Features

ENOUGH REDUX 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

We’ve had enough! It’s time our neighborhood stood up for our quality of life. It’s not fair that one house with far too much emotion about global-local pollution issues can continue to erode our health and peace every single day. We are captive in our houses to their vocalized ramblings, their pamphleting of our sport utility vehicles, and their crass demonstrative behavior in our city’s newspaper. Their loud anti-automobile aggression wakes us up with their noise at all hours of the day. Nana wants to be able to have a nice afternoon nap without a protester on the front walk. Their noise and placard pollution ends up in our yards and in our gardens, and their signs and organizing are eyesores that take up public space. Enough is enough. Our health and happiness are threatened. Our children are greatly endangered whenever they play in the neighborhood. It’s just not fair! The activities of this family threaten the very peace and stability of the country and the planet. 

We know the family has been in the house a long time and no one believes the grandmother is a protest singer (she only complains about having to do the composting) but she seems to have no control over her children who are obviously unable to connect with just going over the road and politely talking to their neighbors about their transportation choices. We demand that this mindless protesting in our neighborhood stop or we will sue! We cannot tolerate this kind of behavior in Berkeley. No longer shall these thoughtless activities of individuals be allowed to disrupt life for the rest of us. 

Join Polite Conversation Please (PCP). 

John Parman 

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SOLANO CONDOS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Solano Avenue Safeway condos. Wow! What a great idea. Better yet, Albany should request/demand, as part of the project, a public open space/ park along Solano so all people can play in it. 

Richard Splenda 

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WORLD CAN’T WAIT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I find it fascinating that Rio Bauce’s Nov. 11 article “BHS Students Rally Against Bush” manages to spend an entire column describing the “World Can’t Wait” movement without mentioning that it is a Maoist group calling for a worldwide Communist revolution. Or perhaps Rio—obviously an intelligent 10th-grader—wasn’t aware of this fact? If so, he has the excuse of youth. But no such excuses can be made for Principal Jim Slemp and the teachers at Berkeley High School who encouraged their students to join a Maoist cult in the name of hip political correctness.  

Imagine the outcry if a high school principal allowed his students to ditch school en masse to attend a Ku Klux Klan rally, accompanied and encouraged by teachers who agreed with the KKK’s message. Yet the Revolutionary Communist Party—the group that organized the World Can’t Wait rally—justifies the murder of tens of million Chinese, glamorizes the most brutal dictator since World War II, and functions essentially as a Communist brainwash cult with calls for the violent overthrow of the U.S. government and the entire capitalist system, to be replaced by a global “Cultural Revolution” to extinguish the middle class. And Principal Slemp has no problem allowing the Communist teachers on staff at Berkeley High leading his students into this maelstrom of political psychosis.  

Where is the outrage? Oh right, this is Berkeley, where we just love Chairman Mao. 

Rio Bauce and the other students can be morally excused, due to their age and ignorance of history. Principal Slemp and the teachers he helped have no such excuses, and should be fired immediately. 

Aileen Duroc 

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DERBY STREET FIELD 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

TJ Wagner wrote a letter to the editor regarding closing Derby. His letter contained a number of common misperceptions about the project. First, while the Berkeley High Baseball team is a primary beneficiary of closing Derby, pulling BHS out of San Pablo Park will allow the COB to annually provide about 7500 hours of neighborhood after school recreation to the mostly low income children who live around the park. Had the Berkeley City Council acted upon this project when it first came before them about six years ago by now we would have provided over 35,000 hours of after school recreation for these children. Second, the Farmer’s Market would suffer no negative impacts. In fact the physical facility proposed for them at the closed Derby site is larger and has superior 

visibility to the space they now occupy. The construction can be done so the Farmers’ Market will have a new space prior to the destruction of their old space. Third, the reason why the Hearst Street area is so underutilized is that the neighbors surrounding this park has been VERY vocal about limiting its use by organized sports. The field users have been asked by them and the Parks Department to minimize organized use of this field so that it can be made available for the very neighborhood pick-up games that TJ Wagner supports. Finally, BUSD has no means of transporting its athletes to daily practices. To suggest that the community is better served by not building a field that is within walking distance of the school in favor of continuing to have these students pile into their fossil fuel gobblers, and drive even further to get to Gilman, is counter to the fairly clearly defined environmental traffic reduction mantra that is oft heard.  

Doug Fielding 

Chairperson, Association of Sports Field Users 

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MORE ON DERBY FIELD 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I found Terry Doran’s Nov. 15 commentary “We Want It For The Kids” both laudable and appalling at the same time. While I do admire Mr. Doran for many of his stances and his consistent support for youth, I feel that his commentary is not factual and that it misleads the common, well-educated Berkeley resident. 

First let me say that Mayor Bates’ office has promised that the Gilman Street fields can be used by the Berkeley High Baseball Teams. They further said that the varsity baseball team should contact their office to schedule pricing and practice times. This is a regulation size baseball field. Berkeley has poured so much money into this, so why not utilize it for our baseball team, rather than say that we want more and more and more? 

Let me further say that the headline presented in this commentary was disrespectful to myself. I am a kid. I go to Berkeley High. And let me tell you, I have been fighting this field for years—I held a sign at the School Board meeting seven years ago to protest this and I will fight against it now. I don’t think Mr. Doran, nor other proponents (who mostly live outside of the community), know of the impacts of the field, probably because they won’t have to deal with the impacts. They won’t have to live with the litter, they won’t have to live with the noise, they won’t have to live with the overcrowding of our neighborhood, they won’t have to live with the Farmers’ Market being severed (several farmers have said that they wouldn’t come back if they were relocated). I just don’t understand the hysteria regarding closing Derby Street, when our neighborhood has bent over backwards for everyone...Not to much mention that the money to build this field isn’t here. I would actually like to have a field at Derby, so I the neighborhood kids could use it as well. I hope that the City Council heeds the word of the people and not the special interests. Build a multi-purpose field now! 

Rio Bauce 

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THE WORKING CLASS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Larry Hendel of the SEIU (Nov. 16, “Time to Kick Butt”) has it right when he says the Democrats “suck at the same corporate teat for campaign funds as the Republicans,” and therefore, remain unable to move forward on a meaningful agenda for working people. Now that we have managed to fend off the latest corporate attacks that Schwarzenegger enabled, let’s not fall back into the same trap that we just came out of. Labor unions must break away from the corporate two-party system in a hurry. 

As a nurse activist who sees how piecemeal reforms championed by Democrats have let millions of Californians fall through the cracks of health care “system,” I believe the hope for the future of working class America lies in the building of independent political organizations like the Green Party. We simply cannot be satisfied to wait for corporate politicians to dole out crumbs so we can thank them for not starving us. 

We need proportional representation or at least instant run-off voting, public financing of political campaigns, single payer healthcare, and a reinvigorated economy based on social and ecological justice principles. Labor leaders should unite around these principles and join with the Greens to build a livable, just society for the next generation. 

Kevin Reilly, RN 

Oakland 

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PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I had the unfortunate experience of having to go before the Berkeley City Council, this time on a Zoning Adjustments Board appeal. The Council rubber stamped a phony ZAB decision, which had typically lied about the facts and the law. The councilmembers lied about the facts and the law, except for Dona Spring, who spoke up on my behalf. Had I not been afflicted with a life-threatening illness, I am sure none of them would have departed at all from their typical cold-hearted bureaucratic treatment. Even in spite of my condition, we got the usual bureaucratic put-down from the few other councilmembers who even bothered to comment and from the city manager. Lots of promises were made that are probably not legally binding. What was legally binding was the staff recommendation, which was a pack of lies. 

I don’t feel like a free man—I feel like a slave to the whims of dictators. So, what is wrong with this society? In my opinion it is endemic to America, but concentrated at grass-root levels like the City of Berkeley. The problem is that the emphasis is on politics, rather than law. Supposedly, we are a nation of laws, but that is not my actual experience. I suppose the adage is true enough when laws are being applied cold-heartedly in the interest of big business or big groups that have political clout. But the individual person will never find that to be true. He will find his fate controlled by forces that render his rights under the law and in a democracy of no effect, or in point of fact virtually non-existent.  

The two-party political system was meant to introduce adversarial controversy into the business of making and administering laws. But the emphasis was still meant to be on the laws and not on the politics. The politics were meant to be a means to an end, not an end in itself. I maintain that democracy in America is deeply flawed, and not just because it is perverted by capitalism. It is deeply flawed in and of itself, because there is nothing to assure that politics will not overwhelm and minimize or even annihilate individual rights under the law. The courts are not adequate to this task, because the legislative and administrative bodies can become too politically dominated, until the courts themselves succumb to the political pressures. These problems would continue and be exacerbated by any transition to socialism or communism, as we have seen in the societies which have attempted the transition. Socialist societies quickly revert to state capitalism and fascism. That is now the fate of the so-called People’s Republic of Berkeley. 

Peter Mutnick?