The Sunshine Boys

by Dennis Green

There is much talk throughout California, and in my beloved hometown of Alameda, about “transparency in government.” Many references to “Sunshine Laws” are made, and here, a “Sunshine Task Force” has emerged to discuss and establish a Sunshine Ordinance to strengthen existing transparency rules. Not every little dark corner of public service, however, is being shone upon.

One local news blog site, for example, ACTION ALAMEDA News, has revealed that an Alameda School Board Trustee, Mike McMahon, has three relatives on the board payroll, including his wife and daughter. And also that the school board, in violation of state and federal law, is accepting Special Education funding without being able to demonstrate a consistent program for finding and recruiting students needing such services, and then providing them. Yet there is no outcry from the Sunshine Boys.

Gadfly Jon Spangler, City Council candidate Jeff Mitchell, and the League of Women Voters all call for more light, so long as it doesn’t shine on them, or any of their pet projects.

Meanwhile, serious charges have been raised against one City Council member, Lena Tam, who is accused of leaking confidential city documents to real estate developer SunCal. Tam’s activities are documented in several hundred pages of emails and inter-office memos CC-ed to the developer and to several local partisans, including a member of the Sunshine Task Force, John Knox-White, and a local blogster, Lauren Do. Again, not only is no concern voiced by the Sunshine Boys, but instead they make excuses for Tam and the others.

At the same time, these Shiny Day People accuse the Interim City Manager and City Attorney of various crimes and misdemeanors, without specifying any codes violated except their own sense of honor. This orb of sunlight appears to be very arbitrary about where it will shine and where it will not.

Some of the public denials of wrongdoing in the Tam case provided much local entertainment, especially the claim that John Knox-White “… did not have text with that woman!” So reminiscent of Bill Clinton, except for the missing sax. And none of these people call for an investigation of the vast SunCal conspiracy to rob the taxpayers.

New Politics in Alameda, and throughout the nation really, are beginning to shape up as the unkindest cuts of all — bitter personal attacks, snarky and smarmy blog commentaries, Tea Party and Town Hall Meeting blockheads, and viral partisanship that brooks no compromise. We can only pray that most of these newbies bought too late and too expensive, that their mortgages are underwater or in default or foreclosure, and that they will soon be packing their bags back to Fresno.

For the Sunshine Boys want to hide away their own pet projects and misdemeanors where the sun don’t shine. Their idea of transparency is a means to embarrass their opponents, not to require full disclosure of the shenanigans of public employees. Not a word from them about unfunded fire fighters union pension perks, let alone exorbitant city executive payrolls.

If they really cared about corruption, equally, on all sides, in the bowels of the school district as much as city management, I’d be impressed. But as it is, all I can see from them is just another partisan smokescreen disguised as something impartial, noble and selfless.

This isn’t, of course, the first time we’ve seen such a song and dance routine in politics. Transparency in government was the claim of Ronald Reagan’s gang, until the Iran-Contra Deal was uncovered. It was also the claim of President Richard Nixon, until those 18 minutes on his office tapes went missing. We know by now that anyone who says he has an exclusive corner on sunlight is coming from the Dark Side.

©2010 Dennis Green

The Laying On Of Hands

by Dennis Green

The American Council of Catholic Bishops has ruled that Reiki, a version of therapeutic touch, or healing massage, is forbidden. No Catholics may practice this healing art, and the priests and nuns who engage in it are hereby ordered to stop. A number of them say they will ignore the Bishops, as do I.

The laying on of hands is a customary method of healing in many cultures and religions. It was practiced by Jesus of Nazareth, who told his disciples to do the same. Until now, Reiki and other similar techniques were practiced everywhere, even in Catholic Hospitals. What now?

Well, for believing Catholics in America, the choices are the same as always. They can pick and choose from a “Menu” of beliefs, ignoring the Church of Rome on Reiki as they do on such issues as birth control and women’s rights. Or else, they can be loyal and true to a hierarchy that seems, with the ascension of former Cardinal “Ratsig,” head of the Catholic Inquisition, increasingly intolerant and narrow-minded.

I’m lapsed, and have no real opinions that matter either way. But I can still criticize the Roman hierarchy, even as I feel the right, even the responsibility, as a lapsed Jew, to criticize Israeli politics. You don’t have to have a dog in that fight anymore to oppose it. And if you lived on the inside for 12 — 16 years, you know more than most laymen.

But this is not about opposition, rather the wonder and the miracle of the laying on of hands. Why is it that the human touch itself should have such miraculous healing powers? What is it in our human and social evolution that sticks with us? Does the grooming of one another, common among all the Five Great Apes, have anything to do with this continued phenomenon? Perhaps.

Chimpanzees are most like the Catholic Bishops, aggressive, domineering, spending most of their time defending their territorial outposts. But they also engage in grooming, stroking and relieving their brothers and sisters of infestations, and simply encouraging each other by physical contact. So do Gorillas. And Orangutans.

But Bonobos, smaller cousins of the Chimps, who live on the other side of the Congo River, are very different. They not only engage in grooming, but spend most of their spare time in sexual interaction rather than in combat. They never quite came down — as we, the Chimps and the others did – out of the trees or depended on an upright posture for their identity. They lay their hands, in a plethora of ways, on each other, calming, comforting, healing each other, more than any of the other Five Great Apes ever do.

We evolve, or suppose we do, from those primate ancestors. We keep a few of the traits and habits that serve our survival well. Perhaps the laying on of hands is one of those practices that sustain us. And why should our religious leaders oppose such a thing?

“It’s only from a direct connection with Jesus that we can trust any healing,” they say. “In this Reiki practice, there appears to be an intermediary, and we can’t know whether that force is divine, or evil.” I would submit that all too often, we cannot tell whether those priestly intermediaries are the real thing, or not…

In the Santa Rosa Diocese of the Roman Catholic Church, which includes the churches in Eureka, where I grew up, more than ten priests are suspected of child molestation, including one of my classmates, Gary Timmons, who died in prison. So much for the laying on of hands.

©2010 Dennis Green

Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!

by Dennis Green

They ain’t comin’ back. America is in for a decade-long economic slump, similar to the one Japan went through, and for many of the same reasons. Balloon! Balloon! Balloon! One after another, from the internet to housing to investments with Bernie Madoff.

Many of those jobs are in obsolete industries, manufacturing jobs that have gone overseas, jobs in retail industries that have peaked, (such as apparel), jobs in newspaper staffs as advertising moves online. Book publishing and the pulp and paper industries are next, as e-readers gain in popularity.

It is often said that Americans are socially conservative at heart, that our morals change slowly, or not at all. (“Same-sex marriage? Gasp!”). But that viscosity also applies to our workforce, to our education system, to our factory-line mentality, which remain stuck firmly in the past.

No high-speed rail, no new pellet-based nuclear power plants, very little modern architecture. We even stopped making electric cars and destroyed the ones we had.

But only the media, and the Republicans are saying that “Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!” will be a major issue in the Fall elections. I seriously doubt it. Even if you’re out of work, are you going to blame the President? If you’re an unemployed lifelong Democrat, are you going to vote Republican…to do…what? Get even? Not if you lost your job or your house in 2008.

As usual, the logic is befuddled. Most of those jobs are not coming back, because the American spending binge is over. People who topped out their credit cards are going to be paying them off for the next 10-20 years. They ain’t gonna have any discretionary spending. If Macy’s laid off half their employees, they aren’t going to hire them back. Not ever.

And it will take us at least ten years to develop those new industries that are needed, such as the “Green Revolution” in housing, autos and electric power generation. There is already massive resistance to the kinds of large power lines needed to get electricity from the wind or solar farms onto the grid. And very few bloggers earn more than $500 a year.

Moreover, if the rising federal deficit forces cutbacks in spending, in pushing up the age for collecting social security, cutting back in defense, closing loopholes in Medicare, some people will stay in the workforce longer, and many people in the military and in healthcare will go unemployed. Public employee unions will resist, but there will be layoffs of teachers, city workers and state bureaucrats.

The real estate industry will not recover soon either, with millions of mortgages still underwater, homes in foreclosure or short sale still kept off the market by local banks. They are already suffering badly from the collapse of the commercial real estate market, office buildings sitting empty and vacant lots where only a few years ago massive projects were planned. The million dollar penthouse condo may be a thing of the past.

Along with conspicuous consumption, irrational exuberance and madcap breakfasts at Tiffany’s.

All through the ‘90s and the ‘00s, our economy was grossly inflated, primarily by a willingness of businesses and individuals to go deeply into debt. The big banks and financial institutions are now awash in cash, but not lending, primarily because no one wants to borrow. Even mergers and acquisitions are way down from five years ago.

Japan went through a similar period of inflation during the ‘90s, greatly expanding the public payroll and social welfare benefits, especially for the retired worker. Their deep and serious recession lasted more than ten years. Many Japanese premiers during that period resigned, some in disgrace.

Whether the U.S. government can avoid a similar lasting recession remains to be seen. A recent multi-billion jobs package went primarily to the teachers’ unions, not private sector employment. Teach! Teach! Teach!

©2010 Dennis Green

Prop. (h) 8

by Dennis Green

“My two moms can beat up your ten wives!” So read a sign held by one demonstrator in the face of another, and that’s how heated this debate has been. Yesterday’s ruling will no doubt be appealed, all the way up to the Supreme Court, where a majority of the justices are Catholic. Is this a civil rights issue, or not?

Yesterday, I wore my Prop. (h) 8 T-shirt to our monthly dialysis meeting, and our final one with Nurse Sandy, who has complete our training, and will now be passing us off to Nurse Kate. My T-shirt, turquoise, was from Fifty Seven Thirty Three, a wonderful silk-screening artisnal shop long located next door to Tania & James’ art studio, and now open as a retail shop on Piedmont Avenue in Oakland.

The T-shirt features two lesbians embracing, passionately making out, and reads, “Love is not the problem.” I wore it specifically for good luck in the outcome of yesterday’s ruling, which found the ban on same-sex marriage in California in violation of equal protection and the 14^th Amendment. “Proponents of this ban have offered no rational argument why it should be in force,” read a portion of the ruling.

The exam itself did not go all that well, revealing that I have been retaining fluid from the peritoneal dialysis exchanges. This results in weight gain, high blood pressure, swollen ankles and, most threatening, fluid in the lungs and congestive heart failure. So my nephrologist, on call, promptly ordered some fine tuning in our procedure.

Instead of exchanges at 6 pm, midnight and 6 am, he ordered three overnight, at 6, 9, and 3 am, plus a drain at 6 am, leaving my cavity empty all day. He also told us to use the 2.5 solution, and prescribed large doses of a diuretic. We just had our first such night, and it is almost as disruptive as being on the machine all night long. Very little deep REM sleep and genuine rest. But already I’m losing weight and fluid.

At the end of our session yesterday, after collecting my 24-hour urine draw and samples from all the previous day’s drains, after the Hepetitus B vaccine shot, the thorough exam, change of dressings, blood draw, and scheduling of future appointments — as I was putting my shirts back on, I peeled off the Prop. (h) 8 Tee, folded it gently, and gave it to Nurse Sandy.

“I may be a toughie, and a warrior,” I said to her, “but I’ve been wearing a T-shirt with two nude lesbians on it, and I think you can make even better use of it!” She blushed at the gift, but knows where our sentiments are.

I fought mightily against Prop. (h) 8 myself, a totally unfair and irrational imposition of religious values on a secular citizenry. The Catholic and Mormon Churches spent millions to get it passed — two organizations with a troubled past in the issues of marriage and child molestation and hardly qualified to sit in moral judgment — and then complained when donor lists were made public and donor businesses were boycotted by opponents.

We’ve had our own little dust-up over gay rights here in Alameda, where the schools adopted a curriculum of lesson plans teaching students not to bully gay classmates, or those parented by same sex couples. There was even an attempted recall of school board Trustees, which petered out from lack of support.

I’m confident that the Supreme Court, with its majority of conservatives, will rule against such bans on marriage between consenting same sex adults. Anything else would be judicial activism, and we know how much conservatives hate that stuff.

©2010 Dennis Green

Is America Really a Democracy?

by Dennis Green

The Freedom House, a group that lists countries worldwide by their degree of freedom and democracy, says that among its highest standard are “Transparency and Accountability” of said governments to international standard tests. In many ways, unfortunately, our own American government cannot be given high marks.

Freedom of expression and freedom of association are especially high on the list of Freedom House’s assessments of nations, their laws and their cultures, around the world. In the new democracies, these scores are low, but also in America,. With a media and government increasingly dominated by corporate interests, the news is not good.

“Struggle against Unfair Taxes” is another criteria Freedom House uses. Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine are considered wanting on this list, where peaceful, non-violent pushback against regimes are resisted. But in the U.S., such movements are also resisted and discredited, tax strikers persecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

“Human Rights” are also high on most lists advanced by the United Nations, and also Freedom House. Yet in America, there are now a million black men in prison, all out of proportion to their percentage of the total population. We are hearing more and more immigrant bashing all the time, a thinly-disguised resentment of “those” people who don’t speak English as a first language, who may have darker skin, and whose only European blood comes from Conquistadors.

“Legality” is always given as the excuse, but where was the outrage about Vietnamese undocumented aliens, Afghani war refugees, South Koreans, Filipinos and the like? Many Jewish refugees of Soviet Pogroms also came here without the proper papers in order, but there was no outcry then either. Our border to the North is just as porous as our Southern one, and longer, but we don’t seem to worry about those illegal Canucks!

The most obvious forms of discrimination in America are in our drug laws, which prosecuted and imprison the drug crack cocaine, usually a black inner city ghetto drug, 100 times more harshly than the powdered form, more commonly used by white executive types. Despite recent reforms, the penalties for crack cocaine are still EIGHTEEN times more severe than for powdered Blow.

Many believe that the current drug prohibitions were designed in the first place, especially the marijuana laws, to discriminate against ethnic minorities, particularly blacks and Hispanics, who were the primary users in the 1930s. Those laws continue to result in far higher imprisonment rates among minorities, and are not only Draconian, but about as effective as the Prohibition Against Alcohol. When will we ever learn?

There’s an old saying that the smaller the venue the more corrupt the government. Too often, public representatives are in collusion with businesses — in California especially with real estate development firms — or with public employee unions. In California, $400 billion is spent on public education, and the opportunities for incompetence and corruption abound. A lack of transparency at the local level makes it almost impossible to uncover waste and fraud.

So it’s not simply a question of whether America is a “perfect” democracy, but how far we need to stray from our democratic ideals of freedom and equality before the term cannot even be applied. If the War in Afghanistan were put to the American people in a democratic referendum, for example, would we still be there? I very seriously doubt it.

But the war makers — from the Pentagon to military manufacturers like Boeing — are in collusion with a media which doesn’t conduct a serious investigation or debate. It takes a blogger like WikiLeak to stimulate any debate at all. So a few Afghani collaborators may be killed? So what? We killed 30 innocent civilians last week alone with our drones. When we pull out, all of the collaborators will be killed, just as they were in France in 1945.

©2010 Dennis Green