Public Comment

It is clear from his comportment that the Mayor has lost his ethical way. He pockets his rules, yet doesn’t see that he leaves himself with nothing. He doesn’t know how to escape this; he feels those binds, those hoods that others put over him, but without knowing that they are playing him. He can’t see them betting against him while telling him they are on his side. 

But what are they betting on? Is it just that he is running for state Senate? He now owes so many for their endorsements that he won’t have enough apologies. Look at him up there on the dias; he thinks he knows what he is doing. 

It is possible that he wanted to set up his town (as he left) to have boodles in waiting that he could finesse once he gets to never-never-land (Sacramento). Those who advance his campaign will simply wait to see if their own luck is holding. Well, you gamble, you lose. But he won’t know until it is too late. He probably thinks they are all in the pot with him. 

Having lost your moral compass, you have lost more than you think. 

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The interruptions of City Council meetings have been unending, ever since November. They represent a sector of the population that wants representation. They want it bad. In a small town like this one, you don’t have party wars. If you get elected, you must represent. The Mayor refuses. And he thinks that is his road to chiefdom? 

All the interruptions have had two sides. There were those pro-Palestinians, many of whom had lost family members in Gaza. And there were those who were willing to support the federal government line about what Israel was doing. We can live with that division even if the Mayor can’t. But we have to understand why he can’t. 

He has been told, often enough, what he needs to do -- by those who support what Israel is doing, yet. They have said, in public comment, “Call a damn hearing already so we can have this out in public.” The Mayor refuses. 

At first, the Mayor couldn’t figure out how to deal with the strong pro-Palestinian faction. So he closed down City Council (in violation of the Brown Act); he failed that test. He couldn’t move toward a real meeting of minds in forum. So he failed that second test as well. If he could have envisioned it, it would have been an active meeting. There could be yelling across the room, and discussions between people who disagree. That’s what had been happening anyway between those who showed up. Hundreds of people have descended on the City Council. Most call for a "ceasefire now!" Others support Israel’s "defensiveness." 

The effect? His council is falling apart. Two councilmembers have resigned. One more and not even this Mayor could get a quorum. All he can do is call for special elections. 

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What he refuses to do is look at what is happening in Gaza itself. 

There are mass murders committed by Israel. We have to notice them because Gaza has become a prison camp for Palestinians. Yet the Jews of the world are divided. The crowd that blocked the ship carrying armaments out of Oakland to Israel last November represented many Jewish organizations. Israel has killed over 30,000 people, half of them children. After injuring another 60,000, Israel has cut off water, gas, electricity, food, and all personal necessities. The Palestinians have nothing else to do but die. 

But even Joe Biden is stuck; he doesn’t know what to do beyond past policies. Some president. Israel would have used up its arms by now if the US wasn’t continually sending them more. Is this a religious involvement in politics? After all, most of the world’s Zionists are Christians, wishing to guard Jerusalem for Christ’s return and their own rapture. 

Which crisis can we identify here? Is it that faced by Palestinians now suffering their long and painful death? Is it that of Berkeley (California?) who find themselves unrepresented by their local government? Is it those who parade in the street chanting “Ceasefire Now” as the only non-partisan demand – the one in which all would survive. Or is it this crisis facing the Mayor in the tumult of those insisting on attention? 

Who can tell? He keeps a stone poker-face, without raising his voice to call down the unruly who are demanding representation. He gets special modifications to ordinances to threaten those assembled in his "audience. Are his ethics tied up with technology. He turned off the mikes to quiet those in the council room. Another violation of the Brown Act. 

It is as if he adopts that old hegemonic paranoia which can complain: “they are attacking me, without provocation.” But there is a half century of provocation, a half century of dispossession. A half a century of "apartheid" against Palestinians. 

And there is plenty of hostility in the streets. It shows up in demonstrations against the police cordoning off People’s Park. It shows up as racism against Jews. It shows up as self-silencing, not wanting to say anything about Gaza in a social situation, so as not to create violence. 

But most of all, he sends himself a letter (to Berkeleyside) criticizing those who stop him from running the city his way. 

“Hey Mayor, you think you can criticize the people? It is the people who have the right to criticize you.” He doesn’t see that when ethics takes a backseat to personal political hunger. One creates an infinite amount of animosity. 

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Israel’s problem is what to do with the Palestinians. Zionism had led in taking their land, their livelihood, their culture, their freedom, their political being. Its answer? The “Final Solution.” It involves pushing the Palestinians south into the Egyptian Sinai desert where they will all starve to death. Perhaps the Zionists think all those bodies decaying will make the desert flourish. 

Not all Jews supported the founding of a Zionist Israel. Many saw it as an imperialist strategy, a tactic to detour Arab nationalism into anti-Israeli campaigns, leaving their mideast oil for sale to the west. But that created a huge refugee problem. And it involved itself in the destruction of a culture. Israel created the Gaza culture in order to make it as easy as possible for themselves. Having erased the Palestinian claim to land, they put them in Gaza as an easily guarded area. To Palestinian resistance, Israel could respond with great fascist force. This is what Israel has been doing since early November. 

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What we have to realize is the extent to which the Mayor extends himself to an audience he doesn’t even know. And he doesn’t know that he cannot trust it. He must fear those who are higher in the bureaucracy than him. They are a presence who can muster all that he desires from them, as long as he doesn’t fail his tests. He must trust them to see his actions as if they were their own. He thinks that they think like he does, so that when he agrees with them, they must of necessity be agreeing with him. What autocracy!! 

His second thought about his shadow bosses is that he realizes he cannot trust them. They belong to the Democratic Party, and suggest to him what he has to do to run for Senate. He thinks all he has to do is clear the media skies over Gaza. Which, for him, means that Israeli bombing of Gaza is “just desserts.” Clearly, his constituents don’t count. He must be anti-Palestinian in order to be a patriotic American. 

Neither thought has any reality in this world. All he has to do is re-write what the Israelis say about what they are doing. And then, make it seem as if the Jews of his town are saying it. That means making the Palestinians the aggressors. Can prisoners aggress against their guards? Or do we have to call it "rebellion?" 

If that means what he thinks it means, then his bureaucratic presence is lost. It implies that this society’s media, which has taken over his thinking, has become too corrupt to be seen as a source of information. 

Oddly enough, he thinks he can violate the Brown Act all he wants. The Brown Act sets state standards for public meetings in California. It would override any of the Mayor’s shenanigans in running his council meetings. For instance, it calls for the use of technology whenever possible so that those who participate in the meeting can hear each other, and be heard. To shut off the mikes to a meeting makes the meeting out of range for a lot of people. To arbitrarily shut off the mikes in order to force people’s obedience is to put him in violation of the Act. 

Somehow, the Mayor has been able to stretch the power of the Act against people calling for a resolution to a political problem. It is a problem involving the US government. Yet the Mayor has been able to make his own refusal of a “resolution” primary. Does he think his narcissism will conquer the real outright power of the main imperialist country? 

At last week’s meeting, the Mayor made a decision with respect to the people. He would enable them to read into the record the names and ages of a number of Palestinian people killed by Israel – some even infants. But he turned off the mikes. The Mayor played with his toys, and the people spread around the data that Israel had provided by killing the people they memorialized. Thus, the Mayor lost his 4 month stand-off. The people had written their own resolution on Gaza. They called it a "people’s resolution," meaning they did it themselves without him. He missed its inner democratic meaning. All he accomplished was laying the basis for division among the people of the town, which was precisely what he intended not to do. 

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Those who support what Israel is doing in Gaza have to accept the Mayor’s duality. They have to accept Israel’s "fascism," its reading from the Nazi book about how to deal with an unwanted "minority." Those who belong to a radical Jewish group, on the other hand, know that Israel has violated the fundamental principle of Judaism, namely the sacredness of human life. All human life. That is what Zionism has forgotten. It is what “Ceasefire Now” attempts to remind us 

The Mayor, however, only thinks of himself. He rules in opposition to state law, and probably figures that, if taken to court, his higher-up friends will support him. But then, he has to have them lined up on his secret side, ready to put in a word. Poor soul; he will owe them for that for the rest of his life.