenshit, he likes living in a world with health care, garbage men, and doesn't want to revert to the stone age.

thomas_lord@davewiner hehe (re "chickenshit"). Fair enough. 140 too small -- I should write a blog post about the topic.

Dave Winer ☮ @thomas_lord -- do write a blog post! please.

So, here Dave. Hope you like it.

Dear Dave,

The GOP has won. They are, hands down, the stronger party in the federal government. The electoral landscape is such that this appears unlikely to change anytime soon. If the GOP's strengths in state government hold fast, they'll even stand a good chance of taking the presidency in 2016 (if they should happen to want it).

The headlines today are amusing and seem to tell a very different story.

"ANALYST: It Looks Like This Is 'Unilateral Disarmament' By The GOP On The Debt Ceiling" -- Business Insider
"House Republicans Cave on Debt Ceiling Brinkmanship" -- Time

How exciting! Only ... there has been no disarmament, quite the opposite. There has been no cave. The GOP is just collecting the pot. They had the stronger hand all along. They're laying down their cards one by one. Read 'em and weep. This is what their victory looks like.

"Just because the bear is eating you slowly doesn't mean you aren't dead."
That's an old proverb I just made up.

Didn't Obama demand, just the other day, either a clean long-term raise or else presidential authority to raise the limit by executive order? Didn't he say that there would be no negotiations?

Now with this three month extension proposed, what happens?

The three month offer gives a middle finger to Obama who can only talk tough because he has no apparent leverage.
The GOP retains its capability to force a government shut-down. With a three month delay, they'll have exercised their option to control the timing of such a shut-down, should they want to invoke it.
The GOP will have more tightly tied sequestration negotiations to the threat of a government shut-down.
Some pundits will help give the GOP cover here by declaring this three month extension a sudden "return to sanity" rather than calling it what it was -- the playing out of the GOP's stronger position.

Much is made of how this kind of GOP hardball effects polling for them but those articles talk about inconsequential, national approval ratings (and such). What really matters for the GOP is whether it has the House by the throat with a secure majority (it does), whether it remains strong enough in state governments to push for electoral college reforms to have a go at the WH (the GOP remains sufficiently strong at the state level), and whether the Obama administration has any actual leverage against any of this (it doesn't -- at least none that is yet visible).

Isn't this all because Obama is weak-willed and/or evil?

If anything, a Democrat Executive Branch and Senate provide the GOP with excellent cover. It makes the Democrats look like they have a lot of policy-making power when, in fact, they do not.

As long as the pundits refuse to acknowledge that the GOP is actually in the dominant position, the popular narrative is that Obama and Democrats are somehow incompetent or corrupt, either weak in their negotiating skills or secretly hoping to dismantal progressive policies.

This is the kind of story the main stream press and the "left" press seems to prefer but it fully misses the point that the GOP has played the superior chess game. Solid GOP control of the House means that the Democrats have very little federal legislative power at the moment and that's not likely to change soon. The GOP is very secure in many states and congressional districts.

Won't The moderate traditional moderate republicans come to the rescue?

Also widely (and falsely) reported is that there must be some kind of huge schism between the traditional fiscal conservative Republicans and the new "batshit crazy" tea party.

Consistently missing in these popular, wishful-thinking narratives is any serious account of how these two factions seriously differ over most public policy. Their differences are over legislative strategies and electoral strategies. They are arguing over how best to spend the party's superior power. They agree on dismantling entitlements except for people who are already old. They agree on dismantling many forms of regulation. The GOP may have small numbers of dissenters on some social issues like gay rights but nobody writing anywhere has identified any serious scism in the party.

Indeed, the carefully disciplined way the GOP is collectively talking about the debt ceiling ought to be a clue: they remain a very unified force.

What the GOP wants

The GOP fat cats and the GOP base agree on a few things. They would like to see far weaker protections for labor and the environment. They would like to see more cops and more "toughness on crime". If the public school system went away tomorrow, they wouldn't miss it much especially if the freed up money could go to privately owned charter schools.

For the fat-cats, this will lower the cost of US labor as well as regulatory costs. There will be fewer rules and workers will be more desparate. In a global market, those economically and morally devastating conditions for workers will raise the long term value of US assets held by the fat cats. At least that is their thinking.

For the low-information base, GOP reforms will inject some kind of tough-love morality into the economy. These are folks who believe, one way or another, that virtue is achieved through deprivation and punishment. Roughly speaking, their superstitious thinking is that dysfunctions in public policy must be because people aren't humble and beat down enough.

Gun regulation and surveillance by the state - dasht notes

2013-01-17T02:59:31Z

In reaction to recent mass shootings, liberals and progressives across the nation are allegedly enthusiastic about beefing up federal gun regulation. The NRA is finally on the ropes, it is oddly presumed against all evidence. Now is the time for common sense regulation, of some sort, because Australia and London "Bobbies" or something.

Common sense is a tricky bird. We really ought to step back and consider if these "common sense" measures will really improve public safety and what else these measures might do.

One of the proposals is to expand the use of the federal database for background checks. Checks would be required even for private sales at gun shows. States would be pressured to more fully report people who are forbidden from buying because of certain kinds of encounter with the mental health system.

There is some history here. Starting in 1993 the federal government used to broadly require states to supply certain mental health records to the FBI for open-ended purposes. They were entrusted to surveille people like this probably because of the FBI's decades long history of respecting privacy and never abusing its powers. The mental health part of the background check for gun purchases grew out of that reporting requirement.

Alas, in 1997 the requirement that states report mental health records to the FBI was struck down by the court. Today, many states voluntarily participate barely or not at all in the program, though a few participate with seeming enthusiasm.

Interestingly, even the NRA who generally resist gun regulation complain about the situation with mental health reporting. They have endorsed the idea of making mental health record reporting more complete.

Will it work? What will it do?

I'm not sure exactly what the effect on violent crime will be if the database is beefed up with greater mental health reporting and wider use. I'm skeptical that it will make a huge difference to public safety one way or another but none of us really know.

There's only an uncertain gain from the proposal but there are some certain costs:

a) The proposal is to expand unaccountable, universal, domestic surveillance by federal law enforcement.

b) In particular, it proposes attempting to track everyone who is ever involuntarily committed or who are subject to certain kinds of court orders related to mental illness. (And it is a virtual certainty that such a list will include many people who would pose no special risk as gun buyers.)

Surely this information can't be abused?

It is commonly believed that, at least on paper, the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) can only be used for the very narrow purpose of regulating gun sales. Unfortunately, that's a bit misleading.

It's true that the law itself specifies the creation of the NICS database, who can use it, and for which (narrow) purposes. The law explicitly specifies auditing policies aimed at preventing abuse.

There is a big loophole in the law, though. The law specifies restrictions on how the NICS database itself may be used but it does not so narrowly limit what the FBI can do with records submitted for addition to the NICS.

When the NICS staff get a record from a state they update the NICS database itself but they are also assigned the duty of updating other (less regulated) federal databases from those same records.

In effect, the FBI may not (per law) directly use the NICS database for "general law enforcement" purposes but the FBI can in effect make a copy of all incoming records to the NICS, and keep those in less restricted databases.

Here is a quote from Law Enforcement Records Management Systems (RMSs) as They Pertain to FBI Programs and Systems, a manual published by the FBI):

"The NICS Section [the department that runs NICS] also is instrumental in effecting the update of applicable federal, state, and local automated criminal history databases to ensure the availability of current record information for future inquiries by law enforcement agencies."

So is all this really -- as a practical matter, legislative intent aside -- really about "common sense" gun control?

Berkeleyside ponders whether we're bashing homeless folks hard enough - dasht notes

2013-01-03T08:30:28Z

As though they actually care, Berkeleyside has invited its always opinionated commentariate to weigh in on the remarkable question: Has it gotten harder to be homeless in Berkeley, a subject about which the typical Berkeleyside reader is surely expert.

To get the customarily productive discussion started, cub reporter Emilie Raguso has seeded the ground with a few quotes from non-homeless people who have absolutely no insight into the question posed.

The ball got rolling when an anonymous reader innocently asked Berkeleyside to chase down a rumor from the street.

"Since the no-sit [ballot] measure failed, the city has begun new, more aggressive treatment of the homeless. My homeless neighbor, [name redacted], has been told he could sleep in the doorway of a movie theater but last night, a cop rousted him from his dry, out-of-the-rain perch in the theater's doorway. The cop said the theater could face stiff fines for giving [name redacted] permission to sleep in their doorway on a rainy night."

The reader continued: "Is this really who we want to be as a city?"

Now that's a fair question and probably important to those who might care about justice and such. The people have a right to know: Has some sort of quiet, departmental backlash from the failure of an anti-homeless ballot measure led to a retributive posture by Berkeley's police force? Are the powers that be, thwarted at the polls, taking out their frustration on the most vulnerable and down-and-out among us? How can we possibly find out?

Berkeleyside settles the question to their own satisfaction with a simple quote from the accused:

According to police spokeswoman Officer Jennifer Coats, the Berkeley Police Department has not altered its general approach to the enforcement of violations associated with homeless residents.

Well, there you have it. The general approach of the police towards the poorest of the poors remains not altered. Are the police stepping up the harassment of people living on the street since measure S failed? The answer is a resounding NOT EXACTLY, SORTA! (according to police).

Thank goodness. If you are worried the police are doing something wrong, you can take comfort because BS asked them and the cops denied everything. Case solved.

Ragusso then hands the remainder of the piece over to Douglas Smith, of the Berkeley Public Library, to give an impassioned defense of new library rules prohibiting bringing in large unwieldy items such as shopping bags full of everything you own, bedrolls, and so forth.

"Our mission is to say 'yes' as much as possible, but we do have to make sure people follow the rules," he said. "Part of our mission is to help create a space in the community where people want to come, where it can be a place for silent study, meeting with friends, using collections, using computers and getting information from librarians."

Which, of course it is. The struggles of public libraries to serve everyone, including the homeless, are legend. The problems resulting when smelly, overly-laden, sometimes ill-behaved homeless people camp out or pass out in libraries are decades old. When Smith says the library's mission is "to say 'yes' as much as possible" his management-school rhetoric might cause some snickers but in substance he is joining a long and proud tradition of fiercely thoughtful and egalitarian public library tradition.

Whether or not the library's practice in enforcing its rules lives up to those ideals is an interesting question. Berkeleyside settles it simply and directly, once again, by asking the accused:

Smith said he understood that the new rules would be a challenge for some patrons, but that they were necessary for the facility to work as a shared resource.

So it's resolved. If anyone wants to know if the library is unjustly harassing homeless people they can sit down and please shut up because Berkeleyside has investigated by asking the library. Whatever is going on, experts say, is simply necessary. Case closed.

The customary Berkeleyside comment clique seems to have arrived at a rough consensus that whatever harassment of the homeless might be going on, it is evidently not nearly enough to do the job.

Remarkably, Berkeleyside and its community of commenters managed to answer its own question about how the homeless are being treated by consulting not a single homeless person or even any advocate for the homeless who might know a few facts on the ground.

I hear that next month BS will add a new investigative feature in which they publish the school lunch menus for the coming week. The data will be supplied by the district but BS will cut and paste like champs.

"new journalism" not dead yet - dasht notes

2012-12-31T05:40:20Z

Ted Friedman has an excellent piece up:

EXCLUSIVE! On Berkeley's Telegraph, Few Creatures Stirred X-Mas Eve -- Or Did They?

He returned briskly, saying, "what was I thinking? I don't have anywhere else to go."

Liberal disengagement - dasht notes

2012-12-18T05:37:25Z

[Disclaimer: this is long and if it were criticized as pompous and self indulgent I'd have to say -- possibly so. My possibly misguided intuition suggests posting it here.]

I live in Berkeley, California.   Yes, *that* Berkeley.   I have long hair. I don't often wear tie-dye t-shirts anymore but I think I still own some.   I think everyone who lives in my apartment building is college educated or close to it.   The public schools are said to be pretty good.   There is a very large, very well maintained public park nearby and kids' leagues from surrounding cities come to make use of the two well groomed baseball diamonds.   (The tennis courts, tot playground, community center, picnic areas, recently resurfaced basketball courts and unofficial but tolerated off-hours dog park are also very popular.)    Our City Council on Tuesday will take up a resolution against allowing civilian or law enforcement drones here -- an item put forth by the "Peace and Justice" council-appointed citizen's commission.   That commission is one of many citizen commissions that operate with funded support from city staff and help to create and shape local public policy.    While my block and neighborhood are high on the list of poorest, relative to the rest of the city, the city as a whole is very affluent.    By population I think we are about 4 times larger than Newtown and by land area we are almost 6 times smaller.    One of the most bitter battles in the recent election was a narrowly decided zoning issue regarding our light industrial zone (and its possible up-zoning).

I live right next to one of the murder capitals in the US., Oakland California. I can walk a few blocks to a famous "gang injunction" area -- a court-ordered stay-away zone and do-not-associate-with-one-another zone for a bunch of named gang members. A few months ago a fellow was murdered (outside the zone) about 2.5 blocks from here (in Berkeley) near the corner store and next to the community's non-profit organic nursery.    Rumor had it that that was a case of mistaken identity. A couple of years ago I covered, for a local news outlet, a murder even closer than that.   I got to that crime scene early on in the event because I had my window open and heard the multiple-10s of shots, in well under a minute, with only perhaps two or three shooters, using weapons that would not be prohibited by Diane Feinstein's bill.     There was a teen there at the scene who acted kind of weird around me once I was recognized to be press and, I'm not sure it's the same guy, but I think he was the kid killed a few weeks later in a shooting that the police decided was an accident.    I can give you a rough idea of where, nearby, you can buy a few hours alone in a motel room with an adolescent child, if you are so inclined.

What remains of the local press is increasingly afraid to venture into Oakland because a resale market exists for high-end cameras and videocameras such as the one that was recently stolen from a TV news station during a live broadcast.   "Someone is going to get shot and the funeral won't be mine," said one photojournalist to explain why he was refusing to go cover any more stories in Oakland where, in fact, people get shot all the time.   Generally speaking the Oakland police department no longer responds to or investigates home burglaries and the like, although they maintain a web site where you can file a police report for insurance purposes.    Indeed, in Oakland the son of Wilie Brown (former mayor of San Francisco and former state assembly speaker) came home to observe burglars in his home -- who took their time finishing the job and leaving well before the police sent a squad car to take the report. I have neighbors whose main response to this kind of thing is to try to engage in collective punishment, suing and harassing black families and businesses out of town.    Did I mention that the Oakland police department has recently been federalized -- put under the control of a federal court -- because of its repeated failures to correct its tendency to act as just another street gang, shaking down and beating up and murdering and such?

Again: I'm talking about Berkeley and the Bay Area.   You know, "The Graduate", vegan food, Chez Panisse, and Silicon Valley.   Some of you have probably been here on business and had very nice meals and some good wine.   Perhaps you caught some theater or took a drive along the coast.

Berkeley is increasingly awash in (mostly white) economically displaced young people -- many of whom aged out of foster care and were dumped off on the street.   Word is that the whole coast is lit up with this growing demographic of very angry, permanently displaced young people -- many quite smart and not especially crazy -- who simply no longer believe in the legitimacy of government or straight society.   They don't see many ways to live without enduring the gratuitous violence of the more privileged and they're increasingly consciousness-raised about that.    The town's swells are trying hard to harass and legislate them out of town -- so we'll look more like Palo Alto, I guess, in spite of having little in common besides the dual presences of a lot of money and an institution with "University" as part of its name.

I've been directly engaged in two mental health crises right on my street. One was an impoverished single mom who the community could no longer prop up to get past her episodes of standing and shouting out to Jesus for hours on end.   I only knew one of her boys... perhaps 6 or so ... from holding his head in my lap while he hoped to avoid another beating.   I wound up praising and encouraging his late developing ability to add numbers less than 10 together. He was keen to show them off. He'd seen something like it in school, I gathered.    He illustrated his reasoning with some rocks off the ground.    In another case there was the 30-something woman, nearly catatonic most of the time, kept as a latchkey child by a mother who knew all too well what the public options were.   When her mother's care faltered, and the disabled woman spent *months* living in a feces-filled apartment, roaming the street from time to time in her feces-covered clothes, dropping weight to the point she looked on death's door --- when that happened it took all of those months from the first sign of trouble for me to coordinate the public agencies enough that they felt they could legally act.

I have great respect for how badly the Newtown tragedy makes everyone, including me, feel.   It is a struggle -- and I do try -- to have any respect at all for the kind of "gun control!" or "more gov't spending on mental health!" responses and rhetoric.   I want to say, frankly, those responses come from a perspective that is not situationally aware. It is a harsh thought but I keep coming back to my perception that economic and racial and gender privilege -- combined with the specific technological and cultural organization of our time -- has left so many of us without a freaking clue about what the state of the world is.   It's so easy to isolate ourselves. To go live in a nice neighborhood. To maintain the illusion of worldliness by developing a keen familiarity with the airport corridors and fine hotels and restaurants of major cities around the world. To eat from menus that vaguely refer to what used to be a practical diet, and call it rustic.   To support (passively or actively) the school district that wants to drive out the problematic kid (as in this Newtown case).   To feebly entrust to Diane Feinstein our political response to a tragedy. To throw more money at mental health agencies on the assumption its their job to make the problems just magically disappear.   It's just rent on our personal islands, right?

The powerful in this country -- and relatively speaking that's us -- treat all this dysfunction as an inconvenience.   We look to government or mental health institutions or institutions of education to please just go ahead and implement some policies and make all these displaced, angry, violent, dead-ended, rejected, ostracized people disappear from sight.   When, as in Newtown, white privileged society, with its predilection for exclusions and expulsions starts manufacturing maniacs of its own the liberals can't decide if its better to step up the elitism with gun regulations or state-operated mental health regulations but either way the gist is the same:   to try to answer the symptoms of isolation, displacement, and disenfranchisement by making the barriers of exclusion harsher.   Hey, maybe it's not just an outrageous distribution of income disparity we suffer in this country but an outrageous distribution of attention and community.

i think we're all winston smith on this bus - dasht notes

2012-12-13T05:22:12Z

You've probably already heard about San Francisco's plans to bug public transit busses. So it is a bit redundant to mention that we used to commonly believe it would be bad to implement George Orwell's vision of a world of total, ubiquitous surveillance. We used to think it might not be so good to have every conversation recorded, every face snapshotted in public life. We were kind of against collecting all that kinds of surveillance for "law enforcement" to peruse behind closed doors and trot out against us as they saw fit. Richard Brenneman has collected some good sources about how times of changed: In San Francisco, streetcars, buses spy on you.

Berkeley reporter on the beat - dasht notes

2012-12-12T02:59:29Z

Remembering an era when people mostly beat about the bush Ted Friedman wraps his grasp firmly around the topic of masterbation and its cultural evolution in a time of "sex positive" student columnists and bureacratized curration of general knowledge. It's mostly about Wikipedia, I think.

The case for masturbation is a strong one, until we come to Kant, who felt that yielding to the "temptations off beasts," was a loss of self.

Today in banking outrages - dasht notes

2012-12-12T01:15:53Z

You may have heard of banks that are "too big to fail" but how about banks that are "too big to indict"? That's the dilemma regulators faced in the case of British multinational bank HSBC Holdings.

Several outlets are reporting today about a settlement reached among HSBC and state and federal regulators in the US. The bank will pay a "record" $1.92 billion penalty after illegally laundering at least $15 billion of funds for Mexican cartels and doing illegal business with sources in Iran, Libya, Sudan, Burma and Cuba. Reports the Chicago Tribune:

The settlement is the third time in a decade that HSBC has been penalized for lax controls and ordered by U.S. authorities to better monitor suspicious transactions. Directives by regulators to improve oversight came in 2003 and again in 2010.

While the penalty is steep the bank announced last month that it was setting aside most of the needed funds in anticipation of settlement. It's stock has taken a slight dip leading some analysts to rate the stock a "buy". One analyst copped a stoic attitude about being let off the hook so easily:

"Is it absorbable? Yes. Is it significant? Yes. But in the absence of a broader attack on the business structure or individuals, that explains why the market reaction has been relatively muted today and has been since the allegations came out," he added.

You might think that aiding and abetting criminal cartels and helping to bypass international sanctions meant to combat terrorism would lead to serious charges meriting more than high profile slap on the wrist. You'd be wrong, at least in the present era when regulators are simply afraid to interfere much with banks "too big to indict." The New York Times has the story:

A money-laundering indictment, or a guilty plea over such charges, would essentially be a death sentence for the bank. Such actions could cut off the bank from certain investors like pension funds and ultimately cost it its charter to operate in the United States, officials said.

Despite the Justice Department's proposed compromise, Treasury Department officials and bank regulators at the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency pointed to potential issues with the aggressive stance, according to the officials briefed on the matter. When approached by the Justice Department for their thoughts, the regulators cautioned about the effect on the broader economy.

So rest peacefully, your pensions are safe. Bankers around the world have been put on notice that should they continue to facilitate the operations of murderous gangs of thugs they might very well be called on the carpet where they'll have to face the mild reproval of regulators yet again.

Who cares about Aquatic Park? - dasht notes

2012-12-11T06:46:03Z

Shit of all sorts rolls downhill, they say, and Aquatic Park is a case in point.

The park serves as a buffer between Berkeley and the bright blue sea.   Excess storm runoff from much of Berkeley makes its way downhill to the park, sometimes flooding parts of West Berkeley on the way to the lagoon. From there the effluent mingles with the Bay as tides permit.   As the water flows it carries with it such pollution as we have, ultimately polluting not only the park but also the Bay.

Like all authorities adjacent to the bay, Berkeley is under legal obligation to reduce these polluting discharges or pay stiff penalties.   At the same time, Berkeley has endogenous obligations to reduce flooding in the city and to improve the quality of the park.

These obligations to the city compete. Flooding can be reduced by increasing the efficiency of storm-water flow into the lagoon -- but only that expense (all else being equal) of further polluting the lagoon and the Bay.

Here is the state of things:

Storm run-off does not flow fast enough towards the park, and so we have flooding. Partly this is because our system of paving causes too much run-off. Partly this is because the city infrastructure doesn't carry water into the lagoon fast enough.

On the other hand, the tides do not circulate water through the lagoon efficiently enough, resulting in a stagnant lagoon. Again, neglected infrastructure -- literally inadequate and poorly maintained culverts between the park and the bay -- are to blame.

But on the third hand, while improving those flows might help reduce flooding and local stagnation, it would worsen Berkeley's contribution to polluting the park and the Bay (and in ways that can can directly cost the city real money).

Nobody is quite really sure if we can raise the money to fix this. It's one of those unaccounted deficits that, if we could really put them on the books, might help prove that Berkeley is well and truly bankrupt, several times over.

It is against this background that Toni Mester writes a fine backgrounder, encouraging public attention to an upcoming public hearing. Here's a teaser. Go read it on that cornerstone of the Free Press in Berkeley: the Daily Planet.

In the meantime, APIP tries to merge two incompatible functions: flood control and repair of the water quality in Aquatic Park, which wasn't created as a flood basin. It's questionable whether this redesign of the Park to accomplish both tasks at once can succeed without further damage to the Park's infrastructure, especially if future storms exceed past downpours as a result of global warming.

Yes-on-S campaign stands accused - dasht notes

2012-12-08T05:39:49Z

In the most recent election Berkeley knocked down Measure S, a ban on sitting on sidewalks in the city's business districts between certain hours. The measure was widely understood to target poor people, the homeless, and itinerent youth who, in the eyes of some, are to be blamed for the recent poor performance of the downtown and Telegraph avenue business districts.

Interests in favor of the measure outspent the opposition by something like 10-to-1 ... yet nevertheless lost the sometimes bitter fight.

The Street Spirit recently reported on just how ugly the Yes-on-S campaign got. Of course, there are the usual accusations of misleading fliers but, as we'll see, this isn't all:

No on S was able to get the endorsements of five local Democratic clubs with the sole exception of the Berkeley Democratic Club, which endorsed Measure S and created a misleading slate card, which included their endorsement of the sitting ban, Offer-Westort said.

Despite its name, the Berkeley Democratic Club (BDC) does not officially represent the Democratic Party any more than any other local Democratic club. Yet their slate cards had "Official Democratic Party Voter Guide" printed on them.

"They're advertising to be someone who they're not," Offer-Westort said. "I mean it's extremely dishonest."

That's iteresting enough but it gets worse:

The BDC supplied John Caner, the chief executive officer of the Downtown Berkeley Association and a major Yes on S supporter, with their duplicitous slate cards to give out to voters.

Caner then had Davida Coady of Options Recovery Services, also a key backer of the Yes on S campaign, recruit approximately 50 homeless people to hand out the misleading slate cards to voters right outside of Berkeley polling places on Election Day.

The No on S campaign spoke with some of the homeless people and were told they thought they were being hired by the Democratic Party to hand out information in support of the Obama campaign.

"So they're handing out these slate cards, which are not of the Democratic Party, despite what they claim, and they're pushing an anti-homeless law," Offer-Westort said. "It's one of the most disgusting kind of vicious things that I've seen in electoral politics."

Coady refused to comment when Street Spirit contacted her at Options Recovery Services, where she is medical director.

I wasn't able to independently verify that polling-place electioneers were misled in their hiring but I do very distinctly recall that my polling place had exactly one person electioneering nearby: A young fellow holding aloft a large Obama sign while handing out those fliers from the Berkeley Democratic Club.