The dean of the University of California at Berkeley law school stepped down from his post today after a lawsuit filed Tuesday by his former executive assistant revealed he had sexually harassed her and other women in the office for months. -more-

On March 12th, the wind and rain weren't enough to dampen the sounds of bagpipes accompanying festive dancers marching through downtown San Francisco for the 165th Annual Saint Patrick's Day Parade and Festival. Saint Patrick's Day is actually on Thursday, March 17th. -more-

A proposal for a wide-ranging fishing expedition that threatens to use taxpayer money to search the City for property the City can take away from its owners by eminent domain will be item 22 on the Berkeley City Council agenda tonight. Here is a link to the proposal: -more-

Most people in Berkeley agree that we have a housing affordability crisis. Yet last Tuesday, a majority of the Berkeley City Council voted down two critical measures to fund new affordable housing. -more-

In a preface to Thomas Paine's 1795-6 pamphlet, Agrarian Justice, the writer correctly notes that Social Security is currently the most effective antipoverty program in the nation. Indeed, as a result of Social Security, over 20 million Americans including more than 1 million children each year escape poverty.

Thomas Paine understood the immense importance of providing an adequate pension to the elderly. To the best of my knowledge, he was the first prominent intellectual after the birth of this nation who advocated social security for both older and disabled Americans. To sustain the program, he proposed a tax on inherited property. -more-

A friend of mine reminded me recently that when Senator Dianne Feinstein was mayor of San Francisco she thought that homelessness was going to be a brief phase, and one proposal floating through town was the idea of mobile cement drain pipes to be used as temporary shelters. The Department of Public Works was already adept at carting them around, they were too heavy to steal, unbreakable, semi-private, washable, and available. And if you think this is a little nutty, you'll have a sense of my response to tiny houses, the movement for miniature abodes sometimes promoted as one solution to the housing crisis.

My friend said that all the contractor proposing the cement drain pipe shelters was requesting from the city was "a plot to put them on." And I thought well, golly. Is that all? Because that's what Liberty City, the community of tents on Berkeley's old City Hall lawn was requesting. And that's what the people in tents under the Division Street freeway overpass were requesting after being flushed away from San Francisco's Market Street Superbowl City celebration area.

That's what the Albany Bulb community was requesting. That's what people ferrying what little they have left to call their own have been requesting of cities nationwide for decades along with their human rights and perhaps a little compassion. Most communities of homeless people are having the door slammed on such requests, and it isn't because tents aren't aesthetically appealing. Liberty City was a monument to cleanliness, orderliness, cooperative living and indigenous democratic organization, much more so than most apartment buildings or even co-ops, and the famously liberal City of Berkeley still swept it away. -more-

It would be nice to see an in depth story about BART's failures as a public transit system. My point of view is that public transit should be funded by those who drive in the form of a gasoline tax, but since we don't have that, BART workers and management should not be overpaid (as they are quite substantially in most cases), and BART should not be used as a jobs program to employ people in useless positions, such as most station agents (this job for all but the busiest stations could easily be handled by a call center). -more-

The print and cable media continues to keep up the drum beat of Bernie Sanders being unelectable and have effectively blocked out his campaign coverage. By contrast, Hillary Clinton actual record has largely escaped scrutiny. She supported the deregulation and gambling activities of Wall Street which precipitated the economic crash of 2008. Her stubborn refusal to release the transcript of her speech to Golden Sacks speaks volumes of her cozy relationship to these banks. At the recent Democratic debate she defended her dark money activity claiming that it was acceptable because President Obama was also a recipient of millions from Wall Street Banks. That is precisely why the Wall Street banks got a free pass from the Obama administration and none of the executives served prison time. -more-

Barbara Yaley lived in Berkeley and died on February 22. This remembrance was written on February 23, 2016, the day after she died, and posted on Counterpunch.org .

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My friend Barbara Yaley died yesterday morning. The news was delivered by a close mutual friend and it came as a shock from which I’m still reeling. Three weeks ago Barbara was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia. She started chemo treatments immediately and never left the hospital. I didn’t even know she was sick.

Many longtime CounterPunch readers may have encountered Barbara from her time together with Alexander Cockburn, in the late 1990s and the early Bush era, as the two of them migrated up and down the California coast from Barbara’s place on Milvia in Berkeley and Rancho Cockburn in Petrolia on the Lost Coast. Those were high times for CounterPunch, as well as Alex. Much of our vicious biography of Al Gore (Al Gore: a User’s Manual) was written on the telephone in Barbara’s house, with her African parrot Ernie spewing hilarious profanities in the background.

Barbara teamed up with Cockburn, but she never operated in his shadow. Barbara Yaley was a titan in her own right. She earned a degree from Berkeley in criminology and followed that up with a PhD in the History of Consciousness from UC Santa Cruz, where she was in the same cohort with Black Panther Huey Newton. She wrote her dissertation was on the History of California Prisons. Barbara used her academic training to fight ferociously for the oppressed. She specialized in hopeless cases: death penalty cases, cases involving racist cops, the drug war, long-term solitary confinement. After our book Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press, Alex and I spent much time together organizing in Richmond, California against the street slaughter from gang violence sparked by the drug war. Barbara, whose years of footwork as a private investigator took across those mean streets, served as our Vergil, guiding us through that fraught terrain. -more-

The effort by Pedro Sanchez, leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party, to form a government on March 2 brings to mind the story of the hunter who goes into the forest with one bullet in his rifle. Seeing a deer on his right and a boar on his left, he shoots in the middle.

Sanchez’s search for a viable coalition partner began when the ruling right-wing Popular Party (PP) took a pounding in Spain’s Dec. 20 election, dropping 63 seats and losing its majority. Voters, angered by years of savage austerity that drove poverty and unemployment rates to among the highest in Europe, voted PP Prime Minster Mariano Rajoy out and anti-austerity parties in, although leaving the PP as the largest single party in the parliament.

The only real winner in election was the left-wing Podemos Party, which took 20.6 percent of the vote. The Socialist Party actually lost 20 seats, its worst showing ever, and at 22 percent, barely edged out Podemos. And if the Spanish political system were not rigged to give rural voters more power than urban ones, Podemos would have done much better. The Socialists and the PP are particularly strong in rural areas, while Podemos is strong in the cities. -more-

In 2012, Democrat Barack Obama won reelection with 51 percent of the vote compared to Republican Mitt Romney’s 47 percent. Obama’s victory was the result of a formidable coalition of racial minorities and progressive Whites, particularly single women. In 2016, if Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders is to prevail, they must recreate the same coalition. And, White men will be the smallest faction. -more-

In case my readers didn't know by now, I have done a lot of introspection partly for the purposes of gaining a better understanding of my psychotic illness, and also for gaining a better understanding of my mind, in general. I have often combined this introspection with journaling, and this is useful because I can see the thoughts and ideas on the pad of paper in front of me. -more-

Henry Purcell died in 1695 at the early age of 36 just three years after the premiere of his semi-opera The Fairy Queen, which in turn came only a year after the great success of his other noteworthy works in this genre, Dioclesian and King Arthur. The genre itself developed in England out of the popular court masques. Semi-operas combined spoken dialogue, acting, instrumental music, singing, and dance. The libretto for The Fairy Queen, by an anonymous author, offers a heavily abridged version of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. This material, usually presented in spoken dialogue, was absent in the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s concert version of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, which included all the music Purcell composed for the 1692 premiere as well as the music he added for the 1693 revival. None of the familiar characters from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream have singing roles, so the singing is provided by nymphs, fairies and allegorical figures. I attended on Saturday afternoon, March 12, the second of two performances of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen at San Francisco Conservatory of Music. -more-

Opera Divas Kathleen Moss (mezzo) and Eliza O’Malley (soprano), with special guests Deborah Rosengaus (mezzo-soprano) and Maestro Alexander Katsman (piano), will light up the hall with arias, duets and trios from celebrated operas of Puccini, Verdi, Bellini, Bizet, Delibes and a special selection of Irish favorites in honor of St. Patrick's Day. . -more-

On Sunday, March 6, the New Falcon String Quartet gave its debut performance under the aegis of Vallejo Symphony Orchestra at Vallejo’s First Presbyterian Church. This group of eminent musicians formed only five weeks earlier, arising phoenix-like out of the ashes of another group, which was to bear the name Peregrine Quartet. Dissension in the first group led to its dissolution as two musicians departed, and a second group was formed, comprising musicians who had performed with the Mendocino Music Festival. Standing before a statue of a falcon in Mendocino, the musicians, mindful of the former name Peregrine Quartet, hit on the name New Falcon String Quartet. It seems a happy choice. The New Falcon String Quartet is comprised of Joseph Gold on first violin, Dan Kristianson on second (and occasional first) violin, Raphael Gold on viola, and Burke Schuchmann on cello. All are experienced as members of Bay Area symphonies, and they have also performed widely in the USA and abroad. -more-

The Lost Trio—Phillip Greenlief (saxophone) of Oakland, Dan Seamans (bass) of Berkeley and Tom Hassett (drums) of San Francisco—premiere Bay Area jazz combo founded in 1994, will play Six By Monk, Six By The Lost Trio, 8 p. m. Saturday, March 12, at the California Jazz Conservatory, formerly known as the Jazzschool, 2087 Addison near Shattuck in downtown Berkeley. -more-

Berkeley Public Library welcomes local pianist/writer/producer Sarah Cahill on Sunday, March 20 at 2:00pm at the Central Library, 2090 Kittredge (at Shattuck) in the third floor Community Meeting Room. -more-