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Updated: Homeless Man Escapes in Berkeley Fire

By Scott Morris (BCN)
Wednesday May 07, 2014 - 07:53:00 PM

Up to 100 recycling bins burned in a fire near the University Avenue offramp from Interstate Highway 80, the city's acting fire chief said.

Fire investigators are trying to determine the cause of the fire. Initial reports suggested the fire may have started from an explosion in a methamphetamine lab, Dong said, but investigators have so far found no evidence of that.

The fire was reported at 2:41 p.m. near the corner of Hearst Avenue and Second Street, according to a fire dispatcher. 

Firefighters found heavy smoke in the area and the fire was impacting a University Avenue overpass and a nearby lumberyard, Acting Fire Chief Gil Dong said. 

The fire was declared under control 18 minutes later. It burned about 100 recycling bins in the area and left the overpass scarred by smoke, Dong said. 

A homeless man was pulled through a fence by public safety officials to escape the fire and suffered only minor injuries, Dong said. He was not taken to a hospital. 

Fire investigators are trying to determine the cause of the fire. Initial reports suggested the fire may have started from an explosion in a methamphetamine lab, Dong said, but investigators have so far found no evidence of that. 

California Highway Patrol officials said the fire impacted traffic on nearby Interstate Highway 80 and the University Avenue off-ramp was shut down. It had reopened as of 5 p.m. and was undamaged by the fire. 

There were also initially reports of heavy smoke near the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. and Allston ways, but those reports were from Berkeley High School students who were seeing smoke from the fire near Hearst and Second, Dong said. 

The fire is near the area where a five-alarm fire burned a warehouse shared by three Berkeley businesses last month. Today's fire did not impact those businesses.


Berkeley City Council Votes for a Flawed Minimum Wage Ordinance (News Analysis)

By Harry Brill
Wednesday May 07, 2014 - 03:46:00 PM

In the year 2000, the Berkeley City Council voted for a living wage law that benefits workers employed by businesses contracting with the city or on Berkeley owned property. The Council on Tuesday (May 6) approved a much more modest, and unquestionably, a rather miserable minimum wage ordinance that extends to almost all workers in Berkeley. Here is all there is to it. There is no minimum wage increase this year. On January 1, 2015 the minimum wage will be $10 an hour, which will be only a dollar more than the State minimum wage law. In January 1, 2016, the minimum wage would rise to $10.75. So it will be two years before it reaches the current minimum wage in San Francisco. No further increases have been enacted for the following years even though the City's Labor Commission, whose members are appointed by Council members, submitted a proposal that would increase the minimum wage by 2020 to $15.25. It also included an annual cost of living adjustment (COLA). 

Although the pressure from the business community was enormous, it was surprising to many and devastating to the Labor Commission that its proposal was completely ignored despite spending a year of hard work drafting the measure. It was especially distressing because the Commission had worked out a detailed agreement with Council member Capitelli, who was charged with the responsibility of reaching a compromise. Despite saying that he is giving his word that the proposal would be voted on with his support on at the May 6 Council meeting, he announced at Tuesday's meeting "I renege". Those words continue to ring in our ears. 

The proposed ordinance submitted by the City Council's own Labor Commission provided additional income to cover health care if it was not provided by employers. This provision was ignored by the City Council. Also eliminated was a substantially higher hourly wage for employees in large businesses. Non-profits are exempted for one year, which include Kaiser and Sutter, whose executives make millions of dollars. 

The Labor Commission's proposal also included annual increases that would have reached by year 2020 $15.25 an hour, and it would include a COLA each year afterward. But the measure that the City Council enacted expires after the January 1, 2016 increase to $10.75. Also, non-profits and government agencies will not be required to pay the minimum wage to young employees who were hired for job training purposes. Sounds innocent enough. But experience proves how such exemptions are often abused by non-profits offering training in name only. In short, many pro-labor provisions of the Labor Commission were omitted and some pro-business features were added. 

Is there a brighter side to what happened? I hope so. But unless we can bring considerable pressure to bear, the prospects look gloomy. A ten member committee will be formed whose purpose is to fashion other minimum wage provisions. The committee will include four City Council members, three from the business community, and three representing labor interests. Since labor members are in the minority, It will be difficult to persuade the Committee to improve and expand pro-labor provisions.  

There is no doubt that the majority of the public in Berkeley support a good minimum wage ordinance. And we demonstrated to the City Council the considerable public support by involving large numbers of people in one way or another. But on progressive economic issues, most of the Council members are unsympathetic. This may be surprising to many who think the Council is quite liberal. This is true, but mainly on domestic social issues and foreign policy matters, which it has often addressed. 

So what do we do? We need to do what we can to influence the Committee and then the entire City Council. In the longer run, we need to elect more progressive Council members. And most of all, we must seriously consider taking the referendum route, which generally achieves the best results. Take for example, how eleven states have enacted a COLA in their minimum wage laws. Ten of these eleven States achieved the COLA by referendum. Only in Vermont was it enacted by the legislature. 

Despite the disappointment, I am optimistic. We need to keep in mind that winning major victories often takes a very long while. Meanwhile we have built a social and political infrastructure that is capable of mobilizing large numbers of people and organizing political campaigns. And our credibility quotient is very high. I am certain that our efforts will enjoy a happy ending.


New: Berkeley Mayor Uses Official Newsletter and Public Resources to Oppose Green Downtown Petitions; Arreguin Protests

By Becky O'Malley
Tuesday May 06, 2014 - 10:12:00 AM

Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates has used his official online newsletter, the “Bates Update”, to oppose the “Green Downtown” initiative petitions which are now being circulated in advance of the November election, and Councilmember Jesse Arreguin, who supports the measure, has cried foul.

In a letter sent yesterday to City Manager Chris Daniel, Arreguin said that the recent issue of the email publication urges voters to be wary of “a measure that would cripple the voter-approved downtown plan." He says that’s “not an impartial statement but rather a negative statement which in the context of the overall email implies that voters should not sign the petition.”

The full text of the Bates letter can be found here . It uses as a return address the mayor’s official City of Berkeley email address, mayor@cityofberkeley.info, and the street address of Berkeley City Hall.

Arreguin also told Daniel that at Bates’ State of the City speech last Wednesday the mayor openly urged people to not sign the initiative, as the Berkeleyside.com site reported : “... he urged the community not to vote for a plan he said is designed to 'stop growth downtown,'the Green Downtown Public Commons Initiative."

The councilmember said that he believes that the State of the City presentation was organized by the mayor’s office and that its costs were paid from the Mayor's Office budget.

​He alleged that “These two public statements using government resources appear to violate the state law around misuse of public resources for political purposes and are also certainly contrary to the memo you sent previously discouraging political activity using city resources.” 

Daniels’ memo, dated March 25, 2014 and addressed to the mayor, councimembers and department heads, said that “it is extremely important to refrain from activities that may give an appearance of favoring or opposing any candidate or advocating the passage or defeat of measures.” 

Charles Burress (who formerly covered Berkeley as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and has recently been hired by the city as an assistant to Mayor Bates to work on press relations) confirmed that the "Bates Update" is produced by city employees, including himself. He said he was not familiar with the Daniels memo. 

 

 

 

 

 


Press Release: Ground-Breaking Berkeley Wage Ordinance on Tonight's Agenda

From Harry Brill, Wendy Bloom, Nicky Gonzalez-Yuen
Tuesday May 06, 2014 - 10:44:00 AM

On Tuesday May 6 at 7 PM, the Berkeley City Council will entertain an ordinance that, if passed, would raise Berkeley’s minimum wage to the highest in the state. The measure comes after over a year of intensive study, debate and dialogue in the City about how best to remedy increasing levels of wage inequality that has left millions of working families in poverty. 

Council Members Laurie Capitelli and Jesse Arreguin introduced the measure at last Thursday’s special Council meeting on the minimum wage at which supporters of the wage increase won a crucial procedural vote to carry out a “first reading” at the Council’s May 6 meeting. 

The compromise measure was based on a draft submitted by the city’s Labor Commission last month. Working alongside members of the Raise The Wage East Bay community coalition, Council members Laurie Capitelli and Jessie Arreguin fashioned an ordinance that will raise Berkeley’s Minimum Wage to $13.34 in today’s dollars with a built-in cost of living adjustment. $13.34 is the rate that workers currently receive under Berkeley’s “Living Wage” ordinance that only applies to employers on city land or contracting with the city. 

The proposed ordinance would phase-in the minimum wage increase over approximately 6 years with an initial increase of 11% and then annual increases thereafter of between 7 and 7.5%. With the annual COLA, it is anticipated that Berkeley minimum wage workers would receive approximately $15.25 per hour by the year 2020. 

The initial proposal by the city’s Labor Commission had called for health benefits as well as an immediate increase to the “living wage” level for employees in large businesses. But, after listening to both worker and employer groups, adjustments were made to ease the transition to higher wages and benefits. 

Councilmember Jesse Arreguin said of the law, “With this compromise, Berkeley is able to lead by example with the highest living wage in the East Bay, giving low wage workers the raise that has been long overdue.” 

Councilmember Laurie Capitelli added: “It is my fervent hope that labor, social justice advocates and the businesses of Berkeley can come together to support this proposal. I believe that adopting this modified plan in Berkeley can serve as a model for our entire region.“ 

Nicky Gonzalez Yuen, spokesperson for Raise the Wage East Bay, said “For too long we have relied on an economy that by design keeps a large number of its workers on the bare edges of survival. This approach is a not only is morally bankrupt, it just does not work.” Instead, he said, “We need an economy where regular people can live in dignity and make enough money to spend in their communities.” 

Indeed, minimum wage increases in other cities provide evidence that significant minimum wage increases can be associated with strong economic growth. In San Jose, a successful ballot initiative campaign raised the city’s minimum wage by $2.00 starting in 2013. The results one year later: 

□ $160 million invested in the economy as low wage workers had more money to spend □ Unemployment decreased from 7.6% to 5.6% □ Business growth was up by 4.9%, from 75,000 registered businesses to 84,000 □ There was a net increase of jobs in the leisure and hospitality sector alone of 4000 positions 

The cost to consumers has been minimal. For example, research from UC Berkeley’s Labor Center has demonstrated that a 10% cost in the minimum wage translates to a .7% increase in menu prices. 

“We believe Berkeley citizens are more than happy to pay an additional 60 cents on a $20 pizza knowing that workers are making a living wage,” said Yuen. 

Numerous community and labor groups have expressed overwhelming support for increasing the minimum wage in Berkeley. Resolutions of support for the Labor Commission’s proposal we passed by the Berkeley Federation of Teachers, the Sierra Club, the Cal Berkeley and the Berkeley City College Associated Students, the National Women’s Political Caucus, The Alameda Labor Council, the Wellstone Democratic Clubs, the California Nurses Association, the Berkeley School Board, SEIU 1021 and other groups. 

Cathy Campbell, head of the Berkeley Federation of Teachers said: “The Berkeley Federation of Teachers strongly supports a living wage ordinance in Berkeley that includes a COLA and consideration of benefits.We know that every step we take to improve the economic security of Berkeley families will reap rewards for our children and youth in their education.” 

Wendy Bloom, Labor Commissioner and leader in the California Nurses Association, said “As a labor commissioner and as a nurse, I totally support providing a living wage for the health and well-being of Berkeley workers. This is long overdue.” 

At the Council meeting on May 1, over 250 supporters of the wage increase outnumbered opponents by 4 to 1. Advocates for the increase pushed back hard against the pleas by restaurateurs to provide an exemption from the wage increase for tipped workers. Advocates of the increase noted that such an exemption is strictly forbidden by state law. Further, Saru Jayaraman, head of the Restaurant Opportunity Center, an advocacy group for food servers notes that “Nationally, servers have a median wage of just about $9 an hour including tips, use food stamps at double the rate of the general restaurant workforce, and are three times as likely to live in poverty as any other worker.” 

For information about the minimum wage act and those who support it, contact: 

Nicky Gonzalez Yuen 510-912-3181 Nickygy@mac.com 

Harry Brill 510-559-3138 harry.brill@sbcglobal.net 

Wendy Bloom 510-701-0192 WEBloom@sbcglobal.net


New: Video Replay: City Council 29 April, 2014 (News Analysis)

By Thomas Lord
Monday May 05, 2014 - 10:45:00 AM

Let's get the most important thing out of the way first. A bit of levity.

Mayor Bates wanted you to know that if we had the redistricting referendum vote in June, it would have cost $300,000. The second point the Mayor wanted to get across is that the students have not failed.

We know the Mayor's talking points because he laid them out live on video and audio broadcast, during a City Council break, while standing unawares next to a live microphone. You can see it in replay on the city's web site.

You see, during that break in the council meeting the Mayor buttonholed Lance Knobel, of the Berkeleyside web site, to make sure Knobel was in possession of the mayoral message. What appears to be meant as a private conversation went out on the air and is forever preserved in the public archives.

For the record, as far as I can tell, Knobel responded simply with pleasantries. Berkeleyside itself gave no noteworthy emphasis to the Mayor's talking points. If this was some great conspiracy about a state-run press being directed by Supreme Leader Bates then it seems the conspiracy has collapsed.

It's just a funny thing that happened. See it yourself on the April 29 video, starting from about 1:36:50:

Actually I hope that Berkeleyans will watch more of the April 29th meeting. There's a lot that can be observed there. Here are time indexes and notes to highlights.

Council Covers its Brown Act Issues Before an Angry, Passionate, and Articulate Public 

Starting just a bit after minute 43 is council item 29. (If you are viewing this on the city web site, below the video there is a pull down menu that will help you skip directly to item 29.) 

At first glance the item appears quite banal: Council will vote on whether or not to "ratify" two actions taken at the March 11, 2014 meeting. The actions in question were: 

(1) To place the the redistricting referendum on the November ballot rather than the June ballot. 

(2) To authorize hire an attorney to file a lawsuit against itself, the county, three council members, and a handful of Berkeley supporters of the redistricting referendum. 

It takes a little bit of insider baseball to understand why Council would need to vote again on those already-taken actions. The issue is that neither action had appeared on the agenda for March 11th. Both actions were taken without public notice. As a result, the city had been advised of alleged Brown Act violations. The ratification votes on April 29th were meant to technically negate any Brown Act violation that may have occurred. 

This was hardly your average procedural vote. The item provided an opportunity for council members Anderson, Arreguin, and Worthington as well as many public speakers to admonish the Bates-led council majority for taking these actions rather than adopting a compromise district map. 

Getting the ball rolling, Arreguin asks "Does that mean that you concede or agree that there were Brown Act violations?" 

It continues this way among various council members until public commentary begins around minute 49. Nearly all of the speakers are articulate and passionate criticizing the redistricting path Bates' majority has chosen and the lawsuit that resulted. 

Referendum supporters charge the council majority faction and staff with collectively committing the two Brown Act and also two City Charter violations in a push for district lines gerrymandered against progressive voters. In a 30 day petition drive over the winter holidays nearly 8,000 signatures were gathered that, according to the City Charter, should have led to a suspension of the controversial district lines and, if the Bates faction would not compromise, a June vote. Instead, the City sued to impose the controversial lines this November and scheduled the vote for November. 

In the midst of the bitter public comments Berkeley photographer Harold Adler (of the Art House Gallery) adds a lighter moment rising to ask what happened to the mural behind council and whether it can be restored. When Bates becomes irritated, Adler concludes "Oh, I'm sorry. I'm out of order." 

Discussion among council members resumes shortly after 1:13 when Arreguin "thanks" the city for suing him and very clearly lays out some of the legal issues. "This is a manufactured crisis," he argues, "and an attempt to circumvent the right of citizens under the California Constitution and the City Charter to pursue a referendum." 

If you had any doubt about Bates' intense dislike for Kriss Worthington, don't miss the back and forth that starts a bit after 1:23. 

Following the bitter exchanges and the unsurprising 5-3 council vote Bates calls a five minute break "to get back on schedule". 

It's as Bates returns from that break that he buttonholes Lance Knobel.


The Public Calls for a No Drone Zone: The City Council Dithers

By Gar Smith
Thursday May 01, 2014 - 04:34:00 PM
Gar Smith
Gar Smith

It was supposed to be a night to "Ground the Drones" but, as Berkeley Peace and Justice Commissioner Bob Meola put it, "it was more like the movie, Groundhog Day" — an experience of being trapped in a maddening rerun of past events and unable to move forward. 

It was back on December 18, 2012, that the Berkeley City Council was first presented with a resolution to proclaim Berkeley a "No Drone Zone." At the time, the Berkeley Review Commission asked the City's Peace and Justice Commission (PJC) and Police Review Commission (PRC) to gather more information report back to council "for further consideration of the issues" at a Council Workshop on Drones. 

In May 2013, the two commissions hosted a crowded three-hour Town Hall meeting to gather public input on a proposed citywide ban unmanned aerial vehicles, a.k.a. drones. [See "Drones or No Drones?" Berkeley Daily Planet

Representatives from prominent civil rights and electronic privacy organizations were joined by scores of citizens who raised concerns about the documented risks drones pose to both public safety and personal privacy. 

Based on these hearings—and months of research—the PJR and PRC produced an extensive 19-page report backed up with no less than 57 detailed footnotes. 

On April 29, in advance of the City's regular Tuesday Council meeting, the Mayor Tom Bates and a half-dozen councilmembers convened a special workshop to consider the commissions' joint-report and a resulting "No Drone Zone" resolution. The commission's findings were underscored by the expert testimony of a bevy of civil rights lawyers. But, at the end of the workshop, instead of acting on the extensive information that had been gathered, the council majority elected not to act. 

Concilmember Max Anderson called the workshop "useful" but suggested "the council would be better served by a real concerted effort to bring experts together and really talk about all the dimensions of the possible use of these things and maybe we'll get a fuller, more fresh, fleshed out view of what our civic responsibilities are." 

Meola, the other commissioners, expert witnesses on hand and members of the public were stunned. Hadn't that been exactly what they had been devoting their energies to for the past three years and the past 90 minutes? 

As a dejected Meola observed, "It felt like starting over and repeating where the issues were left in December 2010." 

Drones Redux: The Workshop Assesses the Risks 

In his opening statement to the Council, Peace and Justice Commissioner Bob Meola decalred: "We believe the recommendations to adopt the resolution and proclamation declaring Berkeley to be free from drones and [to] secure these aims is well-researched, well-thought [and] addresses the situations we were tasked to examine," 

Meola informed the Council that, since the PJC's original recommendation in 2010, eight US cities—including Charlottesville, North Carolina; Syracuse, New York; North Hampton, Massachusetts; Minnesota; Evanston, Illinois; Iowa City, Iowa; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Seattle, Washington—had enacted "no drone" ordinances. 

"Now is the time for Berkeley to form its own policy on drones," Meola said. 

In addition to concerns about "the moral and political consequences of drones," Meola pointed to a number of well-documented safety issues: 

• Drones are known to go off course, disappear and crash into other objects. 

• They can be easily hacked and manipulated off course and used in ways not intended by their operators. 

• Even in the best conditions, drones pose significant risk to safety. 

• More drones in the skies over US cities would mean more drone accidents. 

• Drones are, in the words of Business Week, "the least safe class of aircraft in operation." 

Michael Sherman followed with a statement on behalf of the PRC. Dismissing a comment from a local TV station that described the drone ban as "a made-up crisis," he noted that the response to the 9/11 attacks has prompted a "massive erosion and invasion of political and civil liberties, of which drones are but one manifestation. NSA spying, the mass surveillance of the FBI, Homeland Security's involvement in the nationwide Occupation movement, CIA spying on senators, the dragnet surveillance of US citizens, are but a few examples. 

"There should be no drones before rules and regulations are in place [to safeguard] civil liberties," he concluded. Simply put, "the laws on privacy have not kept up with the technology." 

Jack Hamm, Vice Chair of the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission, reported that the DFSC had voted 6-to-1 that drones "could and should be used —in appropriate circumstances." He did not acknowledge or address the concerns raised by his fellow commissioners. Instead, he proposed that, in addition to fighting fires and chasing felons, drones could somehow be used "to protect the privacy and civil rights of citizens in Berkeley." The DFSC also insisted that the Police and Fire Departments should have sole control over the use of drones. Any other uses would need to be approved by the City Manager on a case-by-case basis. 

Nadia Kayyali, an activist with Electronic Frontier Foundation, cautioned that the DFSC's position was "not sufficiently detailed to cover the degree of concerns, the Fourth Amendment issues that arise" with the use of drones. 

The Public Speaks 

The 90-minutes workshop attracted a wide range of drone critics —including representatives from the ACLU, the Electronic Freedom Foundation, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, Environmentalists Against War and Cop Watch—followed by more than a dozen anti-drone pleas from Berkeley citizens. A small contingent of UC engineering students spoke in defense of drones. 

Tessa D'Arcangelew, an ACLU representative, called drones "a major threat to our privacy" and cited several areas of concern. 

"The first is cost. By dramatically reducing the cost to acquiring information, technology also removes the natural barrier to abuse. Tailing a suspect 24/7 through conventional means requires a huge amount of resources but drones offer extended surveillance of, not one, but possibly thousands of people. Therefore, mass surveillance can be conducted based on mere idle curiosity. 

"Drones are small, hovering platforms. They can explore hidden spaces or peer into windows. They can be equipped with high-powered night-vision cameras and "see-through" imaging [that] can monitor people through walls and inside of a building through distributed video. Drones, like a swarm of insects, can scoop up information to provide comprehensive surveillance and then video analytics can look at all the information ... to recognize and track specific people, events and objects.... We need legislation that anticipates the inevitable evolution in the technology that will happen."
Because drones pose "great civil liberty concerns," the ACLU's position is that drones "need to be highly regulated." 

"We urge you to take the important step of listening to your community and what the Peace and Justice Commission and Police Review Commission say," D'Arcangelew concluded. "They have come forward with thoughtful, well-reasoned and well-researched proposals." 

Surveillance Drones as 'Ghetto Birds' 

A woman with Alameda County Against Drones declared the organization's opposition to "corporate drones in our skies. It is a vehicle of repression against individuals, and political movements.... Helicopters now hover over low-income neighborhoods-of-color so routinely they are sometimes referred to as 'ghetto birds.' We are increasingly seeing local law enforcement use Homeland Security grants to buy new high-tech toys, which increase militarization of law enforcement without making anyone safer. The Alameda County Sheriff's Department bought an armored carrier to a political demonstration in Oakland only to show it off and intimidate political protesters." 

George Lipmann, Vice Chair of the Peace and Justice Commission, noted that "the amount of information gathered through the use of drones. . . is closer to an invasive body search or a search of your home than it is to a passive eye-in-the-sky helicopter, simply because the technology is so advanced." 

Lippman expressed concern that "drones by any agencies that are under contract with the City [could channel] data flows into the intelligence network of the city government and ... the vast and expansive intelligence network of this country, which should scare all of us." 

Jeremy Gillula, one of two drone opponents from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, began with a confession. "Prior to joining EFF," he said. "I was a doctoral student at robotics at Stanford and UC-Berkeley. My dissertation was on algorithms to guarantee drones would operate safely. As such, I think I have a unique perspective on drones.... I agree with my colleagues and many others that their unchecked use by the government can pose to civil liberties." 

However, Gillula added, he believes drones could be used for the public good, for creative and artistic purposes, offering "potential benefits [for] private citizens when properly regulated and safely regulated." In public hands, drones could even allow more effective "independent police monitoring" by citizens watchdog groups, he observed. "It's a lot harder for a police officer who doesn't want to be filmed to snatch a drone out of the sky than it is for him to snatch a cell phone camera out of someone's hands." 

Responding to the issue of private drone use by civilian hobbyists, Meola Michael Sherman of the PRC emphasized that the PRC/PJC resolution "did not take a stand on the personal use of drones. . . for the simple reason we thought that was beyond our review." 

Drones in Private Hands: Hobby or a Horror? 

The handling of the private use of drones is a sticking point. The proposed resolution also fails to specifically address the proliferation of commercial drones. The FAA, surprisingly, has taken a position on commercial drones—they were banned. The FAA actually fined a photographer $10,000 for using a drone to film a commercial on the University of Virginia campus. But on March 6, a federal judge dismissed the charge, ruling that there was, in fact, no actual law banning the use of commercial drones. That ruling has turned the airspace into a "land-rush opportunity" for the burgeoning commercial drone industry. As Politico reported, the ruling "appears to make it legal for drones to fly at the low altitude as part of a business — whether that’s delivering beer, photographing a baseball game or spraying crops." In other words, "the sky's the limit." 

Drones, Angry Birds and Elephants 

Gar Smith*, representing Environmentalists Against War, addressed the council at the invitation of the Peace and Justice Commission and offered "eight additional reasons to ban drones." The list included the latest drone crashes inside the US and a new and, as yet, little-known environmental problem—a rash of deadly drone encounters with angry birds. [See sidebar.] 

Three UC Berkeley grad students spoke in defense of drones. "Where would we be if we had prohibited cars or banned cell phones because Internet connections could potentially breach people's privacy," one student asked, "Clearly those would have been unwise and unfortunate choices." 

Another student warned that a drone ban would destroy careers and commerce. "Banning drone technology in Berkeley would constrain our research and would limit the opportunities for new research in entrepreneurial directions. It would also make UC-Berkeley less attractive to world-class researchers who work in this area and give an advantage to our competitors, including both MIT and Stanford, who have thriving UAV programs." 

The only other drone defender was an autopilot designer who praised the utility of drones for land and resource management as well as for search and rescue missions. Thanks to drones, he said, poaching of elephants in Kenya has now been cut by 95%. [Note: The Kenyan government has not yet introduced its drone program and there appears to be no support for the claim that drones have cut elephant poaching by 95% anywhere in Africa. To the contrary, since the 1980s, the poaching of Liberia's elephants has reduced their population by 95%.

The Council Responds 

Reflecting on the testimony from the UC Berkeley students, Councilmember Max Anderson remarked: "Every technology starts out with very benevolent beginnings, usually in a lab someplace with eager and rigorous scientific investigation and capturing the minds of young inventors and so forth [but], once you open the door to this without a regulatory foundation, the technology drives everything and not the ethics, not the applications of these things. 

"I fully understand graduate students working on robotics and other kinds of scientific endeavors may have visions of dot.com sugarplums dancing in their heads—or IPOs and stock splits coming their way—but there is a larger context in which all these things happen. We've seen the misuse of technology. And once the door is open and you don't have a real regulatory and oversight control on it, the technology drives the politics and the economics of it. And that's a bad situation for a society to be in, having lost control of the ethical direction that we move in." 

At the end of the public comments, the council majority appeared unmoved. No one expressed any interest in joining the growing number of US cities that have already acted to prevent drones from filling their skies—especially if these sophisticated surveillance devices were to be placed in the hands of the Police Department. 

One councilmember pointed out that a proposal to restrict the personal use of drones to certain public places and immediately above someone's personal property, had a fatal flaw. With current camera technology, a drone hovering 400 feet above an individual's backyard would be able to cast a surveillance net over an entire neighborhood. 

"I don't think anybody on the council wants a weaponized drone over the City of Berkeley," Gordon Wosniak stated. On the other hand, he said: "I see lots of uses for drones in public spaces—like detecting wildfires." Comparing drones to cell phones, Wozniak seconded the proposal that drones could be used to document "violations of proper [police] procedures or violations of [citizens'] civil liberties. We should probably encourage that, not ban it." 

Wosniak then offered a "serendipitous" example from the Franco-Prussian war during which, the besieged citizens of Paris were able to restore their mail service through the use of hot air balloons and carrier pigeons. 

Despite the risk of that local skies might soon be filled with hundreds of whining, whirring spy-drones (devices that could eventually be equipped with concussion grenades, tasers and teargas), Wosniak insisted that all new technology was to be welcomed because, we never know what wonderful new uses may result. "We don't know what the technology can do. It has potential for maybe some use we don't want but it has potential for some uses we can't imagine right now. It is like banning hot air balloons. It wouldn't make any sense." 

After listening to the public's critiques, Wozniak dismissed these concerns as moot, arguing that, since "no city department has asked for a drone, a ban is not appropriate at this point." 

The mayor agreed that the resolution was unnecessary since the BPD "has no plans to purchase drones." Therefore, the only concern would be privacy issues arising from the public's use of drones. 

"[T]he main concern I have is the civil liberties issue, the privacy issue," he continued. "I don't know how you deal with that, given the beliefs of the private sector.... I don't think you can possibly regulate effectively the use of this technology to say you can't spy on people because they have the technology to go up in the air and they probably have the technology to do this spying.... So it is kind of like sticking our head in the mud to say we can't use this technology." On the other hand, Bates reflected, "There is no way to stop it and control it once it gets up in the air." 

The mayor's reassurance about the police department's lack of interest in purchasing drones was immediately undercut by Councilmember Laurie Capitelli who countered that he could see drones having "real uses by the police and fire departments." 

"The real question is can we develop protocols and guidelines that protect the civil liberties of the citizens of Berkeley? And if we can't do that, then I don't think we can go forward," Capitelli said. 

The mayor summed up the City's response thusly: "We won't take any action. It will be incumbent on us to come back with something in the regular Council meeting." 

While the public's Input was characterized by well-documented concerns and deeply felt personal fears, the response of the city's leaders struck many as a disappointing mixture of timidity and technophilia. Instead of proceeding with the same historic initiative that once lead Berkeley to declare itself a "Nuclear Free Zone," the council decided to do nothing more than dither. The issue was too complex, it was argued. No decisions could be made without more information. Much more information. 

Meanwhile, while Berkeley's leadership debates, delays and dithers, the FAA's 2015 deadline for approving the release of tens of thousands of unregulated drone aircraft into America's urban airspace continues to draw ever closer. 

" I never wanted a two-year moratorium on drones, like some other cities now have," Meola told The Planet. "But that would be better than nothing. As long as Berkeley does nothing, the drones will fill the air and we will have to regulate them after they are here. We should regulate them now, before they are everywhere in Berkeley. Berkeley should do SOMETHING now." 

[*Full disclosure: The author is a co-founder of Environmentalists Against War and was a participant in the event reported above.] 


Corrections on the No Drone Zone Report, 5/5/14 

The Planet has received a note from Berkeley Peace and Justice Commissioner Bob Meola: 

"Thank you for the Berkeley Daily Planet article. I learned of it when Nick Mottern, [of KnowDrones.org] in New York, wrote to me that: 'I've read several articles about the drone action last week; I thought the one in the Daily Planet was the best.'" 

However…. 

There was one major point of confusion. While the Peace and Justice Commission (PJC) and the Police Review Commission (PRC) submitted a 19-page joint report to the Council, it turns out that the PJC and the PRC had written two different versions of a proposed resolution. 

"Although the PRC copied the PJC WHEREASES," Meola points out, "the RESOLVED clause is very different." 

In contrast to the PRC resolution, Meola writes, the PJC's resolution "bans all drones, including commercial ones." 

Because the speaker's backs were to the reporter when they were addressing the Council, an important statement was misattributed. It was Michael Sherman of the PRC who responded that his commission "did not take a stand on the personal use of drones." 

This statement was incorrectly assigned to Meola. In fact, Meola clarifies, the Peace and Justice Commission's resolution goes further and "bans all drones, including commercial drones." 

And, the author apologizes for misspelling Wozniak. 



Eight Additional Reasons to Ground Drones

By Gar Smith / Environmentalists Against War
Friday May 02, 2014 - 10:32:00 AM

Presentation to the City Council Workshop on Drones

First I would like to commend the Police Review Board and the Peace and Justice Commission for their comprehensive 19-page report (complete with 57 footnotes). And now for some recent news: 

 

(1) In late January, US Customs and Border Protection grounded its entire fleet of drones after an unexplained mechanical problem forced operators to crash the aircraft into the Pacific. Unfortunately, the "ocean-option" is not always available. In 2006, a Customs drone weighing 6,400 pounds crashed into a hillside near Nogales, Arizona. 

(2) The Air Line Pilots Association, the country's largest pilots' union, recently criticized the FAA's rush to introduce drones in to the community airspace. (Businessweek has identified drones as the world's "most accident-prone" class of aircraft.) 

(3) In March, a six-rotor [see video below] was used to demonstrate how its owners could zap "suspicious" persons with 80,000-volts, knocking them out "until police arrive." A pepper spray option is also in the works. 

 

(4) Working both sides of the market, the CUPID developers are building drones with electromagnetic weapons that can disable other drones, forcing them to tumble out of the sky. 

(5) Drones can invite "defensive retaliation." In Montana, Matt Rosendale, a candidate for US Congress, has released a TV spot [below] that shows him knocking a drone out of the sky with a shotgun. 

 

6) Even when drones are not camera-equipped, there can be mayhem. A YouTube compilation [below] shows an anarchist group unleashing hobby drones on golf courses, in bullfighting arenas, at skate parks, inside subway stations, and even during London's Changing of the Guards. 

 

(7) In addition to the privacy issues raised by drones equipped with cameras and other sensors, the proliferation of commercial drones would pose safety and quality-of-life concerns. Amazon is pushing for drone-delivery of packages, some of which could weigh 5 pounds or more. There would be no FAA oversight of these commercial drones crisscrossing overhead bearing book orders, hot pizzas, prescription meds, bottles of bleach and six-packs of Anchor Steam. 

Finally, here's another previously unaddressed problem: drone/bird collisions. (Note: The video shows how easily drones can spy on neighbors and entire neighborhoods — or threaten highways and rail lines. The attacking swarm of birds shows up near the 3-minute mark). 

 

YouTube is filled with scores of bird/drone confrontations. 

 

 

Sometimes the birds knock the drones from the sky. 

Sometimes the drones kill the birds. 

Sometimes the drones just spook the birds. 

 

 

 

Here are some of the comments accompanying the videos: 

I was flying my Hexa Sentinel drone and … I found out just how territorial birds can be." 

"I must have annoyed a group of birds, they teamed up & started dive bombing … from all directions…, I lost control" and crashed. 

"This crow … almost crashed my heli and killed itself. I just happened to do a flip and show[ed] my 'talons' when it attacked." 

In conclusion: No Drones. Do it for public safety, do it for personal privacy, do it for the birds. 

Other Drone Videos 

Footage from Drone Shot Down by Turkish Police in Taksim Square (June 11, 2013) 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGFtaa68NyI 

Drones Shot Down Over Texas. (May 23, 2012) 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGgEFOD8Jlo 

Pigeon Hunters Shoot Down Drone Belonging to Animal Rights Group. (November 19, 2012) 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAELplrEYu4 

Hunters Shoot down Multirotor. (December 16, 2012) 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3DmZAx0bdQ 

The 1st FAA Prosecution of a Civilian Drone UAV. (October 17, 2013) 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV0HEzQM_Uw 

When Octocopters go bad. It this the sound you want to hear in our future skies? (June 8, 2011) 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBbRA4UxBw4 

 

Drone Attack (on an unsuspecting wife)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-FjUTR1ZaI 


Press Release: Berkeley Flexible Work Time Initiative Submits Signatures

From Charles Siegel
Friday May 02, 2014 - 12:47:00 PM

This morning, the Flexible Work Time Initiative submitted 4,604 signatures to the Berkeley City Clerk, well over the 2638 valid signatures needed to get the initiative on the November ballot.

This is an advisory initiative, asking the city of Berkeley and state of California to make it easier for employees to choose part-time work and other flexible working arrangements. It advises the city and state to pass laws similar to laws that have been successful for over a decade in the Netherlands, Germany, and the United Kingdom and laws that have been passed recently in Vermont and San Francisco. For more information about these laws, see http://www.flexibleworktime.com/models.html.

Charles Siegel, initiative organizer and author of The Politics of Simple Living, said, “This sort of law is important to promote better work-family balance. But we also want to emphasize the environmental benefit of giving people the choice of downshifting economically. If people choose to work shorter hours and to consume less, then they will also pollute less.” 

Our goal is to make this sort of law part of the mainstream political discussion. We believe that this sort of law will become common, once people start talking about it and see its many benefits, which include: 

· Stronger Families: Our standard 40-hour week dates back to a time when families were expected to have stay-at-home mothers. Today, 63% of American families with children have no stay-at-home parent, and 90% of these families say that they have trouble balancing their work and family obligations. 

· More Jobs: Employers would hire more people to make up for those who cut their work hours. The Dutch say that promoting part-time work caused what they call the "Dutch employment miracle": unemployment fell from 13% in the mid-1980s to 6.7% in 1996, the lowest level in Western Europe at the time. 

· Cleaner Environment: People who choose shorter hours and simpler living will have less impact on the environment. If Americans worked as few hours as western Europeans, it would lower our energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions by 20%, according to a study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and the reduction would become larger with time. 

“Many environmentalists say that we need to live more simply to deal with the ecological problems of the coming century,” Siegel said, “but people cannot live more simply as long as they do not even have the choice of working shorter hours, choosing to have more time instead of more stuff. At first, the environmental effect will be small, but over the coming century, this sort of law can make a major contribution to controlling global warming and to improving the quality of life.” 

 


New: Campers are Evicted from the Albany Bulb

By Lydia Gans
Saturday May 03, 2014 - 09:17:00 AM

Albany has taken another step in the long and agonizing process of turning the parkland at the end of Buchanan Street over to the East Bay Regional Park district (EBRPD). This includes the Bulb, a former landfill and a source of controversy for many years. State parks do not permit overnight camping, off leash dogs and works of art, all of which were, and still are, present on the Bulb. 

More than 15 years ago homeless people started to camp there. Since then they have been planting trees, clearing out debris and cutting trails, building shelters for themselves from salvaged materials, and establishing a community. Most recently there were about 50 people living there. Some had been there for many years. 

Last June the Albany city council decided to begin the process by evicting the campers and dismantling the encampment. Not surprisingly, there were loud protests. The city brought in Operation Dignity to set up trailers to provide temporary shelter for six months and Berkeley food and Housing Project to help the campers find housing. After that the campers would be on their own. The city would do nothing more to help them. The whole thing was a crashing failure. Nobody stayed in the trailers; practically nobody got housing. The campers were not moving, there was nowhere for them to go. 

Campers filed a civil rights lawsuit asking for a restraining order to prevent Albany from evicting them until the city found them adequate shelter. Meanwhile the police put increasing pressure on them. A 10 P.M. curfew was imposed and citations issued with threats of court actions. Their appeals failed and ultimately they negotiated a settlement to take effect Friday, April 25. 

In the settlement thirty people were offered $3000 each. 28 accepted, 2 refused as a matter of principle. The 28 had to be out of the camp by Friday April 27. Their homes were immediately demolished. Furthermore, for the next 12 months they will have to stay away from the entire area, basically all of Albany city property west of the freeway, for the next twelve months. They cannot even come for a visit with friends. 

According to Albany city spokesperson Nicole Almaguer “The settlement agreement allows the City to continue assisting people, connecting them with human services and housing through the City's service provider Berkeley Food and Housing Project.” Albany has no homeless shelter and virtually no low income or affordable housing nor does it have any kind of human services. The city depends on Berkeley for medical and mental health and other social services. A few people have been housed but it is not clear how many people were left out of the settlement. 

This settlement is far from a happy conclusion. The $3000 can't go very far for people with little or no income, rents and living costs being what they are in the Bay Area. Zuber, a camper who has lived there for several years, was getting the $3000 but declared, “The only reason I'm taking the money is that they're kicking us out...I was happy here." 

He might try to buy something like a camper that he can live in if he can afford one. A long time camper, Ron, who received no settlement was moving about his camp on that last Friday, looking traumatized, not knowing where he would go. 

The Bulb has long evoked strong feelings. There are those who feel that nobody has the right to occupy public lands, or who had an unpleasant or frightening encounter with a camper's dog, or simply disapprove of the camper's life style. On the other hand many people walking through the camp admire the homes the campers have built for themselves reusing only construction debris and discarded materials that that they have salvaged. 

Over the years the campers have had support from people and organizations in the community:a weekly pizza brought from Solano Community Church, sandwiches from Food Not Bombs, volunteers providing for occasional medical needs or a ride to some needed services. Several film makers have made documentaries about the Bulb. More recently the website SHARE THE BULB was created to publicize and solicit support for the campers. 

The process of turning over this part of Albany to the park district started many years ago and will still take a long time to actually happen. The campers may have been officially evicted and 50 parking spaces at the entrance to the area taken away but the dog walkers are resisting losing their pleasant source of recreation. And the art lovers declare they are determined to protect the art works that mean so much to so many people. 


Opinion

Editorials

Berkeley's Council Majority Has It Sewed Up Again, Thanks to Tax-Paid Lawyering

By Becky O'Malley
Friday May 02, 2014 - 03:08:00 PM

As of the time of writing it appears that proponents of submitting the Berkeley City Council majority’s redistricting plan to the voters will not appeal a judge’s decision to allow the disputed council district boundaries to be used for the November city council elections, which will choose councilmembers for new four year terms. The legal sleight of hand which made this possible is much too slippery to detail here, but the real-world result is that the decision effectively nullifies citizens’ right to challenge council decisions using the method authorized in the City of Berkeley Charter. 

The main magic trick pulled out of Mayor Tom Bates’ hat is putting the referendum on the same November ballot as the election of councilmembers, instead of on the next election after the petitions qualified, which would have been June. 

If the voters had overturned the new district lines in the June elections, as polls suggested they might, one of the alternative configurations could have been used in November. Or if the council majority had followed previous practice, they would have reached a settlement with referendum proponents which made the whole dispute moot. 

Instead, Berkeley taxpayers paid some tens of thousands of dollars to Remcho, Johansen & Purcell, LLP, a top-drawer law firm which boasts on its own website that it’s “listed in Capitol Weekly's (Annual) Top 100 unelected political players.” It’s a pay-to-play society these days, and RJP’s a major player, thanks to lucrative fees from government pockets. (By the way, the Mayor seems to have met with the lawyers even before the council authorized legal action.) 

Referendum backers, on the other hand, have to pay their own legal fees, also in the tens of thousands. Doesn’t seem fair, does it? And that’s one reason why they probably won’t appeal. 

The outcome of this particular court case could have been predicted, and in fact was predicted by several observers. Lower court judges tend to defer to elected bodies in local matters, partly because they seldom understand the labyrinthine particularities of local charters. Challengers often win on appeal, but that’s costly when the electeds can dip into the public till to pay their unelected counsel. 

The most annoying thing about the whole brouhaha is that in the end it amounts to not much more than the Bates machine’s greedy desire to rid themselves of Councilmember Kriss Worthington, a thorn in the side of at least the last two mayors because he persists in asking the hard questions in a go-along-to-get-along environment. In November, if Worthington runs again, the more progressive students who live in co-ops and residence halls on the Northside will have been gerrymandered out of his district—and even though he won handily last time without a runoff, it will be harder this time. 

It might not make much difference anyhow, sad to say. Berkeley continues on its inexorable march to become Piedmont Del Norte, as little bungalows down near San Pablo are selling for a million bucks a pop and downtown is condoized for the benefit of the new-rich DINKies. Family size houses in the hills and Elmwood are being bought up as pieds-a-terre for international oligarchs, pushing out the professors who used to live there. 

It will be interesting to see who, if anyone, wants to run for the Berkeley City Council in November. The entrenched incumbent councilmembers who haven’t been gerrymandered out of their existing districts have an enormous advantage in a city which has no news source which reaches any substantial percentage or range of voters. Running against incumbents is a thankless job when name recognition counts for much more than qualifications, and where money (especially developers’ largesse) speaks louder than words. Glancing at big glossy deceptive mailers seem to be the main way most voters make up their minds these days, and that’s what bucks can buy. 


Cartoons

Odd Bodkins: Mister Dick (Cartoon)

By Dan O'Neill
Friday May 02, 2014 - 10:30:00 AM

 

Dan O'Neill

 


Public Comment

Redistricting Sonnet

By C. Denney
Thursday May 01, 2014 - 11:45:00 AM

redistricting! its mysteries are deep
a casual perspective may not see
what purpose drives a boundary's quiet creep
embracing some reluctant addressee
sadly not an "ever fixed mark"
but wild much like the ocean's changing shore
unfair or fair? they cry from dawn to dark
they cry until there's no one left to bore
the wrangling and contention never ends
the finger pointing name calling and worse
the court case pitting neighbors against friends
where both winners and losers feel the curse
redistricting! our lives are hard enough
without this stupid gerrymander stuff


May Pepper Spray Times

By Grace Underpressure
Thursday May 01, 2014 - 02:36:00 PM

Editor's Note: The latest issue of the Pepper Spray Times is now available.

You can view it absolutely free of charge by clicking here . You can print it out to give to your friends.

Grace Underpressure has been producing it for many years now, even before the Berkeley Daily Planet started distributing it, most of the time without being paid, and now we'd like you to show your appreciation by using the button below to send her money.  

This is a Very Good Deal. Go for it! 


Israel and the Failed Peace Process

By Jagjit Singh
Friday May 02, 2014 - 12:49:00 PM

Israel's sudden withdrawal from the peace talks comes as no surprise. Jewish Voice of Peace stated that this is simply a tactical move to deflect the failure of decades of aborted peace talks to address Israel’s ongoing settlement expansion and illegal occupation of Palestinian land. Sadly, the US government has rewarded successive Israeli governments with billions of dollars of our tax money, removing all incentives to reach a peaceful accord with the Palestinians.  

It is evident that the prospects of a separate Palestinian state are doomed forever – no contiguous land exists for such a state. The prior division of the two political parties, Fatah and Hamas, weakened Fatah’s ability to negotiate because its PA Chairman, Mahmoud Abbas, could not legitimately claim to represent all of the Palestinian people under occupation. 

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s own party rejects a Palestinian state in its charter (as do other Israeli parties); Israel has for decades used disproportionate force against civilians; and it willfully ignores international law and prior agreements. Recently, two Israeli refusenicks testified to the brutal treatment of Palestinians in a recent meeting at Stanford University.  

Illegal settlements have entrenched Israeli power and its illegal occupation. It is time for both Hamas and the Israeli government to reject violence and commence serious negotiations based on complete equality and respect for human rights.


Columns

ECLECTIC RANT: America is an Oligarchy, University Study Finds

By Ralph E. Stone
Thursday May 01, 2014 - 02:05:00 PM

America is no longer a democracy, according to a new joint university study. Instead, it has evolved into an oligarchy dominated by moneyed special interests.

The study, entitled "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens" by Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University, concludes that ordinary citizens have effectively lost their say over public policy. Thus, America now resembles an “economic elite domination” or a form of government in which the wealthy economic elite (less than 1 percent of the population) has near exclusive control over policy-making decisions.

“The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence,” the authors state. “Our findings indicate, the majority does not rule – at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.” 

In other words, when the economic elites want something, it tends to happen, and if they don’ t want something, it tends not to happen. In effect, the elite class wields veto power over maintaining a “status quo bias” to guarantee a long life of oligarchical control which began to emerge during the Reagan administration. 

The data under scrutiny in the study was from 1981-2002. Imagine how much worse things have gotten since the 2008 financial crisis. The study found that even when 80 percent of the population favored a particular public policy change, it was only instituted 43 percent of the time. We saw this with the bank bailout in 2008, when Americans across the board were opposed to it, but Congress passed the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) anyway. 

The study’s conclusions should not be a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. So why should we care? We should care for at least two reasons: First, there is a certain influential segment of the population which requires empirical evidence and academic studies before they will accept uncomfortable truths. Second, the study may actually prove helpful in making the case for publicly funded elections and other campaign and lobbying reforms. 

The late George Carlin was one of the first luminaries to shine a light on political elitism in America, famously stating that America’s political class is a "big club, and you ain't in it."  

 

 

 


ECLECTIC RANT:Thoughts On The Donald Sterling Matter

By Ralph E. Stone
Thursday May 01, 2014 - 02:03:00 PM

National Basketball Association Commissioner Adam Silver has banned Los Angeles Clipper’s owner Donald Sterling for life, fined him $2.5 million, and will urge the board of governors to force a sale of the team following the publication of a recorded conversation between Sterling and his ex-mistress, V. Stiviano, during which Sterling made racist comments. 

Was it legal for Stiviano to record the conversation? If the conversation was private, that is, not held in a public or quasi-public place, then in California, where I believe the recording was made, the consent of all parties to the conversation is required before it can be recorded. Whether the recordings are legal or not, once they are made public, the damage to Sterling is irrevocable. 

Stiviano is the defendant in a lawsuit brought by the Sterling family, alleging that she embezzled more than $1.8 million. Sterling claims Stiviano said she would ‘get even.’” Stiviano certainly got even. Donald Trump remarked Stiviano is the “girlfriend from hell.” 

Former basketball player Charles Barkley, now a CNN and TNT analyst, called the NBA a “black league.” The Clippers are a predominately African-American team with an African American coach. However, there is no evidence that Sterling made overt racist remarks or discriminated against team members. Elgin Baylor, the Clipper’s executive vice president and general manager from 1986 to 2008, did sue Sterling, however, in 2009 for racial discrimination. Baylor later dropped the racial discrimination claim but maintained an age discrimination claim. The jury found for Sterling in 2011. 

Sterling’s recorded comments are reprehensible and action by the NBA was certainly expected. However, it should be noted that Sterling’s racism was not a big surprise to basketball community. In 2009, Sterling agreed to a $2.8 million settlement in a case that alleged discrimination against African Americans, Latinos and others at apartment buildings he owned in Los Angeles. The-then tenants alleged Sterling’s property managers used racial slurs against them. 

Another federal lawsuit, filed in 2003 by the Housing Rights Center and 19 tenants, accused Sterling of stating his preference not to rent to Latinos because, “Hispanics smoke, drink and just hang around the building.” The lawsuit also accused him of saying “black tenants smell and attract vermin.” The allegations included Sterling refusing to rent to non-Koreans in Koreatown and African Americans in Beverly Hills. 

Though Sterling settled the case for $5 million, neither the NBA Commissioner or the basketball community took action. 

Was there a rush to judgement? There is no indication that the NBA had conducted an investigation as to the authenticity or integrity of the recordings, and Sterling was not provided an opportunity to explain or defend himself. 

The matter is probably not over. Sterling has said he will not sell the team. I see lots of litigation on the horizon.


SENIOR POWER Safe Today. Healthy Tomorrow

By Helen Rippier Wheeler, pen136@dslextreme.com
Thursday May 01, 2014 - 01:57:00 PM

Each May since 1963 communities across the country have celebrated Older Americans Month. To learn more about Older Americans Month 2014, contact the Alameda County Area Agency on Aging at 1 800 510-2020; to read more about it, subscribe to its Senior Update publication. This year’s OAM theme is “Safe Today. Healthy Tomorrow.” It focuses on injury prevention and safety. The next Senior Power column will consider falls and their ghastly concomitant, fear of falling.

Here are some surprising 2012 statistics about the 43.1 million senior citizens in the United States. They are 13.7% of the total population.  

It is estimated that 9.6 million persons age 65+ are veterans of the armed forces.  

21.3% of the labor force consists of men age 65+, significantly higher than the rate for women of this age group at 13.4%. 

45.5% of senior citizens accessed the Internet either from home or elsewhere, and 71.9% reported casting a ballot in the 2012 Presidential election. 

Half of the population of Sumter County (inland central Florida) was age 65+ in 2012. Forbes magazine ranked The Villages, which is partly in Sumter County, as the No. 1 fastest-growing small town. The Villages is an age-restricted community controlled by several Community Development Districts and dominated by golf-playing, retired Republicans. If you read The Yearling (1946), Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ memoir from which the 1983 film, Cross Creek, was adapted, you have an idea of the then-rural environment. Author Rawlings wrote many of her books while living there. 

xxxx 

Bias is a preference or an inclination, especially one that inhibits impartial judgment, an unfair act or policy stemming from prejudice. There are three kinds of bias with which senior citizens and senior advocates must cope—expectation, restrictiveness, and negative attitudes. They all involve one’s age.  

Expectation is what we believe a person at a particular age should be like. It functions at all stages, of course.  

Restrictiveness dictates certain ages when people, depending on their sex/gender as well as their age, must do some things and must not do others. For many people, early adulthood is most restrictive. For example, parents are ashamed, chagrined at best, an offspring does not marry, particularly if a woman, secure an occupation particularly if a man, and have a child or two in either case.  

Negative attitudes constitute ageism and sexism. These views are most evident toward old age. Social policy is based on an assumption that everyone reacts to the process of aging in the same way.  

xxxx
 

NEWS  

Triangle Square is the only affordable housing complex in Los Angeles that caters to LGBT seniors. "For LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender) seniors, affordable housing is scarce and often unwelcoming," by Hailey Branson-Potts (Los Angeles Times, April 20, 2014). 

The number of elderly people who are suffering from senile dementia or whose health is so bad that they cannot receive nursing care services at home has been on the increase as the graying of Japan’s population increases. The government needs to help establish a sufficient number of critical care nursing homes for the aged (tokubetsu yogo rojin homu, or tokuyo for short) in a systematic way. "A need for special nursing homes" (Japan Times editorial [Tokyo], April 21, 2014).  

Medicare is the government's health insurance program for people 65 and older and the single largest payer of health insurance coverage in the United States. Male physicians on average were paid $118,782 in Medicare reimbursements by the federal government in 2012, compared with $63,346 paid women doctors. According to NerdWallet Health, reasons for the gender gap included male doctors on average seeing 60% more Medicare patients than their female counterparts. Analysis of recently released data suggests that the gender of a medical provider could play a role in the number of services provided patients. The difference is particularly striking because Medicare pays men and women doctors the same amount for the individual services they perform on patients in the same geographic area. "Rx Gender gap! Male MDs earn way more than females in Medicare," by Dan Morgan (CNBC, April 22, 2014).  

"Teaching seniors to use the Internet reduces risk of depression," by Robin Erb (Detroit Free-Press, April 21, 2014).


ON MENTAL ILLNESS: A Voice That Must Be Heard

By Jack Bragen
Thursday May 01, 2014 - 02:13:00 PM

The voices of persons who suffer from mental illnesses are oft silenced by a number of forces. Our perspective is one that should be heard, and that usually is not. Persons with mental illness frequently have difficulties speaking up for ourselves in a number of forums including, but certainly not limited to, simple verbal communication. This is often a cause for bullying in subtle and gross forms, since without being able to protest, we are often unable to prevent being stepped on. 

When someone's mind has gone haywire, it makes it much harder if not impossible to communicate one's needs to others. Part of this is due to internal confusion concerning what is real and what isn't. Partly, psychosis or other psychiatric problems make it harder to communicate things coherently. People in the outside world, including mental health professionals, are not at fault for this. If you can't speak up about what hurts, how is anyone to know? 

On the other hand, it is clear that some mental health treatment practitioners are in the wrong business. Some treatment professionals wrongly use therapeutic techniques as weapons to silence people. Other professionals get into our internal workings by digging, apparently in the name of helping someone, and yet they end up doing more damage. Therapy should never be used this way. 

People with chronic and severe mental illness are not in the position of influencing policy makers. Thus, when legislation is considered that affects people with mental illness, those most affected, the mentally ill people, do not have a voice in the decision-making process of government. 

I am sure that the gargantuan drug companies who manufacture medications for the mentally ill have plenty of lobbyists to influence Congress. But where are the lobbyists who might speak on behalf of persons with mental illness? 

(Don't get me wrong; I believe psychiatric medications have saved my life. However, there ought to be more of a push toward safer meds that, unlike most of today's psych medications, will not cause severe physical health risks. Zyprexa, for example, has made me eighty pounds overweight, hypertensive, and borderline diabetic.) 

Persons with mental illness are generally underprivileged and do not have any economic power to speak of. Thus, when dollars are voting, persons with mental illness don't get their vote. 

Mentally ill people are thus reliant on family, usually parents, to be the ones who would pull any strings on behalf of persons with mental illness. And so, there is NAMI, National Alliance on Mental Illness. While this is helpful, it is not exactly the same as if we, ourselves had such a voice. Parents may not have a complete understanding of the suffering caused by medication side effects, for example. And they may not have the same agenda for us as we would for ourselves. 

Government, in the almighty quest to save money (so that there will be more left for building drones) has cut benefits for people with psych disabilities, including drug coverage, cash, and programs that would help us become more independent. If you are on a combination of Medicare and Medi-Cal, good luck finding a private practitioner for therapy or psychiatry. 

Because of how conditions have changed, I wouldn't dare try to go off meds because the prospect is terrifying of a relapse in which I would simply be incarcerated or, at best, hospitalized in an underfunded and cruel situation. 

Furthermore I am terrified of the future as someone who is dependent on government funded services that currently allow me to be housed, fed and medicated. Things are headed back to the Stone Age in which persons who can't make it in society are left without fundamental support. 

Thus, it is important that persons with mental illness have a voice. This column offers my voice and can potentially include yours. I can be reached at: bragenkjack@yahoo.com with your comments. Please specify whether or not I have permission to publish your comments. (Your name and identifying information will not be included unless you specify otherwise.) . 


Ps.: my self-published books, "Instructions for Dealing with Mental Illness, A Self-Help Manual," and "Jack Bragen's Essays on Mental Illness," are available for purchase on Amazon.


Arts & Events

THEATER REVIEW: O'Neill's Last Play, 'A Moon for the Misbegotten'

By Ken Bullock
Friday May 02, 2014 - 03:39:00 PM

"It's a fine end to all my scheming ... " So says Josie Hogan—conflicted temptress, appointed by her father to seduce their drunken landlord, a man who she perhaps harbors other feelings for ...

Josie's words above are humorously quoted by director Ron Nash, reflecting on the directing project this play culminates, in his program notes for Marin Onstage's production of 'A Moon for the Misbegotten,' Eugene O'Neill's last play—later than 'Long Day's Journey into Night' and featuring once again the character of James Tyrone, based on O'Neill's tormented older brother.

With a small cast and crew, Marin Onstage and Nash finish out their "trilogy" of collaboration splendidly, which began last year with a remarkable staging of Ibsen's 'A Doll House,' followed by an exciting, gamey production of Strindberg's 'Miss Julie'—and now, from the American heir to that modernist theater tradition, the intended climax of 'Moon.' 

And it is a climax, a strange intensification of the deeper-than-depth psychology that Ibsen and Strindberg helped introduce into modern theater to explore further that oldest of Western dramatic themes—the family, always with at least a hint of the incestuous about it. 

And 'Moon' reeks with that scent, as James Tyrone, played by John Nahigian with presence and sensibility, unpeels himself like an onion, exposing his life of a stage door Johnny, a dissolute heir of a successful actor-manager, to Josie, the seemingly coarse, even slutty (as her own father calls her) overgrown Irish farm girl on the Connecticut tenant farm that's part of Tyrone's inheritance. 

Invited by Josie to come spoon romantically in the moonlight on the stoop of the Hogans' glorified cabin, Jim Tyrone comes apart, finally talking about the death of his mother, in a long, wrenchingly beautiful scene, not without humor, as the libertine becomes the suffering son—and the would-be seductress, the loose woman of the neighborhood, turns into a madonna, resolving the romance on the stairs into a kind of tableau, a Pieta. 

With O'Neill, tragedy is more like inverted comedy: film director Howard Hawks once spoke of the close relation between melodrama, with obstacles to be overcome, and comedy, in which those same obstacles provide comic embarrassment. All the Hogans' scheming—to razz their nouveau-riche neighbor T, Stedman Harder (deftly played by Will Lamers, a surprised stuffed shirt in a scene of hazing by Phil and Josie Hogan that has him pinging across the stage between them like a pinball), then to damage-control Harder's threat to buy the place and evict them by tricking their hard-drinking landlord into bed and a verbal shotgun wedding with Josie—evaporates into moonlight, into the beauty of the world outside and the torments within ... 

"All of a sudden, all the fun went out of it, and I was more melancholy than ten Hamlets," intones Tyrone. 

Michael Walraven plays Hogan as the joking, lilting, Protean trickster—or would-be trickster—seeming to be stern, manipulative, narrow-eyed, but moving with suppleness through a world dominated by others. Josie—the character in every sense at the heart of the play and O'Neill's intention, the polar opposite and antidote to the long-suffering mother invoked by Tyrone—is played with great sensitivity by Walraven's own daughter, Caitlin. They work splendidly together, caviling against each other when they're not scheming in tandem. But it's in her scenes with Tyrone, slowly realizing that neither her own schemes nor the deeper hopes that underlie them can contend with the ghosts that haunt her landlord-cum-beau, in which her real power emerge, paradoxically—in a play consumed by words, Irish blarney, outcries of the soul and pure poetry—through silence, a glance, a slight movement of the lips ... 

Nash has staged the piece in the half-round, bringing the action—and the wonderful dialogue—close to the audience, half wrapped around the dooryard of the stony farm, stumps and a water pump leading up to the Expressionistic sub-American Gothic frame of a house, the facade of the Hogan's abode. 

Through masterful editing and stagecraft, this ostensibly heavy tale slips by throughout the evening like the moonlight in the title, the counterpoint to these lost and misunderstood lives. Ron Nash, Marin Onstage producer Gary Gonser, the small but valiant crew (including Frank Sarubbi, the lighting man behind the moonlight) and the splendid cast, have woven a fine tissue of O'Neill's complex of words, actions and memories. It's the last weekend for it at St. Vincents, the pioneer church and onetime Gold Rush orphanage on the Bayside of 101, just north of San Rafael. It's the ripe time to see a play like this. 

May 2nd and 3rd at 8 p. m., May 4th at 3, St. Vincents Little Theater, 1 St. Vincents Drive (opposite Marinwood; same exit), north of San Rafael. $10-$18. (415) 448-6152 or marinonstage.org


AROUND AND ABOUT THEATER: Golden Thread's The Fifth String; Inferno Theater's Diasporas Festival

By Ken Bullock
Friday May 02, 2014 - 10:06:00 AM
Carolina Duncan
Brian A. Bernhard
Carolina Duncan
Company: Christine Germain & Dancers
MoonFish Foto by Warren Jones
Company: Christine Germain & Dancers
Company: Dell'Arte Company
Anthony Arnista
Company: Dell'Arte Company

—Golden Thread, the Bay Area production company staging plays about the Middle East, presents The Fifth String, an original play for families, written and directed by founder Torange Yeghiazarian, May 2-4 and May 10 at the Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California in downtown Oakland (an extraordinary historic building from 1911, originally a Masonic Temple, in Moorish Revival style). 

Subtitled "Ziryab's Passage to Cordoba," the Fifth String tells of the arrival of Ziryab in Southern Spain, a Middle Eastern figure who, in the words of designer Mohktar Paka, "not only introduced the fashion idea of seasonal clothes, fabrics and colors to Europe, but also brought toothpaste, and deodorant!" The lively production features a fashion show, rap music and a blues song, with original music by Faraz Minooei and performances by musicians Gari Haggerty and Ali Bazyar. "A moment of shared history, both East and West," is how Yeghiazarian describes it. 

May 2-3, 7 p. m., May 4 at 3, May 10 at 7, Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California, 1433 Madison, near 14th—6 blocks from BART—(& May 15-18 at Brava! Theatre, 2781-24th Street, San Francisco. $15-$22, children under 12, free. goldenthread.org 


—"It's a way of celebrating the making of the United States," said Giulio Cesare Perrone, founder of Inferno Theatre, of the upcoming First Annual Contemporary Performance Diasporas Festival, next weekend at the South Berkeley Community Church, "Diasporas are the concrete reality of the United States! We're not just doing a festival of Jewish or Italian theater, but moving towards working together. It's experimental ... but not so much an ethnic eye looking at it as it being a contemporary way of doing theater—mostly ensemble-based, physical, performative groups ... They're from all over the world in terms of ethnicity, but all work in the Bay Area." 

Inferno Theatre is in its second year of residence at historic South Berkeley Church, an Arts & Crafts architectural gem, with a troupe right now consisting of performers and production people from "North Africa, Russia, Ukraine, French-American, Chinese-American, two other Americans—and I'm Italian," said Perrone, a native of Calabria. 

Among the pieces to be performed—many being works-in-progress in one way or another—are some by "masters of the precision of the art form—like Joan Schirle of the Dell'Arte Players (Perrone once directed the Dell'Arte School in Blue Lake, near Eureka), who will perform a piece about a Jewish woman making an art book in a concentration camp, about displacement, not only during but after the War, first trying to survive, then to get her life back—a sub-theme in Perrone's concept of the Festival ("In that sense, the Holocaust continues to happen every day")—and Jubilith Moore of Theatre of Yugen, performing a piece using Noh and Kyogen movement from Japanese classical tragedy and comedy, to contemporary music by Polly Moller—and dancer-choreographer Christine Germain, "who's young, but really knows what she's doing, has a solid relation with her art form." 

There will be a piece on women's issues—and the Five Deadly Improvisors, "who're very, very funny!" The individual pieces range from seven minutes to a half hour. 

Inferno's own piece, "Oblivion," which played in a shorter version at the French School-International School in San Francisco recently as part of a wider program there focusing on a contemporary response to the fate of Antigone, who was condemned for burying her brother after a veritable civil war in Thebes, is a response to "the revolutions, the genocides today, the frequent impossibility of finding relatives who've disappeared," said Perrone of the unusual, universal little piece he wrote, as I saw it performed by Inferno at the French School. 

Perrone—who lives in Oakland, once worked at the Grotowski Institute in Italy as well as teaching Commedia at Blue Lake, before founding Inferno Theatre here five years ago—stressed the differences of the performers, not only where they've come from and how they came here, but their styles and techniques—and their will to work together, the nucleus of theatrical performance. "Christine St-Germain married an American, immigrated here; Jubilith Moore's from America, but practices Japanese classical theater—performers like Jubilith are important to me. I want to show groups interested in and with a mastery of the art form itself, the dynamics of theater, the vibration of it—filling a space with the performer's voice, their presence. It's a high state of being—much contemporary film acting, for instance, goes away from that, has the camera and editing doing the work—and not all schools of theater, for that matter, rely on it!" 

Friday May 10th, from 8 p. m.: Dell'Arte Company (Joan Schirle, Laura Munoz, Ruxy Cantir), Robert Fields, Theatre of Yugen (Jubilith Moore, Polly Moller), Christine Germain & Slater Penney, Inferno Theatre. 

Saturday, May 9, from 8 p. m.: Dell'Arte Company, Elia Zaturanski, Five Deadly Improvisors, Melusina Gomez, Inferno Theatre. 

Sunday, May 11th, from 6 p. m.: Faun Fables, Jamie Greenblatt, Michael McCamish, Eli Zaturanski, Carolina Duncan & Carlos Munoz Kampff, Melusina Gomez, Inferno Theatre, Robert Fields, Maria Luisa Forenza. 

South Berkeley Community Church, 1802 Fairview (entrance on Ellis), two blocks from Adeline, near Ashby BART. $10-$35 (Festival pass: $35-$50) infernotheatre.org/shows/ & Inferno Theatre on Facebook.