Extra

It’s been quite a week. On Monday, February 3, 2025 when I called in to the Berkeley Council’s Land Use, Housing & Economic Development Committee to make a non-agenda comment, I said I had been listening to the morning news and it was very unsettling, the closing of USAID, the takeover of the Treasury Payment System, that I was concerned we were in a soft coup, that I would like to see our city government call a special meeting to talk to us about what is happening nationally and how we will respond locally. 

I felt like I would probably be seen as some crazy person in a tinfoil hat saying we were in a coup out loud. Within hours the word coup was being used by respected national journalists and some of the more daring Democratic politicians. Councilmember Bartlett, the just elected committee chair followed my comment stating the reminder of the media moguls standing behind Trump at the Inauguration and then the meeting moved on. 

Monday morning was my last city meeting of the week. I heard about the protests at state capitals from a caller into the Thom Hartmann show. I arrived around 1:15 pm to the Wednesday Sacramento protest that started at noon. People were still coming while others were leaving. There weren’t any speakers that I could hear so I wandered through the crowd asking people how they found out about the protest, where they came from and now and then I would engage in longer conversations. 

One person I spoke with saw the demonstration as so important that she drove up from Los Angeles the day before. People traveled from Redding, Chico, Fresno, Mountain View, Fremont, San Jose, San Mateo, Oakland. Some brought their children. For some this was their first protest. 

They heard about the protest through Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, BlueSky, friends and emails. Some answered with the “all” encompassing “social media”. 

I never got to the front, but felt encouraged by the diversity of the people who showed up with probably the largest group falling into the 30 to 55 age range. This was definitely not a protest of college students with a few older adults joining in support. There were some students including four Fremont high schoolers dressed in their most respectable best attending as part of their journalism class. 

Of course, the signs were great with many calling for the removal of Elon Musk. 

Much to my delight when I pulled up my evening recording of the Rachel Maddow show, she started off with photos of protests at state capitals from all over the country including Sacramento. 

If you don’t have TV or access to MSNBC, I highly recommend picking up the free Rachel Maddow show (Monday - Friday) podcasts which you can listen to anytime. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rachel-maddow-show/id294055449 

The encouragement I felt by the show of people standing up to be counted in resistance on Wednesday vanished when I attended a birthday party on Saturday and expanded the conversations with friends and new acquaintances to national news. It was the same as the party I attended the week before. Their response was to turn off the news and disengage saying it was too stressful as if hiding in a news blackout would stop the erosion of the constitution. 

When we’re needed in the streets to resist, tuning out is exactly the response that is needed to smooth the road for the new regime. 

The lack of leadership and cohesive response from the Democrats doesn’t help as those who do want to engage are lost in how. We need to push our elected through calling, writing and showing up. 

For guidance in action, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder is at the top of the New York Times best seller list. It is a start. Then follow it with Gene Sharp’s From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation. It is free online, though you can always buy it, https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/resource/from-dictatorship-to-democracy-a-conceptual-framework-for-liberation/ 

And, sign up with Indivisible and other groups taking action. This is an all hands on deck moment. 

If you need a little uplift Ezra Klein gives a take on why Trump is executive orders instead of congress besides Bannon’s “Flood the Zone”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8QLgLfqh6s 

I expected Trump would be more organized the second time around, but I didn’t expect a Musk to march in with a team of young engineers and hackers to take over departments, start wholesale gutting, gain access and invade critical systems like the Treasury payment system. 

I received one email saying the twenty somethings didn’t know what they were doing. I responded back they did and to look up Curtis Yarvin. I guess the name for people like Yarvin is “Influencer” and he seems to have influenced VP JD Vance among others. Yarvin professes we need a CEO not a president and embraces governing by an authoritarian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin 

The big problem is as I emailed a friend over the weekend in response to the Friday Ezra Klein podcast with Kara Swisher Tech journalist with this, “listened to the podcast - break things and a disregard for law are the key points - this is bad, very bad - add in that we have two men, Trump and Musk, who don't really care about anyone but themselves with an insatiable need for attention, racists to the core and a president with a fragile ego filled with the thirst for revenge, retribution.” 

After that I found Kara Swisher’s audiobook Burn Book: A Tech Love Story at the Los Angeles library and finished it by Sunday night. It was well worth the time which is why I returned the audiobook to the library and signed out the ebook for notes. 

Swisher labeled Zuckerberg as, “The Most Dangerous Man” in chapter 9 covering Facebook. She described him as, “extraordinarily naïve about the forces he had unleashed…that Zuckerberg was woefully unprepared to rein in the power of his digital platform as Facebook’s population swelled to 3 billion active users and it became the most important and vast communications, information, advertising, and media behemoth the world has ever seen.” 

“Move fast and break things” from Mark Zuckerberg was the motto for Facebook. With the creation of META the new mantra became “move fast with stability”, but if we look at action the mentality of breaking things is where we are. 

Burn Book was published in 2024. It’s worse now as Zuckerberg knelt to Trump removing fact checking from Facebook leaving it to the “community” to catch up with circulation of conspiracies, hoaxes, disinformation and misinformation. And, Zuckerberg deposited $1,000,000 into Trump’s inauguration fund. A token to show that he is onboard. 

Swisher got to Musk in Chapter 13. Swisher started the interview with Ezra Klein calling Musk a one-man wrecking ball and it didn’t get any better in the book. 

Musk and Trump have always acted as though laws do not apply to them. When their actions do land them in court, it appears to be a mere bump in the road. Now with the latest responses to the courts pulling in the reins, defiance is the threatened response. We are in a constitutional crisis. 

The court doesn’t have its own police force. Over the weekend and as I write, VP JD Vance and reporters are reminding us of President Andrew Jackson. No sources call “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it” an actual quote from Jackson in regard to a supreme court decision, but it gets the point across. The courts lack enforcement forces and that is never more true than when the Supreme Court has already granted broad presidential immunity in Trump v. United States No. 23-939 Decided July 1, 2024 and the President controls and chooses will and will not be enforced. 

With Pam Bondi, Trump’s former defense attorney as the new Attorney General, we can expect all that happy talk about independence and following the law to vanish with anything Trump. 

Ezra Klein with Kara Swisher full interview to read or listen from New York Times as subscriber article share. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-kara-swisher.html?unlocked_article_code=1.wE4.UE3w._9TIwQZ5lU_D&smid=url-share 

Back to the city. 

The Land, Use, Housing and Economic Development Committee meeting agenda items were taken out of order with the Housing Advisory Commission (HAC) item on prohibiting the sale or use of algorithmic devices to set rents or manage occupancy levels for residential units. I wrote about RealPage and a software program used by property owners to maximize rent and calculate the sweet spot between maximum rent and vacancy in my August 4, 2024 Activist’s Diary referencing Tyler Walicek’s article in Truthout. https://truthout.org/articles/real-estate-software-aided-price-fixing-cartel-among-us-property-companies/ 

After a long discussion the HAC item passed with full committee support. 

Next up Councilmember Tregub’s budget referral on a transfer tax exemption on 100% affordable housing projects passed with clarifying language to include 100% affordable rehabilitation housing projects. 

Last up was former councilmember Hahn’s item on vacant store fronts modeled after San Francisco’s First Year Free program. It was moved forward with a unanimous negative recommendation which translates to take no action and let it die. 

After councilmember Harrison resigned, Hahn called agenda items of former councilmembers no longer in office “orphan items” and commented on those items when discussed without using Harrison’s name in a manner that is best described as not nice. One time at the Agenda Committee during the public comment period of the discussion on creating a policy on “orphan items” I suggested the possibility that they (members Arreguin, Wengraf, Hahn) might consider what would happen with their own items. Arreguin was obviously going to be a State Senator, Wengraf was retiring and Hahn was running for mayor. 

I don’t think Hahn imagined she would lose the mayor race. People were still angry with Harrison for quitting and Ishii was an unknown. I expected Ishii to win with reallocation of votes through rank choice. I did not expect her to lead with the majority of votes before adding in rank choice, but she did just that. She worked hard, knocked on lots of doors including my neighbors. She missed my door and I did not take advantage of talking with her when she joined a house party for another candidate. I’m sorry I didn’t jump on that opportunity to meet her. 

My favorite part of the day is when I’ve completed my to do list for the day or given up on unfinished tasks and crawl into bed to read until I’m tired enough to fall asleep. My goal is to finish one to two books per week. 

We’re living through a very difficult time and it looks to get worse. We’re going to be called on. The question is how much will we do to help another in the days ahead. Are we willing to stand up and be counted. 

Two ordinary British sisters Ida and Louse Cook answered the call in the lead up to WWII. Their memoir written by Ida Cook in 1950 and republished twice first in 1976 and then again in 2021 with a new title The Bravest Voices: A Memoir of Two Sister’s Heroism During the Nazi Era tells that story. It’s one of those books that has kept me up reading into the wee hours of the morning. Maria Rose ended the title of her article reviewing the book with “Why Heroism Will Never Be Enough and Why We Can’t Let That Stop Us.” https://marla-rose.medium.com/little-things-are-big-what-the-legacy-of-ida-and-louise-cook-tells-us-about-why-heroism-will-never-e207264f218d 

Of course, Ida and Louise Cook were on my mind when I visited the Berkeley Historical Society exhibition Roots, Removal and Resistance: Japanese Americans in Berkeley and stayed for the film One Fighting Irishman: Wayne M. Collins and the Tule Lake Segregation Center and post film discussion with Sharon Yamato who wrote, directed and produced the film and Satsuki Ina, child trauma psychotherapist, author of The Poet and the Silk Girl: A Memoir of Love, Imprisonment, and Protest. https://www.heydaybooks.com/catalog/the-poet-and-the-silk/ 

Satsuki Ina was born at the Tule Lake internment camp. Ina told us that when her mother was sick and dying she (Satsuki) wanted to replace her mother’s worn torn quilt, but her mother refused relating that when she was incarcerated at Tanforan and pregnant a woman managed to throw that quilt over the high barbed wire fence and said, “I hope that helps”. The quilt held the memory that in that dark time someone cared. 

The exhibit in the Veterans Memorial Building at 1931 Center Street is free and open Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays from 1 – 4 pm, from now through August. It will come down sometime in September, but don’t wait. You may feel as I do there is a lot to absorb and want to make multiple visits after looking at “Here Lived” the more than 1,100 names and 260 addresses of Berkeley residents removed under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1942 Executive Order 9066. 

Michael Several said he spent two full years beginning in 2022 researching and compiling the “Here Lived” with date and place of birth, occupation, camps in order of incarceration, date of removal through date of release, and released to location. 

In Several’s description of his work, he wrote he was inspired by the stepping stones, Stolperstine, in Berlin Germany, “Knowing that installing plaques in front of houses in Berkeley where people who had been incarcerated had lived at the beginning of World War II was beyond my capability, I decided to create digital Stolpersteine…” 

It seems like this exhibit is too important to send to the Veteran’s Building attic for storage. Do we have a public art artist who can pick up from here and turn this exhibit into a Berkeley walking tour with plaques? Can we kickstart such a project with in lieu fees for Public Art on Private Development? I certainly hope so. And, while we’re at it can include in that walking tour the borders of redlining. https://berkeleyca.gov/construction-development/permits-design-parameters/design-parameters/public-art-private-development#:~:text=Policy%20requirements,as%20an%20in%2Dlieu%20fee. 

The Historical Society exhibit this fall is on Latinos in Berkeley. Given that Berkeley reaffirmed our status as a sanctuary city at the January 21, 2025 City Council meeting, we can expect to be targeted for actions and removals. Will we hold or fold?