A suspect in the fatal shooting of a Stockton man in South Berkeley Tuesday night was also arrested in connection with another shooting in the same place last year, Berkeley police confirmed today.
Anthony Durant, 24, of Berkeley, was arrested early this morning on suspicion of the fatal shooting of Christian Sheppard, 24. Sheppard was found suffering multiple gunshot wounds near the corner of Russell and California streets when police responded to reports of gunshots there at 8:32 p.m.
Sheppard was taken to a hospital but died a short time later.
Investigators scoured the shooting scene for clues and early this morning arrested Durant about a block away in the 1600 block of Julia Street, police said.
Investigators believe Sheppard and Durant knew each other but have not released any information about a possible motive.
Durant was arrested last year in connection with a June 11, 2014, shooting at the same corner that sent two young men to the hospital.
Investigators served search warrants in Berkeley and Oakland on June 26, 2014, while investigating that shooting and arrested another suspect, Donzale Majia, 22, of Oakland.
Investigators continued searching for Durant, posting alerts that he was wanted and considered armed and dangerous. He turned himself in to police early the next morning.
Police and prosecutors this morning did not immediately provide information on the result of that case.
Tuesday night's homicide remains under investigation. Anyone with information about the case has been asked to contact Berkeley police homicide investigators at (510) 981-5741 or Bay Area Crime Stoppers at (800) 222-TIPS.
A Stockton man shot in South Berkeley on Tuesday night has died from his injuries and police arrested a suspect in his death this morning, Berkeley police said.
Police responded at 8:32 p.m. to multiple 911 calls reporting gunshots near the intersection of Russell and California streets. Officers found Stockton resident Christian Sheppard, 24, suffering gunshot wounds there.
Sheppard was taken to a hospital but died a short time later.
Investigators scoured the shooting scene for clues and early this morning arrested a suspect in the crime about a block away in the 1600 block of Julia Street, police said.
The suspect was identified as 24-year-old Anthony Durant of Berkeley. Investigators believe Sheppard and Durant knew each other but have not released any information about a possible motive.
Police are continuing to investigate the shooting. Anyone with information about the case has been asked to contact Berkeley police homicide investigators at (510) 981-5741 or Bay Area Crime Stoppers at (800) 222-TIPS.
Calculations by applicant for 2211 Harold Way project do not accurately reflect their potential profits from their proposed development.
Under Berkeley’s Measure R, developers were given an “entitlement”, not a right, to build three tall buildings in Berkeley up to 180 feet in height if they provided significant “community benefits.” On September 30th, Berkeley’s Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) approved a claimed $14.5 million “community benefits” package as a condition of approving construction of the 302 unit, 18-story Harold Way Project, located at the site of the current Shattuck Cinemas. The level of “community benefits” was based on the developer’s claim, never verified by ZAB, that total profits from the building would only be $26 million. Instead, based on more accurate numbers, profits are more likely to be in the range of $89 to $145 million, over three to five times the amount relied on by ZAB. These profits occur AFTER the costs of both keeping the Shattuck Cinemas and ensuring that the project uses union labor are included, two of ZAB’s major claimed community benefits. These are “walk-away” profits, one-time profits received by the developer selling the property soon after it is completed, not profits collected over the life of the building.
To download a revised Pro Forma which accurately analyses this project, click here.
ZAB’s decision will be appealed to the Berkeley City Council for reconsideration in the next two months. The amount of community benefits could likely be increased by at least $10 to $20 million to promote affordable housing, encourage arts and culture, and assist in the relocation of the Habitot Children’s Museum being displaced by the project, while still guaranteeing ample profits (in the 5% range) that the developer believes necessary to construct the project. One hopes the Berkeley City Council will set the correct level.
The profit levels of $89 to $145 million are based on a revised economic analysis of the Project, using more accurate numbers provided to the Berkeley City Council itself in 2015, as well as the developer’s own numbers from other filings. Differences in the level of profit include significantly overstated land costs, omission of revenue sources, and overstated costs.
Incorporating these more accurate and realistic numbers it is concluded that;
Profits would be at least $89 million, over three times the amount of profit estimated by the developer;
This profit could be realized immediately upon the sale of the building once constructed or soon after occupancy;
Profits from the Harold Way Project could be as high as $145 million if the Project were to charge rent at the high-end of the Berkeley market as it is likely to do;
For an initial total investment of $173 million (most of which will be financed with short-term construction financing), the developer could sell Harold Way for somewhere between $263 million to $318 million, representing a return on investment of 50% to 83% within the next 2 to 3 years.
In exchange for this level of profits, ZAB’s current proposal does not seem adequate as;
All of these profits remain available to the developer even AFTER including the total cost of using union labor and keeping the existing theaters on-site; These two items comprise $9 of the $13.5 million of ZAB’s claimed “community benefits”
The developer benefits from the use of union labor due to their superior skill-set, improved labor relations and a better built, higher-quality building; and
Retention of the theaters is primarily mitigating a harm, rather than providing a new benefit to Berkeley.
Although the Berkeley City Council requested ZAB to “independently evaluate” the level of community benefits (even for projects already in the planning pipeline) to ensure “a reasonable relationship to the value generated by the project” ZAB never conducted this analysis. Throughout the process, numerous parties requested it to do so.
There was a remarkable sunset on Wednesday night. As I came up Martin Luther King towards Old City Hall, looking southeast, I could see the hills behind the Berkeley Community Theater bathed in an amazing rose-colored light—in fact everything to the east of MLK was tinted pink. Sunsets for those of us who live in Lower Berkeley are not the splendid views of the Golden Gate which our Upper Berkeley friends enjoy, but instead the subtler eastern reflection of the sun going down in the west.
Inside, from the former council chambers where the Zoning Adjustment Board meets, you could still see the candy-colored hills through the deteriorating Beaux Arts casement windows. The Hancock/Bates regime has allowed the formerly grand building to fall apart, like most of Berkeley’s civic patrimony, but it’s still a beautiful wreck, and the gorgeous view of the sunset only made its decay more poignant.
Someone in the audience waiting for the meeting to start suggested that people should look out the windows. Someone, maybe me, said, see what we’re going to lose if the board votes the wrong way tonight. Someone else, developers’ shill Mark Rhoades in fact, said No We’re Not.
It’s true that from the Maudelle Shirek Old City Hall building second floor windows you can’t exactly see the area behind the Berkeley High campus which will be dominated by the 18 story monstrosity Rhoades has been flacking, but his project is the camel’s nose in the tent. It’s only a matter of time, if the trend continues, until it will no longer be possible for Berkeley flatlanders to lift up their eyes unto the hills as they’ve always done. But not to worry—by the time that happens Mark Rhoades and Joseph Penner will have departed the scene with their thirty pieces of silver.
A small posse of iggerunt young’uns were recruited to attend this meeting by an online call to arms on the list-serv of SF BARF, the appropriately acronymed San Francisco Bay Area Renters Federation.
On Wednesday, September 16, one emunahhauser wrote a pitch for attendees there: “Looking for a satisfying brawl? To be part of history? To make or break the difference whether housing lives or dies?”
(Someone at the meeting last night suggested during public comment that Emunah Hauser might be related to new ZAB Commissioner Savlan Hauser, District 8 Councilmember Lori Droste’s appointee. No response from the Commissioner to this question.)
The BARFers did show up looking for a brawl, about ten of them, carrying mass-printed signs on yellow paper with cutesy slogans. Some of them even spoke, earnestly recounting pathetic tales of woe. They seemed to be under the direction of Downtown Berkeley Association honcho John Caner—when he showed up (late) someone gave him a sign of his very own to wave and offered him their seat.
This courtesy might be because he was one of the few token old folks taking part in the Yellow Sign Brigade. The other two that I recognized were former councilmember Polly Armstrong, who now fronts for the Chamber of Commerce, and Suzy Medak, boss of the well-heeled Berkeley Repertory Theater. (Memo to self: cancel those family plans to take in the musical now at BRT.)
So how did the brawl turn out, anyway? Well, if I were a betting woman I might have made a few bucks on the outcome, if I’d been able to find a sucker to take my bet.
As predicted in this space and elsewhere, the vote was 6-3, with the commissioners who were appointed by the Bates majority, all historic or current participants in the development industry, voting in lockstep. Also as predicted, they abdicated the Zoning Board’s statutory responsibility under the Downtown Plan to calculate the basis for what would constitute an appropriate amount of profit-sharing by developers of properties upzoned like this one, based on how much the extra floors upped the applicant’s total take. They capitulated to the city council’s cut-rate “recommendation” (which was justified by exactly nothing in the way of data) to give Hill Street Realty, Joseph Penner and Mark Rhoades huge windfall profits, estimated by economist James Hendry as between $89-$145 million.
One interesting development is that Commissioner George Williams, who used to be a high-level employee of the San Francisco Planning Department and knows his stuff, insisted that the permit approval contain conditions which would insure that 10 movie screens be provided in the new building to replace those which would be demolished by the project. ZAB members declined to credit the full cost of rebuilding the theaters as an in-kind contribution to the “significant community benefits” tally, saying that it should be considered mainly mitigation of damage done. This analysis was supported by a consulting economist’s requested appraisal of the applicant’s proferred benefits package which down-valued both the project labor agreement and the proposal to rebuild the theaters.
The majority of commissioners did accede in the main to the City Council’s “request” that SCBs be capped at a deeply discounted $13.50 million, though their final package added up to a million more at $14.5 million. Williams’ winning motion allocated the total as a $5 million credit for a project labor agreement, a $4 million credit for rebuilding the theater complex and $1 million for “arts and culture”, which seemed to be code for helping on-site non-profit Habitot to relocate.
Another $4.5 million was added for the city’s affordable housing fund, but the developer will be exempted from including any affordable units in what’s touted as a luxury building, despite cogent arguments from Stefan Elgstrand (substituting for Sophie Hahn) for the merits of including onsite low-cost housing units in every new development.
After the Williams plan was proposed and a more stringent one from the minority commissioners was voted down, Chair Pinto called a brief recess. Mark Rhoades asked for permission to meet with his “team” in the private offices behind the dais. When the group reconvened, he and his associate seemed angry, and a testy exchange ensued.
You can tell when Mark Rhoades is mad because his ears turn red. He stood up before the commission, ears red, and said that he thought the plan, which did after all grant him all the permits he sought, was “arbitrary”. This provoked commissioners, especially Denise Pinkston and Prakash Pinto, to show some serious annoyance in turn.
Pinkston reminded Rhoades that their decision was based on their econ consultant’s report, after all, and Prakash said that he’s built way more projects than Rhoades ever has, so there! Arbitrary? Not on your tintype!
(If you believe the Hill Street Realty website, by the way, neither the corporation nor its principal Joseph Penner has ever built a project of any kind, though they seem to have procured all the permits for a number of projects before flipping them to someone else to build. Many commenters at the meeting predicted that this will happen again—one opponent was handing out a list of flipped Penner projects.)
What the aggrieved commissioners seemed to be saying to Rhoades at this point, with some justification, was: We just gave you a whole damn farm, and now you say you want a pony too?
Rhoades threatened to appeal the decision to the City Council—of course, this might all have been playacting from a previously concocted script. It’s possible Rhoades has planned from the git-go to take his project up to the next level, where he seems to think he has even more juice than he did with the ZAB. Perhaps he hopes his good buddies on the council will re-write the deal for him.
Why do I think that? Well, this call to arms appeared on the SF BARF list-serv on Tuesday, even before the Wednesday meeting:
“For the policy wonks, a message from the project team for the Residences at Berkeley Plaza: “I wanted to alert people to the fact that we really need your support at the Berkeley ZAB tomorrow night because the Residences at Berkeley Plaza project is in jeopardy. The staff report for Wednesday is unfortunate, it severely under values the proposed community benefits package. In particular two tragically flawed financial characterizations of the two most important project benefits. “First, in all four of the City staff’s report on the community benefit options, the union PLA is completely undervalued. The project is going to cost $125MM to build and the PLA is going to cost an additional $12MM to $20MM dollar to achieve. One option has the PLA valued at only $6MM, two options have it valued at $1.8MM, and the last option has it valued at a meager $675K. An outrage to be sure in a community that SAYS it values union labor. Apparently not.
“The second and as troublesome issue is the undervaluation of the movie theaters. Our estimates (which are derived from actual data, the staff’s are NOT) has the theaters worth approximately $15MM to $17MM. In one of the staff’s options to ZAB they value the theaters at $6.3MM. The next option has it at $4.1MM, the next option at $2.7MM, and in the final option the theaters are valued at $0. That’s right, $0.
“This is an attempt to extort even more money out of the project. The project is already agreeing to pay an in-lieu affordable housing fee of $6,040,000. The project won’t work under any of the options except MAYBE Option 1, which is more than $1MM over our estimates and proposal. That option still undervalues the community benefits, which is going to make it very difficult for the City to attract more of these buildings.
“So a vote tomorrow night is still critical – up or down. If the ZAB decides it wants to go with anything beyond Option 1 we don’t have a project and may look for the ZAB to deny it so we can move on to Council. That would be a shame but might be unavoidable if we can't ’pack the chambers tomorrow night to tell the ZAB to recognize the value of the project’s Community Benefits package and overall design after almost three years of good faith effort on our part to deliver what the community has said they wanted…twice.
“Remember the project itself is worth approving even without the additional benefits – 302 units of sustainable, transit-oriented housing units. LEED Gold. Transit passes. Car share. Very high quality design. Public plaza. More than $6MM to the Housing Trust Fund. The development project has shown good faith, now it’s time for the Berkeley ZAB to hold up their end of the voters desires and approve the project after almost three years and 35 public hearings.”
It sounds kind of like it might be a Bre’r Rabbit maneuver:
“Oh please Bre’r Fox, don’t throw me into that briar patch,” says the Rabbit.
(Bre’r Fox throws Bre’r Rabbit into the briar patch anyway.)
“Born and bred in a briar patch”, sings out the Rabbit, hopping gleefully away.
Perhaps Rhoades wanted to be able to claim it was a bad deal so he could appeal and get a better one…
So now what’s going to happen? Project opponents have also expressed their desire to appeal the ZAB decision, the LPC approval for structural alteration of the landmarked hotel and the Environment Impact Report.
Will Rhoades and company file their own appeal, asking the City Council to give them that pony after all? At the beginning of Wednesday’s meeting, when the applicant was given the usual extra time to make his case, he began by saying that he needed to get this finished before the first of the year or…or what??
I didn’t quite catch what he was saying, but I do know that real estate loan approvals usually have time limits. It’s apparent that someone in the city government, whether it’s mayor, councilmembers or staff, has desperately wanted this project to be sped up in the last few months, even though announced deadlines have repeatedly been missed.
Council watchers are targeting December 15 as the date they'll make the deal final.
Might this be because the project financing will evaporate after January 1? Or will interest rates for borrowed money go up by then?
As we say all too often in this space, time will tell, even if Mr. Penner and Mr. Rhoades won’t.
And about those sunsets over the hills? Enjoy them now--it's later than you think.
If you’d like to see a few more reports of this confusing meeting, check out:
Berkeley Councilmember Laurie Capitelli and/or his firm profited from a real estate commission on the city's loan of half a million dollars to new Police Chief Michael Meehan.
Zelda Bronstein covered the story in the Planet first in 2012:
I am a long-time Berkeley resident and card-carrying library user.
My latest (2013) book publication is not in the BPL collection, although my 1997 Women & Aging; a Guide to The Literature has apparently survived. I have served on the Berkeley Housing Authority and as a North Berkeley Senior Center volunteer, and I was a founding member of Save Section 8.
My qualifications to impose the following counsel include: BA Barnard College (Foreign Areas Studies: Latin America, Spanish); MA University of Chicago (human development); MS and doctorate, Columbia University (library information science and media). Prior to receipt of the doctorate, I was employed in library management. Following receipt of the doctorate, I began to teach at graduate and undergraduate levels. I was a presidential appointee to the American Library Association's Committees on the Status of Women and on International Relations; I was elected to Council (the ALA governing body) by membership. You may not consider this an expression of interest in serving on a BPL Director of Library Services S&S Committee.
I disagree with a previous Library Director who declared that a library board is no place for a professional librarian! On a Director search and screen committee-yes! Community representation is essential in both cases. I have made 3 attempts to ascertain the "official" version of who/what constituted the [Jeff Scott] Search & Screen Committee, if indeed there was one, leading to the cover-up.
An immediate independent investigation is essential to the restoration of public trust. Complete transparency into what happened, when and who were/was responsible. The investigation needs to be completely independent of current management, who worked with the former director. Public desk librarians must be returned to their book selection, budgeting, and weeding duties and responsibilities; 34 specialist librarian voices reflect better Berkeley's diversity than managers plus 4 helpers! The Moratorium on Weeding cannot be lifted until the 34 librarians are returned to their selection and weeding tasks, which are components of affirmatively managed collection development and maintenance. An affirmatively managed library director search & screen process is essential to the restoration of public trust, i.e. to restoration of a Berkeley PUBLIC library. The Library Board, which is appointive, should have at least one professional librarian on it.
This Library Director recruitment process should be managed not by a City functionary, but by an independent person with relevant training and experience. (I am not referring here to an expensive outside consultant.) A jargon-free position description should be widely circulated in a variety of media, soliciting applications, nominations and self-nominations.
It should include:
a reasonable closing date
some level of salary information (e.g. a range)
minimum education and professional experience qualifications, to include at least one graduate degree in library-information science-management from an accredited 'library school'
desirable qualifications
commitment to nondiscriminatory affirmative action
Many speakers at the last Zoning Adjustment Board hearing regarding the towering apartment building at 2211 Harold Way, most of them young and prodded to attend by the Bay Area Renters Federation (BARF), spoke in favor of building the proposed luxury apartments that they themselves could not afford. One young woman was very frank: if the rich live in the new building, then she will be able to afford the less expensive apartments they abandon. This is another way of stating the trickle-down theory of housing, the idea that any housing will increase the supply, and if the supply increases, prices will fall. That theory failed the Econ 101 test when I was in planning school in 1969, and it still fails it.
Those who provide a commodity will do so only if the price is high enough make it worthwhile to provide an additional amount. George Bernard Shaw explained this nicely nearly 90 years ago in his “Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism,” using coal mining for his example. But housing is the same. The price of housing will always rise to the “marginal cost” of building the next unit rather than stay at the “average cost” of all housing. Let’s say that today in Berkeley the cost of building a new apartment building, including the land, materials and labor, architects and engineers, permits and inspections, construction loans, long-term financing, and reasonable profit for the developer, will result in a rent for a one bedroom apartment of $2,500 a month. Now consider the owner who already has an apartment building that was built five years ago and for which the costs would have resulted in a rent of $1,500 a month. Will this owner keep his rent at $1,500? No, it will be raised to $2,500 because that’s what his old project is now worth. The value of the building and the land its on have gone up, and rents will go up based on these new values as long as there are renters to pay.
If all the housing units in a market area were owned by one giant corporation, then in theory the rents could be based on an average between the old housing built for less and the new. In a sense this is what a big owner like the University of California does. While it charges more for its newest and nicest dorms because they’re newer and nicer, it also averages costs so all dorms remain more-or-less affordable. But in the open market there are many owners, and all operate under the same economic principles: the cost of housing will go up to the cost of building the next unit.
Of course the apartments at 2211 Harold Way will rent for more than those, say, in the new building at University and Martin Luther King (over the Trader Joe’s). But that’s because they will have gangbuster views of the bay or hills instead of an 8-foot wide light well. The views, of course, are a gift from the city to allow such a tall building, but the developers, I’m sure, think they are deserved for all the trouble to get city approval.
Perhaps this explanation is not convincing, but a little web searching brings up some reinforcements. This is from “The Source,” a commercial real estate blog by the National Association of Realtors.
…[Our] research divides workers into three socio-economic classes — highly skilled knowledge, professional, and creative workers, and less skilled and lower paid blue-collar and service workers — and takes into the account the wages and housing costs borne by each.
Our main takeaway: On close inspection, talent clustering provides little in the way of trickle-down benefits. Its benefits flow disproportionately to more highly-skilled knowledge, professional and creative workers whose higher wages and salaries are more than sufficient to cover more expensive housing in these locations. While less-skilled service and blue-collar workers also earn more money in knowledge-based metros, those gains disappear once their higher housing costs are taken into account…
The trickle-down effect disappears once the higher housing costs borne by less skilled workers are taken into account. The benefits of highly skilled regions accrue mainly to knowledge, professional, and creative workers. While less-skilled blue-collar and service workers also earn more in these places, more expensive housing costs eat away those gains. There is a rising tide of sorts, but it only lifts about the most advantaged third of the workforce, leaving the other 66 percent much further behind.
Yet another reinforcement, this one from the California Planning & Development Report by William Fulton, considered by many to be the guru of California planning.
… [S]upply and demand get intertwined in peculiar ways, as is happening up and down California today – and, indeed, as is occurring in desirable locations across the country and throughout the world.
The traditional economist’s assessment of the current situation would be pretty straightforward: Housing prices are going up because demand is outstripping supply. So if you create more supply, prices will come down (or at least stabilize) and the market will approach equilibrium...
This, in turns, leads to the typical argument of the building industry…which is that overregulation in California – especially the California Environmental Quality Act – has suppressed supply and screwed up the market.
All of this is true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t explain why people who are concerned about the high price of housing are against the construction of more housing. That’s happening because the interplay between supply and demand is more nuanced than traditional economics would suggest, and because the interplay between the market and politics isn’t always rational.
The problem is that under some market conditions, more supply doesn’t lead to market equilibrium because it actually creates its own demand. You can see this wherever the world’s uber-rich decide to buy houses – New York, London, or, … Santa Barbara… This throws the supply-demand equation out of whack; if you build more houses, the result might just be more uber-rich folks from out of town showing up to buy them, and that doesn’t help ordinary folks. In fact, for a while the debate in Santa Barbara centered on encouraging construction of certain types of housing that uber-rich wouldn’t want to buy, such as small rental apartments on busy streets. But given the revival of urban living, I wouldn’t even bet on that strategy working. Look at what’s happened to Charleston, which has rapidly become a second-home haven for people from New York.
And once the uber-rich throw the supply-demand equation out of whack, there’s a ripple effect...
Something similar is going on today in San Francisco and Santa Monica. These places are hotbeds for cool jobs. The folks taking the cool jobs may not be uber-rich, but they have tons more money than everybody else, and so they drive prices out of sight. Build more market-rate housing, and you’ll just accelerate the cycle – more smart kids will show up wanting to work for tech start-ups, and that means you’ll have more tech start-ups, and pretty soon demand will rise faster than supply – in large part because you increased the supply. To a local community activist, it feels like a no-win.
The solution isn’t easy – or, at least, it isn’t simple. Yes, you need to build way more new housing than we’ve done in California. But that housing needs to come in more types, forms, and even tenures than we have seen in a long time. Yes, some needs to be market-rate – but we need to recognize that this will be snapped up by highly successful folks and won’t necessarily bring about market equilibrium.
The full article is worth reading and can be found at http://www.cp-dr.com/node/3765. It doesn’t make a case for opposing 2211 Harold Way or other new development in Berkeley, but it does make clear that willy-nilly support of this project merely because it provides upscale housing makes no sense. It won’t help BARF to achieve what its members purport to want, which is more affordable housing. At the risk of being facetious, BARF’s argument is a bit like saying the luxury buses Google provides for its employees living in San Francisco can be justified because they reduce crowding on Muni and BART trains that the rest of us must use.
Christopher Adams is a retired architect and city planner.
Almost 14 years have elapsed since President George W. Bush opened the United States camp at Guantánamo Bay in a hasty response to the September 11 attacks. Most of those interned had nothing to do with terrorism but were swept up on orders from the White House to demonstrate that progress was being made in the nebulous ‘war on terror’. The writ of Habeas Corpus and the Geneva Conventions were suspended and our government engaged in hideous acts of brutality (renditions, torture, assassinations, . .). No effort was made to exercise due process. Afghan tribal disputes were settled by persuading American military that their enemies were Taliban fighters in exchange for bundles of money.
Many prisoners were force fed when they went on hunger strike, with the help of health professions who oversaw much of the abuse, but chose to remain silent. There is little doubt that the prison has radicalized many of the Afghan people and has severely tarnished our country’s claim to be a nation of laws, squandering more than $5.2 billion.
President Obama made closing Guantánamo a major commitment during his first term in office but his promise remains unfilled.
It is time to discharge the 53 men cleared for release and bring charges on the remaining 52 who have never been charged with a recognizable crime failing which they should be released immediately. Finally, the prison should be closed and Guantánamo Bay returned to its rightful owner - Cuba.
It’s puzzling why the Indian media has devoted so much newsprint to Narendra Modi’s visit. Largely forgotten is the uncomfortable truth that successive US governments barred him from visiting the United States over his role in anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat while he was chief minister. Modi has never apologized or even explained his reasons why he allowed 3 days to elapse while the killings took place.
More than 100 academics in the U.S. wrote a letter protesting Modi’s visit to Silicon Valley, warning tech giants of the dangers of doing business with a government that has "demonstrated its disregard for human rights and civil liberties, as well as the autonomy of educational and cultural institutions."
Modi certainly seems to have a penchant for fancy clothes and foreign travel and seems averse to getting tied down to the minutiae of governing. Everywhere he goes he gives himself an air of royalty. Meanwhile, his cabinet has been running roughshod against civil libertarians and other dissenters, especially Teesta Setalvad. A climate of fear has gripped human rights activists who are determined to hold Modi’s feet to the fire and hold him accountable for the pogrom in Gujarat in 2002.
Soring food prices have imposed tremendous hardship on the poor, but has largely been ignored by Modi’s BJP. The pro-business agenda is very much in display in Modi’s Digital India idea. Facebook has created a web portal called Internet.org, linked up with a major Indian multinational, Reliance. Modi claims that this would allow the poor access to the Internet.
The problem is that both Facebook and Reliance have made deregulation and development a major theme of their partnership which would surely be the death knell of net-neutrality and fast internet access only affordable to the rich. Privacy advocates have also sounded alarm bells on the potential for surveillance and government overreach.
If Modi is serious about alleviating poverty he should turn his attention the poorest of the poor, the Untouchables or Dalits. There are 200 million Dalits, in India. According to the country’s National Crime Records Bureau, four Dalit women are raped, two Dalits are murdered, and two Dalit homes are torched every day. Dalits are the modern slaves of India who suffer enormous indignities in their daily lives. Deeply entreated Brahminized religious institutions have perpetuated this system of injustice. Not a single religious or modern day politician has voiced concern for their welfare and demanded an end to Dalit discrimination.
I urge readers to see the documentary film #Dalitwomenfight., which will be showing in various places around the Bay Area in the next couple of weeks. Asha Kowtal, the general secretary of the All India Dalit Women’s Rights Forum, was highly critical of the rise in power of Hindu extremists groups following the election of Modi. She expressed concern for the erosion of free speech, freedom of assembly, and organizing and demanding justice – the hallmark of a functioning democracy. Perhaps, it’s time to usher ‘a ‘Dalits lives matter’ to bring much needed public awareness on this hideous system of caste apartheid
Another school shooting frays our communal nerves. While tragedies involving violence grab the public’s attention, there is a quieter story that plays out in homes across the nation. Frequently, and out of public view, families watch as loved ones deteriorate before their eyes, spiraling deeper into delusion and dysfunction. As they lurch from crisis to crisis, family and friends are helpless to intervene; frustrated by a system that gives them few options.
It doesn’t have to be this way.There is a bill working its way through the Congress right now that tackles some of the major problems of our current system. HR2646 is the brainchild of Senator Tim Murphy. Spurred by his own professional experience as a mental health professional, he has listened to families and experts, gathered bipartisan support, and come up with a set of measures that address the most pressing disparities and deficits in our current public health system, if only politics doesn’t get in the way. Why should those suffering from disorders of the brain receive a different standard of care than those whose illness affects any other organ in the body?
I have an adult child who was struck by severe mental illness at nineteen, on the cusp of a full and successful life. At the same time a niece was diagnosed with a severe physical illness in her teens. My son was diagnosed with a neurobiological illness, bipolar disorder; my niece had lymphoma. Our families experiences could not have been more different. My niece got the finest medical care available for as long as it was needed. I was told “your son is not sick enough yet, you have to wait until he hits bottom.” Can you imagine telling the parents of someone with cancer “you have to wait until the cancer is stage 5 before we can intervene?”
When he got ‘bad enough’, and we were able to have him hospitalized, he was usually held for 24 or 72 hours, then released, because he was ‘presenting well’ after being dosed with powerful medications. as if he were being treated for the flu, rather than a serious chronic illness. Would a cancer patient be given one dose of chemotherapy, and told she appears better now, or her insurance company only authorized one day of treatment, or there just is not enough chemotherapy to go around for her to receive more than one day’s worth? If her medical condition became so severe that she could no longer think clearly or lapsed into a coma, would treatment be withheld because she was not able to tell doctors that she was choosing to be treated? Instead of trained medical professionals would it be recommended that her treatment and medications be directed solely by cancer survivors, because they had ‘lived experience’ of cancer? If an emergency arose and her parents had to call an ambulance to take her to the hospital, would the doctors and staff at the hospital refuse to tell her parents if she had arrived, whether she was being held; would the doctor refuse to discuss her treatment or history with them? Would they shoot her up with powerful drugs then release her hours later, suffering with side effects, onto the street with a bus pass, failing to notify her family who would have picked her up? We have experienced all this and more.
Both my son and my niece were extraordinarily intelligent and creative individuals. My niece was cured of her illness, finished her education at top universities, and is now an oncologist, happily married with a newborn. My son became so ill because treatment was denied that he had to drop out junior year of the top university he was attending, and now sleeps on the heating grates outside of the buildings where he once attended classes.
Wednesday, October 17 , is National Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Day. is Ask your Representatives to co-sponsor this bill. Ask them not to play politics with the lives of our most vulnerable citizens. It’s time to take mental illness out of the shadows and treat it with the same level of commitment and compassion as we do other medical disorders.
In another odd twist to the Syrian war, Vladimir Putin has decided to lend his support to a much weaker Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. It is a pity the United States, Britain and France misjudged the Syrian dictator’s staying power and failed to support a Russian proposal to end the fighting in 2012 after peace talks started between the regime and opposition.
Since then, tens of thousands more have been killed, and ISIL militants have seized huge swaths of Syria. President Obama reluctantly admitted that only Syria and the Kurds were committed to fighting ISIS. Thus far, US efforts in Iraq have netted 5 Iraqi trained fighters at a cost of many millions of dollars and scores of US trainers.
Recent events have demonstrated that western interventions for regime changes in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, . . , have been unmitigated disasters creating failed states and a dramatic rise in terrorism. Better to have a thuggish ruler over a stable state than try to remove a brutal ruler and create a dangerous vacuum (examples, Iraq, Libya). Foreign interventions have invariably united foes against the invader (examples, Iraq and Afghanistan). Putin seems to have forgotten the Soviet’s misadventure in Afghanistan. He might well be on the slippery slope of another quagmire in Syria.
Obama would be wise to seize Putin’s initiative and not lay down any preconditions, resisting the slogan, ‘Assad has to go’. The focus should be to bring an end to the fighting and neutralize the demonic ISIS.
How will our next president activate the economy without raising taxes on rich people and big corporations? Do we think that by levying a flat tax on the lowest income groups, upper class citizens, including the new president, will find peace? How on earth can such heartless people pray to God for his mercy? How are they able to sleep at night? I hear would-be presidential candidates declaring that cutting Obamacare will give a big lift to the economy.
This kind of discrimination against people who are not well off happens in many places. The top officials in an organization get the best of everything but when it comes to looking after others higher ranking people remark that there is no money left to share.
Please explain how low income and poor people will fit in presidential candidates' plans of bringing prosperity to the nation? Even the poor belong to the nation. How will their economic status be improved? Presidential candidates must think of helping all citizens, not only those in the highest income bracket.
Let all get an equal shot at the best of education, healthcare, and living standards. Our investment in those people who cannot afford an education will add a dynamic and advanced workforce to the US economy
It means a lot to me that in September of 1983, we were on the brink of global destruction from a narrowly avoided nuclear war.
I turned the ripe old age of nineteen that month, and I was heavily involved in two groups that were actively campaigning to try to prevent worldwide atomic annihilation. I attended the Unitarian Universalist Church in Walnut Creek, and I gave hundreds of my earnings to the Mount Diablo Peace Center, money I made in my job as a janitor in a number of supermarkets in the Bay Area. There was a man named Andy Baltso who would write me nice notes when I made my donations. I was also involved in a Ken Keyes Study Group. I read a book by Keyes called, "The Hundredth Monkey" that scared the daylights out of me. I sang songs and visited with other people who wanted peace, in the home of Dale Swinney on Oakland, and I meditated at work while my body was on autopilot polishing the supermarket floors.
I was noncompliant with taking my psychiatric medication, and I almost succeeded at bucking mental illness. However, events did not allow me to make that escape.
On September 12 and 13, in 1983, I almost lost my life when one of the stores where I worked had an armed robbery. I was alone with two gunmen overnight while they awaited the arrival of the morning supermarket employees who would be able to open the safe for them. At the time, armed robbers probably were less murderous than they are now. They let me live, perhaps because they had some amount of empathy.
It was after the armed robbery that my deterioration into a second episode of being psychotic accelerated, even while my body continued to do my job on autopilot.
On television, on the ABC Network, a show aired that was a depiction of nuclear war. It was called "The Day After," and it starred Jason Robards. It was the last straw. I didn't go back to work, I deteriorated very fast, and I was 5150'd in January of 1984.
Since that time, I have been continuously in treatment except for a couple of instances of noncompliance in which I didn't last nearly as long before getting acutely ill and being re-hospitalized.
However, it is nice to think that at the time I wasn't too far off base, and also that on some level I may have contributed, just a little bit, to the survival of the human species.
This is not a report on the Sept. 16 Forum organized by the Berkeley Neighborhoods Council (BNC) in South Berkeley, but a critique (unfortunately partial) of its content. No apology for length would be sincere. If it is too long for you, skip to the end. .
As intended, the forum was informative. It went back over material previous BNC forums had offered, though in some greater detail. But that is not what was needed. It gave voice to local activists addressing the impending problems. But it offered nothing in terms of political perspective. Nor did it break through any of the political mythologies that hold back much of the current activism. It provided no avenues for people to become active. In a word, it was politically useless, at a time when events demand more than that.
On one panel, there were three activists from the South Berkeley neighborhood. They all spoke about the overriding need for affordable housing, so that a resident population won’t become a mass of refugees fleeing a war imposed by developers and landlords. On another panel, there were three activists who had been struggling for years against the industrial pollution of West Berkeley by Pacific Steel Castings and Berkeley Asphalt plant. They all spoke cleaarly about how, in response to their facts, figures, and case studies of pollution’s ill effects, the city had done nothing. It hadn’t even enforced its own use permits.
A panel on Telegraph Ave. briefly became a battelground itself over the plight of two zones, north and south of Dwight, and the ability of people to avoid speaking to each other by shifting at will from one zone to the other. South of Dwight, two enormous projected buildings promise to destroy the appeal of the area by steamrolling residences and commercial attractions, and clogging streets and sidewalks. The fourth panel was the BNC panel, which presented detailed statistics on the present state of development and new construction, a history of the struggle for affordable housing (including the fate of rent control, and the erstwhile efforts of the city to use the abused Housing Trust Fund). A city councilmember on that panel said he wants to go to Sacramento to demand amendment of the Costa-Hawkins bill that undermines urban rent control efforts.
Three solutions were offered for the extreme problems described. One was to sign up with the BNC, so that its arguments at council and commission against development would speak with a larger voice. Another was to read the BNC on-line newsletter, so that when people went to council or commissions, they would have more facts and a more persuasive argument. And the third was to support the councilmember on proposals he intended to make in council for the benefit of the neighborhoods.
The neighborhoods, especially in South Berkeley, have already been demanding something more tangible, something which breaks with that tradition. What the neighborhoods face is gentrification, a major shift to high income residency, with concomitant dislocation of the present residents. Protest movements have been addressing city council and the commissions to stop this process (at present, focused on the Harold Way building). Neighborhood surveys and conferences have clearly said, “we want a moratorium on market rate housing, until the need for affordable housing is met.” And council has clearly indicated that it is not going to do that.
The traditional solution is the following (quotes and paraphrases):
“The city needs to look for different ways of providing affordability.”
We need to do more homework to find out what other cities are doing.
We have to pressure the Planning Dept. to take sesriously the Adeline surveys.
The legal process for stopping development is to go to the commissions and the ZAB, or community meetings with the developers.
But these traditional solutions ignore ignores the fact that the city is the problem, which more residents and neighborhoods are recognizing. That recognition appeared in this form:
The people will go through the motions, and the city will do what it wants anyway.
Council has failed.
The city council vote is always 6-3 in favor of the developers.
Sometimes the city gives money to relocate.
Can we at least get a guarantee that former long-time residents will get first shot at the new housing.
There is anger and despair in this present moment. And a tremendous fear of dislocation. To suggest that what people must do is go to the city council begging for surcease is to miss the tenor of this moment. With all the ideas extant about neighborhood organizing, alternate political structures, and other perspectives that position people in a “first person plural” sense, to marginalize those perspectives behind information and city council hearings is to simply render the problems described as objects in the distance. The communities represented in the panels were there as museum pieces, to speak about their past and their problems as if on display. No analysis of the organization problems they face was on the agenda.
Ironically, the forum opened with very strong statements by community activists, one of whom said very clearly that gentrification was a war against the people. Others added that though it was imposed by developers and landlords, the city was accessory. Yet in the wake of information and story, the forum only ended with the sentiment, “we must make stronger statements to the city.” In the face of a "war," that is to miss something. It ignores those who bear witness that the city isn’t listening. When West Berkeley residents set up their own air quality monitors to test for chemicals, and took data to the city, they got nothing. When experts in four different areas took facts about faults in the Harold Way building to commissions, the plans still got a rubber stamp. Where was the first person collective sense of political power that could deal with this?
If the people are beset by a war not of their own choosing, then what is needed is an army with which to defend themselves – a euphemism for strong neighborhood organization. And that is what is now forming. There have been three huge meetings in the Adeline area organized by a city front group (Idea Center), and one large meeting organized by Friends of Adeline which the city almost coopted. It is in those meetings that the moratorium has been demanded. There was a large forum last Spring in West Berkeley in which these same problems were broached, and at which various neighborhood organizations were introduced to each other, as embryonic modes of local resistance. It was six months earlier that the BNC had organized a forum downtown in which the same informations had been given as in this one. Where was any recognition that a real build-up was going on?
Were all these meetings, in which hundreds of people participated, to be thought of simply as niceties? If a first person sense of the political exists in the neighborhoods, then they are the ones who should have been running the forum. Insofar as that was not on the forum’s agenda, it was politically irrelevant.
There were actual organizers on some of the panels. There were actual organizers in the audience. But nothing was said in the entire forum about how neighborhoods should or could organize themselves. The presence of Friends of Adeline, with its vision statement, was the closest it came.
Instead, there was that old “we’ll do it for you” paradigm. But that is a bankrupt notion, because those who will do it “for the people” will only be representatives speaking to representatives. They will only see their way to using city structures and rules and hearings with their endless commentaries, which are now clearly recognized as useless. “We’ll do it for you” also implies, “if we can get enough people signed up, we’ll be able to speak in a strong enough voice to make them listen.” That partakes in the same bankruptcy of representation.
The city has sidetracks, "studies," future hearings, more hearings, meetings organized to get “input from the people,” etc. As sidetracks, they revolve around one idea, which is the center of the city’s thinking. "You the people come to us and we will fix it." That is not a step toward anything being fixed. It is a step toward “you the people come to us and we will listen.” And neither is believable because we know what the next step is. It goes, “you the people come to us and speak, and that will be your participation in the process.” And that step only leads to the final step, which goes, “if only fewer people came to the council meetings and the commission hearings, we could get some work done.” There you have the disconnect.
We saw this disconnect in operation in hearings on the police brutality during the Dec. 6, 2014, demonstrations. Hundreds came and spoke. When the police report whitewashed what it had done, it offered no accountability for the injuries done to people. And it even refused to admit that its militarist strategies had been pre-planned (cf. FOI requests), though its entire report belied that denial.
What kinds of excuses are we going to get when the construction on the Harold Way building gets started, and technicians take a look at the weaknesses in the foundation of the hotel, “suddenly discovering” some uncontrollable water drainage so that the theaters can’t be built. There will be reports and hearings and more disconnect.
It is now time that the term “democratize” be given concreteness. We need to democratize the planning procedures; we need to democratize the permitting procedures; we need to democratize the police; we need to democratize neighborhood governance.
What does the term “democratize” refer to? It refers to the process whereby those people who will be affected by a policy not only get to vote yes or no on the policy, but to define the issues the policy addresses, how it addresses them, and how it is articulated in terms satisfactory to those who will be affected by the policy.
To "democratize" means organization. It means people taking control of their own destiny – including forums about that destiny. There was no attempt at organization for this forum. No leaflets in the neighborhood, no calls for people to put forth who they want to be on the panel. Ms. Ritchie actually sat there and instructed the BNC as to the desirability of handing out flyers.
What are the organizational forms that will give a neighborhood the power to establish a moratorium on market rate housing in Berkeley before it is too late? Where do we start, if the Idea Center has coopated resident "participation" in planning the “Adeline corridor,” and now that the city has given the Planning Dept. directions to start making plans for the “San Pablo corridor”?
Anything short of neighborhood dialogue on how people can organize themselves (not simply express opinions and desires) to take democratic control over their collective destiny is missing the point. In that sense, the forum was politically useless.
We need local organization in the neighborhoods for the following:
Neighborhood assemblies that can send people to sit at the planning tables for individual projects.
Neighborhood asemblies that have the right to say what can get demolished in their neighborhood, and what cannot because they need it.
Neighborhood assemblies that can demand that before the city acceeds to ABAG requirements, they be taken to the neighborhoods that will be affected by them, with the power to reject what is detrimental to the neighborhood.
A network of assemblies that can demand the following:
That the hospitals not move out of town (as they are planning to do).
That the money to be used to beautify the city for the proposed new high income residents in the proposed new developments be spent instead on local public transportation, on a network of small buses run on a non-profit basis that take people all over town.
That the university be charged for the city services that it uses, so that the money can be spent on affordable housing.
That there be a moratorium on market rate housing, so that Berkeley does not fall into the same kind of crisis we see happening across the bay in SF (massive evictions) – which means housing for the homeless, and a barrier against housing speculation that is warping real estate values.
If laws need to be changed, then laws will have to be changed. The will to change them will only come about after there is a movement that is engaged in activities and taking measures that need the support of changes in the laws. Changing the laws in the interest of social justice does not and will not come first.
In Berkeley, a town where developers are kings and poor people are being gentrified out of existence, genteel sleaze is the order of the day, as we noted recently.
The latest example to raise a stink in the normally complacent mainsteam media comes from the Oakland Tribune, under the headline “Berkeley council member profited from police chief’s public home loan.”
The U.S. finds itself between a rock and a hard place in the Syrian civil war. Russia has deployed warplanes and tanks to a base near Latakia, Syria in support of President Bashar al-Assad's Syrian government. In the meantime, Iran ground troops have arrived in Syria. These troops would be backed by Assad's Lebanese Hezbollah allies and by Shi'ite militia fighters from Iraq. Russia would provide air support for these ground troops.
Russia, Iran, Iraq, and Syria have also agreed to share intelligence about the Islamic State. Russia has already started bombing raids within Syria, supposedly targeting Islamic State forces. But if Russia supports Assad, who is to say U.S.-supported rebel forces won't also be targeted.
Let's look back at the four-year Syrian conflict. Pro-democracy protests began in Syria in March 2011 in Derea after the arrest and torture of some teenagers who painted revolutionary slogans on a school wall. The protests triggered nationwide protests demanding President Assad's resignation. By July 2011, demonstrators were taking to the streets all across Syria. Those opposing the government eventually began to take up arms, first to defend themselves and later to expel Syrian security forces from their local areas. The Syrian conflict became a civil war as rebel brigades were formed to battle government forces for control of cities, towns and the countryside. Fighting reached the capital of Damascus and Aleppo, the country's largest city, in 2012. At least by 2012, the CIA was running a covert program to arm and train the Syrian rebels. Officially, the U.S. was only supplying non-lethal aid. The conflict is now more than just a battle between those for or against President Assad but has spread beyond Syria into Iraq.
The rise of the jihadist groups, including the Islamic State, has added a further dimension. After its capture of Palmyra, the Islamic State now controls over half the Syrian landmass and large parts of Iraq.
More than 220,000 Syrians have died in the conflict and more than 11 million have been forced from their homes. Almost 4 million people have fled Syria, most of them women and children, adding to the refugee crisis now facing other countries. According to the United Nations, an estimated 12.2 million are in need of humanitarian assistance inside Syria, including 5.6 million children.
Russia has made it clear to the U.S. that it supports Assad while the U.S. wants Assad out. The U.S. may end up looking on from the sidelines unless the U.S. agrees that as between Assad and the Islamic State, Assad is the lesser evil, and then actively joins the Russian coalition or tacitly steps aside. By joining the Russian coalition or stepping aside, the U.S. will be abandoning the U.S. trained and armed rebel forces opposing Assad.
Given the huge humanitarian crisis, perhaps it is time for the U.S. to exercise Realpolitik or politics based on practical and material factors rather than on theoretical or ethical objectives. Ending the humanitarian situation by defeating the Islamic State may be the most humane goal at this point even if it means keeping Assad in power.
Schizophrenia and bipolar are both illnesses that can worsen the tendency toward anger. This is more so for someone who refuses treatment. However, despite being medicated, a schizophrenic or bipolar person can have a worse than average temper, because of how our brains are built. Therefore, in order to exist among people, we must work to remain as peaceful as we can and we must learn to avoid getting verbally abusive.
In my last psychotic episode, which took place in 1996 and was a result of stopping medication, authorities described me as "hostile and nonviolent."
When I was being 5150'd, I nonviolently resisted police. In that instance, police did not overreact, and knew that I needed to be hospitalized rather than jailed. This is partly because communication had occurred with my girlfriend (who would later be my wife), with the individual at the church (probably the rector), police, and with my mom. This meant that there was some understanding that I was mentally ill, among police and with the head of the church to which I had walked (about an eight-mile, or ten-mile walk, from downtown Martinez to Pleasant Hill).
Later, when I met with the judge in a "Riese Hearing," (a legal process which was for the purpose of getting me to take medication) the judge said he would tell the two officers not to press charges for resisting arrest if I would agree to take antipsychotic medication.
Aside from the main subject of this article, the above is an ideal example of how things are supposed to work when dealing with a mentally ill person who is acutely ill. I was fortunate. The above is also an example of how I had learned to have nonviolent responses ingrained to the extent that they continued to work for me even when I had become acutely ill.
Once in treatment, rethinking responses to situations that feel extremely stressful or provocative is a very powerful technique and can prevent other people from abandoning their attempts to deal with us. If we feel that we are going to get mad at someone, we are better off walking away and getting some space.
Changing the emotions behind this is a bit more difficult, but can be accomplished given enough practice. Medication also helps with reducing anger levels. Depakote is a mood stabilizer that can alleviate a lot of anger, and so can Zyprexa, an antipsychotic with some mood stabilizer properties.
At some point, friends and family became tired of my tendency to get hostile, and I was forced to employ a lot more tact, or I would reap some consequences. In recent years I have given more thought to the feelings of other people, and have put my discomfort into a perspective, in which a situation is no longer just about how I feel--other people have feelings as well.
A simple method that helps in alleviating anger is to try to see things from the perspective of the other person. Another method is to imagine you are an observer who sees you from an outside perspective, and who assesses how you come across. A third method is to gain an understanding of oneself in order to discern why a particular situation or event is upsetting.
Angry responses to events aren't universal--things that make one person angry do not make another person feel that way. While our culture expects us to be upset by certain things, our culture is not intrinsically correct. Just because certain things make 99.9 percent of people angry, it doesn’t mean that you have to feel that way.
On the other hand, if you have been a recipient of abuse, you probably should not try not to be angry about it. Forgiving a perpetrator is iffy territory and can sometimes be bad for you. Do not forgive until ready. Readiness to let go of anger perhaps means that you have dealt with your feelings concerning an event, and you have become ready, on a psychological level, to rise above it.
Abuses happen in the mental health treatment system, sometimes perpetrated by supposed mental health professionals. This is one of many reasons why sometimes it is hard to get mentally ill people to accept treatment. To some mentally ill persons, accepting treatment feels like accepting supposed help from an abuser. It is necessary for a mentally ill person to understand we are accepting treatment to help ourselves and not in order to please any other person.
Toning down anger is generally a favor that we are doing for ourselves. If we get angry and speak in an angry tone too often, we risk losing people's cooperation. Since we live in a society filled with people, we need to deal peacefully with some of them.
As an opener to the season celebrating Nicholas McGegan's 30th year as music director of the Philharmonia Baroque, the orchestra will perform yet another of the remarkable musical rarities they're famous for, something more and more prevalent in their programming: Alessandro Scarlatti's lavish serenata, La Gloria di Primavera, composed in a month and performed an unusual three times in 1716 to celebrate the birth of Duke Leopold, heir to the Hapsburg throne in Vienna, whose father, Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, had only recently acquired the Kingdom of Naples as part of the settlement of the War of the Spanish Succession. But Leopold died a few months later, and the work fell into obscurity, performed only in London five years later as a commercial venture by the composer's brother, Francesco.
Never edited in its own time, never heard in the Western Hemisphere, The Glory of Spring will be performed by Philharmonia with McGegan conducting and singers Suzanne Ograjenseki, soprano; Diana Moore, mezzo-soprano; Clint van der Linde, counter-tenor; Nicholas Phan, tenor; Douglas Williams, baritone and members of the Philharmonia Chorale.
Berkeley performances are at 7:30 this Sunday, October 4, and at 8 the following Saturday, October 10, with shows at 7:30 Wednesday, October 7 at Bing Audiorium, Stanford, and 8 p. m. Friday, October 9 at Herbst Theatre, San Francisco. Berkeley tickets are $25-$105. philharmonia.org
John Korty, the only American filmmaker to have won major awards in dramatic, documentary and animation work, will tell how it all started, fifty years ago, with scissors, paper and yarn. His first film, ANY MANY AND MAN, was about new math for children. Next, BREAKING THE HABIT was a satire on giving up smoking. And after doing many number and letter spots for CTW, he invented THELMA THUMB, a miniature super-woman.
Finally, in the 1980’s, he took on making a full-length feature with his cut-out technique, now call Lamage. Five years later, TWICE UPON A TIME was finished—-but for various reasons, never got a full release. Now, after 30 years on the shelf, it is coming out as a DVD from the Warner Archive.
Clips from all of his animation will be shown with explanations about the development of production-line techniques. Rather than the cuddly curves of traditional animation, more straight and angular lines are employed in modern designs. His dialogue tracks are often improvised in the manner of his friends, John and Faith Hubley.
In the late 1960s, Francis Coppola and George Lucas visited Korty’s small studio in Stinson Beach and were instantly inspired to make the move north. The three of them occupied the first offices of American Zoetrope.
DVDs of Twice Upon a Time (executive produced by George Lucas) will be available at the theater..
Sponsored by the International Animation Association San Francisco, Berkeley City College and the Bay Area Antioch College Alumni Chapter--FREE! Berkeley City College, 2050 Center Street, one block from the BERKELEY BART station, 7-9 pm on Friday, October 9.
From the celebrated madeleine crumbled into a cup of tea that brings back lost memories of childhood, to the narrator--only once referred to as Marcel, sign of his identity with the author--in a rage crushing Baron Charlus' hat as Charlus replaces it calmly with one of many more ... and tells Marcel how much he cares for him, to the idea coming to Marcel of the book he wants to write--the same book the reader is plowing though ...
Playwright James Keller performs a very unusual solo act--unusual because it focuses on taking the audience through Proust's seven volume masterwork, rather than avowing the performer's own dedication to and identity with the book--of a tour through 'In Search of Lost Time' (Remembrance of Things Past) by Marcel Proust, framed by an arragement of flowers that recall "Proust's cathedral of hawthorn"--and his asthma--and the screen for the 180 slides that accompany Keller's delivery, setting the elaborate stories he gives us a gloss on, not like gossip, but like a farsimpler version of what Proust does, as his own Virgil, guiding himself and the reader through the inferno, the purgatory and paradise of his memories, his discovery that they must be involuntary, taken off guard when least expected, so they may briefly live again ...
Keller tells us the tale both quickly and leisurely at once. He briefly acts out an occasional exclamation or gesture of one of the figures of the tangled story, like the way Jean-Louis Barrault quickly pantomimed the animals as he recited the Fables of La Fontaine here, alone onstage, on tour so many years ago. And at the end exclaims, "Merci, Marcel!" ... and then reclines for a moment before turning to the audience for a conversation.
What's the purpose of such a recitation, of neatly avoiding the self-reference of the usual solo show? One result: the friend I went with, an ardent reader of Jane Austen, is now determined to wade into Proust's intimate epic--intimate, but which also shadows the death of the glittering Belle Epoch and the rise, from the ashes of World War, of what will be the remarkable--and ersatz--era that followed, the Roaring Twenties.
Emmy-Award-winning director Stanley Nelson has made a great film. For anyone who lived in the East Bay during the Sixties, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution will revive some powerful memories. Running nearly two hours, this documentary serves up a seething, brim-full cauldron of radical history, memorable images and gritty interviews with radicals, reporters, supporters, cops, informers and more than a dozen Panther survivors. Among those interviewed: Bobby Seale, Kathleen Cleaver, Jamal Joseph and Emory Douglas (the cartoonist who became the Party's Minister of Culture and created the indelible caricature of a pig outfitted in a police uniform, surrounded by buzzing flies).
The film excels at capturing the eloquence and conviction of many Black Panther Party (BPP) leaders but doesn't bite its tongue either—as when a fellow Panther describes Eldridge Cleaver as "a Rottweiler… fuck-yeah, crazy!"
While the freedom struggle in the rural South largely focused on voting rights, the Panthers dealt with the daily issues of survival and human rights in the crowded cities of the North. Nelson reminds us that the organization's full name was The Black Panther Party for Self Defense.
Nelson says he decided to make this film to communicate "the core driver of the movement" which was that the BPP "emerged out of a love for their people and a devotion to empowering them."
With their urban black-is-beautiful bearing—proud Afros, dark glasses, berets and black leather jackets—the Panthers we're instantly appealing to the youth. The appearance of "Constitutionally armed" Panthers patrolling city streets—and, on one memorable occasion, the corridors of power in the State Capitol Building—made headlines around the world and reaped a harvest of new Panther Party offices in cities across America.
The mainstream press would have us remember the Panthers in gun-bearing "battlefield mode" but how often have you seen photos of Panthers dressed in aprons serving breakfasts to hungry children—and impoverished, abandoned war veterans. The BPP's pioneering food program that eventually grew to provide 27,000 free meals a day to 18 different communities. Also contrary to the "mainstreaming" of the BPP, Nelson underscores the role of Panther women. By the end of the 60s, a majority of the Panthers were women. While some Panthers retained ingrained sexist habits, the BPP openly promoted the power of women and created a "womanist" ideology that fused feminism with black nationalism.
The Panther's "Ten-Point Program" was, quite literally, revolutionary [See the complete Program at the end of this review]. The Panthers weren't just about guns, cop-watching and bravado. They walked the "Ten-Point" talk, providing the community with free food, free health clinics and free schools that provided missing lessons in African-American history.
The FBI Plots to Destroy the Panthers
Nelson does a good job of covering the government's secret war against the Panthers. One of the main tools was the FBI's COINTELPRO operation, which was designed to "disrupt and neutralize" radical organizations. The FBI saw the Panthers as a revolutionary vanguard and sent forged letters to sow suspicion among Panthers and their spouses. Fearing their families might be at risk, many Panther men were forced to abandon their families and congregate in safe houses known as "Panther pads."
The FBI's COINTELPRO memos also spoke of the need to "prevent the rise of a Black Messiah." That warning was soon followed by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. This blatant murder—both public and brutal—put an end to hopes for a peaceful revolution in the US.
"We wanted nonviolence," one Panther reminisces in the film, but after King's murder, it became clear that Malcolm's path now seemed inevitable—"by any means necessary."
Soon thereafter, Eldridge Cleaver was wounded by police bullets in an Oakland shoot-out and Little Bobby Hutton was shot to death—shirtless, with his hands raised above his head. Hutton's murder was the first overt Panther killing by police.
Marlon Brando appeared at in Oakland Rally pledging to bring the Panthers' story back to his community. (A revived memory: Later that day, I ran into Brando and Cleaver in a former "bail hut" at 2229 MLK that had became a movement hub for Berkeley radicals. It was a harrowing time. Bobby Seale had also recently "disappeared.")
In November 1968, Cleaver fled to Algeria where he started an international wing of the BPP. Malcolm X had talked about internationalizing the Black struggle in America but it was the Panthers who actually did it. The Vietnam war made black expatriates heroes around the world.
The FBI Assassination of Fred Hampton
Meanwhile, a charismatic Panther named Fred Hampton was making news in Chicago, inflaming crowds with chants like: "You can jailed the revolutionary but you can't jail the revolution." Hampton was a crowd magnet. At the age of 17 he headed to the NAACP's youth wing. He specialized in working with other marginal groups—including Puerto Rican street gangs and the Young Patriots, an organization of poor whites from the south. The specter of the political unification of the country's poor across racial lines, really spooked FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover who saw these burgeoning alliances as a major menace to the status quo.
Hoover insisted the solution to all of America's problems boiled down to "law and order." When a reporter asked Hoover whether justice was also important, Hoover replied: "Justice is incidental to law and order."
Hampton's rising prominence placed him squarely in the crosshairs of Hoover's COINTELPRO operation. The FBI decided to take a "proactive approach" to the Panthers, using local police to stage raids on Panthers offices across the country and they began with the Chicago police force, which agreed to stage a "night raid" on Fred Hampton's home.
In 1969, an FBI informant infiltrated the Chicago Panthers and became Hampton's bodyguard. The informant worked with the cops to set up the home invasion that lead to Hampton's brutal assassination. A massive cover-up followed. The film offers previously unseen interviews with the survivors of the deadly assault that murdered Hampton and a young Panther named Mark Clark. The testimony of the survivors is gripping and shocking—as are the photos of the murder scene.
The police attacked with submachine guns and falsely claimed the Panthers had fired upon them without provocation. In fact, only one Panther bullet was fired. It came from the barrel of a gun held by Clark, who was shot in the heart while answering the door. The gun discharged a single bullet—after it fell from Clark's hand and hit the floor.
The FBI gave their informant a $300 bonus.
Nelson includes a photograph that captured three Chicago cops laughing over the body of the slain Panther leader.
Dennis Cunningham, a lawyer for Hampton's family subsequently called the incident "a police death squad directed by the FBI." A lawsuit was filed and the FBI and Chicago police were eventually ordered to pay a $1.8 million in a wrongful death settlement. (In 2010, Cunningham won a $4.4 million settlement in a lawsuit charging the FBI with civil rights violations following the Oakland car-bombing assault on environmental activist Judi Bari.)
Another injustice soon followed in New York City where the "Panther 21" were accused of a terrorist bomb plot. They faced a collective 360 years in prison and were hit with $100,000 fines designed to keep them in prison. After more than two years in jail, the Panthers had to endure an eight-month trial at the end of which the jury deliberated for just three hours and acquitted all of the Panthers, handing out 156 not-guilty verdicts.
Bobby Seale was arrested for giving a speech at a rally outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He was accused of fomenting in a riot, even though he left Chicago hours before the "police-riot" that precipitated the violent confrontation.
In court, Seale was famously tied-up and muzzled when he attempted to represent himself. Even constrained by a straitjacket, Seale continued to protest loudly despite the gag that bound his mouth. Outside the courtroom a growing crowd of supporters picked up the chant, "Stop the trial!"
Across the nation, Panthers begin sandbagging their offices, fearing more police assaults. They were not long in coming. Four days later, the country's first SWAT team quietly surrounded the Panther office in Los Angeles in the dead of night and suddenly opened fire. (The LAPD had been ordered to execute an "armed warrant" and were advised that "surprise was the element to be used.") The Panthers returned fire and held their ground for hours as the sun rose and local news crews gathered.
In another of Nelson's memorable sets of interviews, survivors of that extended shootout recount what it was like to be in the middle of that LAPD assault. Although they were nicked and riddled with bullet wounds, they still managed to survive.
In 1970, Huey Newton was freed from jail. Nelson's film records how Huey began to steer the Panthers away from armed confrontation and more towards community service. The shift angered Cleaver and others who believed the Panthers should continue to pursue the goal of "overthrowing the fascist, racist US government." The BPP split into two factions.
Weakened further by factionalism, the Panthers became pray for the FBI's campaign of fake letters designed to create a culture of paranoia and to widen the rift between Panther factions.
(This is a matter of some personal anguish. While I was on the staff of the Berkeley Barb, we received—and printed—one of these fake documents. Unaware of the secret COINTELPRO operation, we believed the letter to be a legitimate political complaint from a Panther insider directed against other Panthers. To our lasting regret, the antagonistic letter had the desired effect: shots were fired and people got hurt.)
Nelson's archival acumen also resurrects a rare video clip involving a TV host who attempted to smooth over the differences between the factions by inviting Huey and Eldridge (on the phone from Algeria) to iron over their differences, live and on-air. But in the last minute of the broadcast, Cleaver lashed out at Newton's new direction. By some miracle, Nelson managed to locate an audiotaped recording of the enraged phone call that Newton made minutes after the broadcast. You can hear Newton and Cleaver rage at each other over opposite ends of the phone. It's an extraordinary moment.
In 1973, Bobby Seale ran a populist campaign to become mayor of Oakland and nearly won in a run-off. Unfortunately, the campaign consumed a lot of BPP energy and money and, as one of the participants laments, after the electoral loss, "there was no Plan B." The BPP began a slow collapse as people quit the party and drifted away.
As the film draws to a close, Newton, addled by drugs, has become a "fucking maniac" and the Panthers have been reduced to raising revenues by shaking down drug dealers, prostitutes and pimps. One of Huey's friends tells Nelson that Newton had become "a maniac in his penthouse who did all kinds of things to people" including angry rants, abusive behavior, and beatings.
As comprehensive as Nelson's film is, it wasn't possible to cover all the stories that haunted the Panther's during Newton's decline. There is no mention of the Newton's savage beating of Preston Callins, the brutal murder of Panther bookkeeper Betty Van Patten (allegedly on Newton's orders) or of Newton's involvement in a the deaths of Kathleen Smith, Crystal Gray, and Nelson Malloy.
In 1989, Huey Newton was killed in a drug deal on the streets of Oakland.
But the story of the Panthers continues. In a closing admonition, Nelson notes:
More than 20 Panthers are still serving terms and prisons.
"What We Want Now!"
The Black Panther Party's original Ten-Point program, published in the second issue of the Black Panther newspaper on May 15, 1967:
We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.
We want full employment for our people.
We want an end to the robbery by the Capitalists of our Black Community.
We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.
We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present day society.
We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.
We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people.
We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.
We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black Communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.
We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.
