Wednesday night’s Community Services District meeting at the Boonville Firehouse was uncharacteris­tically testy, and grew testier as the evening wore on as trustees traded verbal jabs with each other and aimed a couple of body blows at Fire Chief Colin Wilson.

The first skirmish arose when the Recreation Commit­tee proposed a “playgroup” at the preschool at The Elementary School. (The Anderson Valley tends to the utilitarian. The elementary school is called The Ele­mentary School, the high school Anderson Valley High School. Scissors, rock, paper.)

The playgroup would be conducted by a local woman celebrated for her childcare abilities. This mega-mom would provide childcare for the tots of several younger teachers while instructing other younger mothers in the fine points of child rearing, all of it seemingly innocu­ous.

Skuntown/Willits — Mark Scaramella’s report on the County Supervisors August 3 meeting in Covelo was right on target — a reality-based, bullshit detecting analysis in a few concise paragraphs.

The Mendocino National Forest has been “occupied” from the get-go by the locals: logging, livestock grazing, poaching, joyriding, and, more recently, pot growing.

Since the current big-time occupation by outsiders — allegedly Mexican drug cartels — the good old boys feel threatened and dispossessed.

I went to get my hair cut the other day in the town of Fortuna and waited ten minutes while the elderly barber finished buzz-cutting a young Mexican American. After the young man had exited under his thin skullcap of black stubble, Don the barber sighed and said, “That’s the third boy I’ve cut today who’s headed into the Marines. They all say the same thing. “There’s no work around here and I’ve got a family to support.” When I tell them to hold off, they say the same thing: “Too late. I’ve signed up.”

This is Humboldt county, northern California, where the marijuana boom is in its final paroxysms, with people flocking from around the world to get a piece of the action, just like they did in the Gold Rush. One of the many places selling bags of good soil to marijuana growers ($10 a bag, 8 bags to each marijuana plant, grown in a 100 foot x 30 foot plastic greenhouse, $25,000 or so) had a $300,000 day lately. So there’s more money here than most places across America, where the situation is truly desperate.

Corporate profits are up 41% since Obama’s election; yet half of American workers have suffered a job loss or a cut in hours or wages over the past 30 months. They’re saying around 28 million people either have no job or one that doesn’t yield them enough money to get through the week. On Friday, August 13, the Bureau of Labor Statistics noted on its home page that “Employers initi­ated 1,851 mass layoff events in the second quarter of 2010 that resulted in the separation of 338,064 workers from their jobs for at least 31 days.”

Millions are plummeting into total destitution, having reached the end of their 99-weeks of unemployment benefits. Their only option then is the soup line at a church and getting on the waiting list for a homeless shelter. The nearest big city north of me is Portland, Oregon, adjacent to the Oregon City bunker of Counter­Punch co-editor Jeffrey St Clair. The downtown area in Portland is filled with homeless people, napping on steps, bedding down on cardboard in doorways. Jeffrey kayaks frequently down the Willamette and can see colonies of the destitute all along the river bank, from the shipyards to Willamette Falls, sleeping under thin plastic and gray skies.

California agriculture and much of the construction industry depends on undocumented workers coming across the border from Mexico — minimum cost $1000 — for an 8-day walk through the Arizona desert. Since building is in a terminal slump, many Mexicans would like to head back home till times improve, but nowadays it’s so tough to come back across that they daren’t risk it. Hence the paradox: trying to lock “illegals” out means locking them in. Frank Bardacke who lives in the farm town of Watsonville, a couple of hours south of San Francisco, recently described amid an important piece in our newsletter a bank robbery by one young, desperate immigrant.

“Several months ago,” Frank writes, “Jario took his father’s pickup truck, drove 20 miles to the upscale tourist playpen Carmel By the Sea, and walked into the local branch of the Bank of America. He waited in line to see a teller, and, when his turn came, he pretended to have a gun under his shirt and quietly demanded that the teller give him her cash. As she was passing out the money, he apologized for frightening her; meanwhile, she was hiding a GPS device among the bills.

“He left the bank, his crime apparently unnoticed, and returned to the truck for the drive home. On the way, he got confused and took a wrong turn through Monterey before he got back on the right road home. Twenty police cars from four different police jurisdictions fol­lowed the GPS signal and stopped him 45 minutes after he left the bank. He immediately confessed, explaining that he needed the money to help his dad pay the family mortgage. When his case came to trial, the DA pressed for two years in State Prison. The judge decided that six months in the county jail and five years probation would be enough.”

In Texas or anywhere in the South the fellow would probably have got 25 years. But in desperate times one can expect people to do desperate, stupid things, and this decent judge showed compassion and understanding. One can’t say the same for many Americans, starting with the Republicans in Congress who’ve been happily voting for a cut-off in benefits for the jobless, while simultaneously engaging in the politically insane enter­prise of repealing the 14th Amendment, no longer mak­ing it a constitutional provision that those “born or natu­ralized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” Do the Republicans want to cede Texas and Florida permanently to the Democrats?

Conspicuous good works are always a feature of Depression, the rich zealous to purchase moral insur­ance. Some billionaires, led by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, have been pledging that they will earmark not less than 50% of their personal wealth for charity. But since whatever they give away is tax deductible, so revenues to Uncle Sam will drop.

The rich don’t get to be rich by being the nicest guys in the shark tank. As Carl Ginsburg recently remarked in a fine piece on CounterPunch recently, “In its fledgling years, profits on Bill Gates’ software were reportedly 70% annually. Another way to gauge Gates’s billions is by catching a glimpse of the multitudes of students priced out of the computer market — thanks in part to that Great Giver’s expensive software — lined up daily at community college libraries for some free access to computers, each machine an expression of Gates’ crea­tive commitment to profit in the +40% range — a gift Gates gave himself that keeps on giving. As Gates told Fortune: ‘The diversity of American giving is part of its beauty.’”

We can probably expect more laid-off workers going postal, as David Rosen discussed on CounterPunch.org last week. On August 3, at 7am, Omar Thornton showed up for a disciplinary hearing at the Hartford Distributors, a Budweiser distribution warehouse in Manchester, Con­necticut. Thornton had been caught on video pinching some beer. They asked him whether he wanted to be fired, or just quit. Thornton pulled out a handgun and killed seven fellow employees before shooting himself dead. Before he loosed off his last shot into his head, Thornton, a black man, called a friend on his cellphone and said he’d taken care of some racists who’d been giving him a hard time. Unemployment means fear and fear nourishes racism, all the more because we have a black president. Racism is drifting across America like mustard gas in the trenches in World War One.

And, final token of hard times, we have Bonnie and Clyde on the run. In their latest guise the duo consists of John McCluskey and his cousin and fiancee, Casslyn Welch, who’s no Faye Dunaway. She threw some wire cutters over the fence of her man’s Arizona prison. Cops suspect them of killing a couple of retirees, then stealing their truck and heading north up to the Canadian line through Glacier National Park. That’s the last sanctuary in America of Ursus horribilis, the American grizzly. Behind them the cops, ahead the bears. It could be the first movie of a new time.

Marriage’s Fiercest Defenders

Last week I wrote about the Prop 8 decision handed down by a federal judge in San Francisco and evoked the irony of gays striving to save the sinking ship of mar­riage. Here’s a letter from Marc Salomon, who says he’s a 21-year gay anarchist in a committed relationship, married only when it was illegal, and who’s “probably gonna tie the knot in the future when it becomes legal again.”

* * *

Alex,

It should not go unnoticed how same sex marriage got to this point, and what impact the experience has had on the gay rights movement.

As you might know, only 15% of LGBT are in a rela­tionship circumstance where they would marry. Yet this issue has dominated LGBT activism for the past two decades. Along with gays in the military, which served 1.5% of LGBT, these two conservative issues have crowded out progress on consensus economic issues, housing and job discrimination protections, which would appear to be in the interests of the vast majority, those of us who must compete for housing and employment.

In the early 1990s, conservative homosexuals began to sue for the right to marry. They won in the Hawaii Supreme Court in the mid 1990s and that instigated the backlash with the Defense of Marriage Act as the center­piece. At that time, Clinton, a straight white male philan­derer, glibly promised to end the ban on gay sin the military.

That worked out well.

In ’04, Gavin Newsom, another straight white male philanderer, ordered the county clerk to issue marriage licenses irrespective of gender. That led to the California Supreme Court granting LGBT suspect status and allowing same sex marriage.

Reactionaries easily qualified an amendment to the California constitution, which barely passed in 2008.

And then it took the straight, white male establish­ment figures like Boies and Olsen to win this case.

Shit just happens. Who would have thought that the chain of events outlined above — wealthy fags sue to be married, backlash against queers swells, straight white guys define our agenda, marriage ends up with decisions that grant LGBT exemptions from discrimination in California and in Walkers’ court in a case launched by straight white guys?

The issue of marriage is just a vehicle. The payload is the state ending discrimination in all of its practices. It is disgusting to me that marriage ended up getting us here, but I think that I can see daylight through Kennedy.

Yet still queers are getting fired, not getting jobs and losing housing because there is a flashing green light signaling that we can be treated like second class citi­zens.

Up or down?

Meet the Amarnath Shivalingam

Our latest newsletter is choc a bloc with terrific pieces. Peter Lee reports on the ghastly ongoing strug­gles in Kashmir, and the enormous tensions caused by the Hindu shrine of the Amarnath Shivalingam. This is a large ice spike displaying the lingam shape, formed by water dripping on the floor of the immense Amarnath cave in the remote high mountains of Kashmir. In 2006, disaster struck. Climatic conditions caused a failure of the Shivalingam and it did not form at all. A crude and clearly-handcrafted snowman pinch-hitting for the Shiv­alingam outraged the Hindu faithful. Lee’s story lays out the macabre saga and the overall political tragedy.

Meet the women trying to reform America’s insane sex offender laws. JoAnn Wypijewski talks to them, describes their struggle.

“Food security” … “sustainable agriculture” … “slow food” … “food sovereignty.” R.G. Davis separates the real from the phony in the world of organic food.

(Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com.)

]]> http://theava.com/archives/7881/feed 0 http://theava.com/archives/7857 http://theava.com/archives/7857#comments Wed, 18 Aug 2010 21:24:37 +0000 Daniel Mintz http://theava.com/?p=7857

More than a year in the making, an advisory plan for using the Humboldt Bay Municipal Water District’s water surplus includes an option that was torpedoed when it was proposed a few years ago — shipping water out of the county, to another municipality.

A report by a 15-member Water Resource Planning Advisory Committee was presented to the District’s Board of Directors at its August 12 meeting. A product of numerous public meetings, it divides proposals for use of the District’s 60 million gallon per day industrial water surplus into two categories: those that would hap­pen within the District’s boundaries and those outside of them.

Since 1775, when the Spanish vessels Santiago and Sonora anchored in Trinidad Bay, the surviving Ameri­can Indian nations of California’s northcoast have with­stood violent conquest, systematic land expropriation, kidnapping and forced indoctrination of their children via a residential school system that persisted for nearly a century, destruction of their languages and spiritual tra­ditions, New Age commercialization of their lifestyles wrought in no small part by recent waves of settlers beginning with the Back to the Land movement of the ’60s and ’70s, and various other facets of a campaign of cultural genocide, still ongoing.

Throughout this time, the thin margins of cultural and physical survival maintained by nations such as the Yurok, Karok, Pomo, Hoopa, Wiyot, Tolowa, and other native people of the Russian, Eel, Trinity, and Klamath River watersheds have been assured largely by one factor: their ability to harvest seafood in the coastal waters of the Pacific and the tributaries that feed it, with all of the profound cultural meanings these practices entail. So, as the State of California’s privately-funded Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Initiative’s planning process has lurched toward the criminalization of small-scale sea food harvesting via a series of so-called Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) — often located in the primary subsistence areas these native people have used from, in the words of many, “time immemorial” — a new pan-Indian movement has steadily been gathering in resistance to it.

We didn’t usually have to leave the waterfront for entertainment. Waldo Point was its own ongoing movie and endlessly entertaining. But when Mark Whittington, the Independent Journal reporter for southern Marin, came over to my houseboat, The Toots & Toots, with an invitation to a dinner and musical revue at the civic cen­ter, I couldn’t pass it up. The entertainment was written, choreographed and directed by County Counsel Douglas “Baloney” Maloney, who, Mark said, produced such an event annually, using current events in Marin County as themes for the songs he wrote.

In a historic protest on July 21, members of dozens of California Indian Tribes and their allies marched through the streets of downtown Fort Bragg protesting the viola­tion of indigenous fishing and gathering rights under Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Marine Life Protec­tion Act (MLPA) Initiative.

“This is the biggest protest on any issue held on the North Coast since the Redwood Summer of 1990,” said Dan Hamburg, former North Coast Congressman and a current Green Party candidate for Mendocino County Supervisor, as he marched beside me on the way to the MLPA Blue Ribbon Task Force meeting in Fort Bragg.

In her guest opinion in the Eureka Times-Standard on June 29, Former Democratic Assemblywoman Virginia Strom-Martin claimed that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s fast-track Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Initiative is “the most open and transparent process” that she has ever been involved with.

However, a historic protest the same day by over 40 activists from the Yurok, Karuk, Hoopa Valley, Tolowa, Cahto and other tribes at the MLPA Science Advisory Team meeting in Eureka exposed Strom’s claim for the falsehood that it is. They demonstrated how the only thing “open” about the process is the open, racist disre­gard by MLPA officials for tribal gathering and fishing rights.

There are three chapters to this story: Subdivision of Albion Head; Piecemeal Development of the Mendocino Outback; Official Waste with Over, Under, and Non-regulation from Characteristic Supervisory Dither and Constipation.

Guarding the southern shore of the mouth of the Albion River is a grassy rounded hill, pretty much in its native state and unmarred by structures. In November of 2008, present owner Carol Smith of “Oak Grove Enter­prises, Inc. Representing B&C Smith Family Trust, Big River Partners, LLC, & Mendocino for Economic Growth,” re-filed an application for a Boundary Line Adjustment to reconfigure her one huge parcel and three tiny parcels into one big parcel and three good-sized par­cels to enable her to effectively subdivide the headlands.

There were some interesting things about Tuesday’s very preliminary election results which should not go unnoticed.

Only about 12,800 of Tuesday’s votes have been counted. There are more than 10,000 votes uncounted, mostly absentee ballots turned in on Election Day. So these early results could easily change by the time the rest of the votes are counted in a few weeks.

If the November election gets just a conservative 55% turnout of registered voters, that translates to 3,000 to 4,000 more votes countywide in November than were cast on Tuesday. That means that in the close elections, people who didn’t vote in the primary may well decide the outcome of the two closest local races: District Attorney and Third District Supervisor. (And, if any of the candidates engage in a serious get-out-the-vote effort, there could be even more new votes in November.)

In the DA’s race, we note that newcomer Matt Finnegan got a surprisingly respectable 30% or about 3500 of the 11,700 votes for DA on Tuesday. (About 1100 voters didn’t even bother to vote for District Attorney.) So the questions regarding the District Attorney race in November will be:

How many of Finnegan’s 3500 votes will go to Lintott and how many to Eyster? (Contrary to some observers, we suspect the majority will go to Lintott because Finnegan ran as a tough on crime DA and Eyster is probably perceived by Finnegan voters as a DA who won’t file as many cases — that is, unless Eyster recasts his opposition to Lintott and convinces Finnegan voters that his promised “gatekeeper” role will produce more public safety, not just fewer charges filed.) But the bigger question may be how many of the several thousand additional November voters will Eyster get? Recent history tends to indicate that the challenger will get more of them. But lots of things could change between now and November.

Then we have the semi-squeaker race for Third District Supervisor. Based on the limited number of votes counted so far, incumbent John Pinches is only three (3) votes short of winning over Willits City Councilwoman Holly Madrigal and Brooktrails Community District Board member Tony Orth outright — a disappointing and unimpressive percentage for an incumbent Supervisor. (Mr. Pinches got 1517 of the 3038 votes cast in the Third District. Half of 3038 is 1519 — Pinches was only three votes short.) But there are more than 1800 Third District ballots still uncounted, primarily the absentee votes that were turned in on election day, June 8. This Third District race has the potential of becoming unusually tight and contentious before it even reaches the general election — if it ever does. If Pinches’ outright-win margin after all the votes are in is still only a few votes, will there be a recount? Alternatively, if Pinches is only a few votes short of an outright win (as he is now), will there be a recount? As far as we know, recounts are only required if the difference between candidates is below a certain amount. Are recounts required if the results are very close to the 50%+1 threshold in a primary for one of the candidates? Who knows? Presumably, supporters of Pinches and Madrigal are looking into this. And who pays? If a recount is mandated by the Elections Code, the County will have to find the money to do it. Otherwise the candidates might have to pony up if they want a recount.

Some local readers may remember the very close Fourth District race between Liz Henry and Heather Drum in the early 90s. As we recall, Ms. Henry ended up winning by a margin in the single digits. Among the small but significant questions back then when they did the County’s last recount were some voters whose district residency was not clear — a few Fourth District voters had residences in both the Fifth (in Mendocino) and the Fourth (Fort Bragg). Which district could they legally vote in? A few were registered in the wrong district, having moved since they last registered. A few were registered in Mendocino County, but actually lived elsewhere in the state. Other small questions involved a lack of clarity about who the voter meant to vote for, if anyone, on a few ballots; and, I think, a few simple counting errors.

For now, all we can say is that we expect most of Mr. Orth’s votes to be gathered up by Ms. Madrigal in the general election (if there is one) since Orth and Madrigal are both, more or less, “liberals,” whereas Pinches is a libertarian Republican. So if this Third District race goes to a run-off in November, Ms. Madrigal could make it interesting. If Pinches doesn’t win outright in the primary after all the votes are counted in a few weeks, that means that he may be more vulnerable than he thought.

In the Fifth District, the numbers went pretty much as we predicted, although Mastin appears to have received some votes we thought would go to Hamburg — but there are still almost 2,000 Fifth District votes uncounted. We predicted Hamburg 40%; Roberts 32%; Mastin 16%; de Vall 14%. So far it’s Hamburg 34%, Roberts 30%, Mastin 21% and de Vall 14%. That’s still pretty much what we expected. Ms. Roberts will probably still go into the run-off by the time the remaining votes are counted, but it’s hard to imagine her getting more than the standard conservative allocation of around 40% in the Fifth District come November.

A few other minor preliminary notes: Although almost 12,800 Mendo votes have been counted so far, those running unopposed didn’t get anywhere near that number of people checking them off even though they were the only choice. Sheriff Allman got 10,293, or about 80% of the votes so far. County Clerk-Recorder-Assessor Susan Ranochak got 9,351 or about 73%. Auditor Meredith Ford got 9,217 or about 72%. And County School Superintendent Paul Tichinin got a niggardly 9212 or about 72%.