Mendocino County Today: Monday 8/26/2024

Hopland Horses | Warming | Elk Protest | Local Band | Water Authority | Dahlia | Mundane Exigencies | Angelo Reserve | Sweeney Confession | Richardson House | Oakland Coliseum | Dolores Park | Hip Replacement | Yesterday's Catch | Teleportation Complaint | Reluctant Mongering | Clarkia | Israel Trip | Wanted Poster | DNC Tunes | Meet People | Labor Movement | Make Grave | Footnote Father | Strong Tea | Avoiding Escalation | Safari Shot

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SEASONAL CONDITIONS RETURN as higher temperatures and a drier air mass sets in. Highs around 100 are possible for the interior by mid week. The return of moisture is likely as a closed upper low lurks early next week. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): 53F under clear skies this Monday morning on the coast. We might see a bit of fog but mostly clear conditions prevail until further notice.

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A READER COMMENTS:

Saw Boonfire at the Cloverdale Friday Night live concert this past Friday. Exciting to see local kids going for it. Loved the girl singer's voice. Not exactly my kind of music, but I appreciated the talent. What really impressed me was how many community members of Anderson Valley came out to give moral support to the band. Very cool. Warmed my heart.

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UKIAH VALLEY WATER AUTHORITY READIES FOR BIG CHANGES: What’s Next?

by Monica Huettl

The Ukiah Valley Water Authority held a regular meeting of the water executive committee on August 6 at 5 PM at the Ukiah Valley Conference Center, chaired by Adam Gaska. Currently the UVWA is comprised of the City of Ukiah, and the Redwood Valley and Millview County Water Districts. RV and Millview are managed by the Willow County Water District, but they will transition to Ukiah City management in January 2025. Other local water districts may, in the future, opt to sign on to the Joint Powers Authority document that formed the UVWA.…

https://mendofever.com/2024/08/26/ukiah-valley-water-authority-readies-for-big-changes-whats-next/

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THANKS FOR NOTHING, POSTMODERN AMERICA

Warmest spiritual greetings,

Sunday August 25th 2024 Anno Domini in Ukiah, California USA was spent identifying with that which moves and otherwise works through this body-mind complex.  Having already attended Catholic Mass on Saturday at the church located right behind the Royal Motel, the day was free for mundane exigencies.  Got up early and did the laundry!  And then, ambled over to the Ukiah Co-op for a breakfast burrito.  Walked slowly after that to a mostly empty downtown Ukiah, stopping for a relaxing sunny break at the Alex. R. Thomas Jr. town plaza.  Continued on to Black Oak Coffee. And then, mindfully headed east to the Pear Tree shopping mall.  Stops at the clothing stores yielded nothing, and then walked back via The Great Redwood Trail to Safeway in order to purchase LOTTO tickets, plus discounted deli food and more coconut water.  Returning to the motel room, took a refreshing shower.  Afterwards enjoyed eating the deli food while listening to the most recent YouTube video of Amma (the hugging saint) leading chants to a blissed out audience.  

All throughout the day and evening, witnessed the mental factory worrying about what is going to happen next.  Nobody anywhere has indicated that they wish to do anything of any social importance with me at all.  Money is presently adequate but not abundant.  It would be expensive to continue being at the motel in Ukiah.  There is necessary maintenance such as food, too.  Nobody has offered me anything in the way of solidarity in Washington, D.C. at the peace vigil, should I show up there.  And then there is the expense of air travel, and the complication of negotiating this over the Labor Day federal holiday.  And, if I do somehow get from Ukiah to the Ronald Reagan International AIrport, and using my still good D.C. Metro Senior Card, who or what will be there at the Peace Vigil?  Can I go somewhere indoors to relax at somebody's place?  Or am I then living homeless across the street from the White House?  And if I used the money in the checking account to stay another month at the motel in Ukiah, will being in Mendocino County without any purpose be better?  And what happens after that?  

Thank you to postmodern America for this unique situation.  I couldn't have done it without you.  

Craig Louis Stehr

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I BOMBED JUDI BARI — THE MYSTERY THAT NEVER REALLY WAS

by Mike Sweeney, as told to Bruce Anderson

I’m desperate, Bruce. I’d considered bombing you at one time, but two bombings in Mendocino County at that particular time would have been pushing my luck, not that it was luck that I got away with bombing Eliza Devlin, aka Judi Bari as I called her in the novel I was writing about her. Hell, we’re old, and no one except us cares about this stuff anymore.

I live in New Zealand now and plan to stay unless by some fluke you win and I’m extradited. Anyway, here goes:

I’m the only person who knows the whole truth about the bombing of Judi Bari because I did it, and I’ve orchestrated the cover-up for all these years since. The other person who knows the whole truth is dead because I murdered her, albeit in slow motion.

There are quite a few people who know parts of the truth about the bombing, and there are quite a few people who’ve lived off its mythology all these years — literally lived off it in some cases. I’ll name each of these mercenary frauds and explain how each was involved. Why? Because I’m old and far away, and the truth should at last be told.

I bombed Judi Bari in May of 1990. Like Judi, I’m a violent person. She may have been even more violent than me. She might have been crazy too, but all that baloney about “Gandhian non-violence” from her was belied by her real life behavior.

Judi and I fire bombed the hangars at the old Naval air strip southwest of Santa Rosa back in 1980. We were just married. I guess you could say the 1980 bombs we did together in Santa Rosa was our honeymoon.

Before we did that one, which got a big play in the local newspapers, we did minor league sabs of my former wife’s property out in Sebastopol. Her name was Cynthia Denenhotz. I met her at Stanford in ‘68 where we belonged to a commie cult run by an English professor named H. Bruce Franklin. We wrecked Cynthia's water pump one time, for instance. Judi loved those late-night sabotage forays. Me too. We were true soulmates.

I first hooked up with Judi Bari at a Maoist labor convention where the federal government probably made up half the participants. We were both labor organizers, more or less, although neither one of us ever had a real job for more than a few weeks.

My estranged first wife, the aforementioned Cynthia Denenholtz, whose water pump Judi and I had sabbed, had restraining orders out on me for harassing her, and as much as I wanted to bomb Cynthia I’m pretty sure I would have got caught because she and I used to be Maoist bombers back at Stanford where we met in 1968. People knew our histories, and they’d have known if I had done it.

But Cynthia, even when we broke up, never threatened to go to the cops about me like Judi did all the time after we moved to Redwood Valley where our marriage ran up on the rocks. In Redwood Valley, Judi even accused me of a Michael Jackson with our youngest daughter. She would say anything if she thought it served her interests, and that’s why I came to hate her.

We’d moved to Redwood Valley from Santa Rosa after we’d scammed Hewlett-Packard by threatening to sue them for their planned development. Our threat worked. They paid us to go away. We used that money to buy a big piece of bare ground on Humphreys Lane in Redwood Valley. We built a spec house on that lot, but we were no longer happy together. Judi wanted more than her share of the money we had, and she wanted to run around all the time with hippies and smoke dope and use speed. I didn’t want my daughters around those people. I wanted to be respectable. I didn’t like hippies, and I still don’t like hippies.

So I started writing recycling grants with some help from Richard Shoemaker, my pal and protector, who was a Mendocino County Supervisor. Shoemaker got Wes Chesbro, the state senator who sat on the state’s garbage board, to shove a half-million tax dollars my way. All I had to do then was get a Fort Bragg lady named Carol O’Neal out of the way of the recycling operation she was running — which I did — and I was up and running, reborn, as the county’s official recycler. Shoemaker and Chesbro got me all set up in Ukiah, even though Mendocino County already had a garbage agency of its own.

But here was Judi Bari running around with Darryl Cherney doing all kinds of crazy stuff to get her name in the paper while I stayed home with the kids, or had to take them with me to my “office” at the Mendocino Environment Center in downtown Ukiah. When I complained about her hippie lifestyle, she’d say, “Fuck you, Mike. I’ll go to the cops and tell them everything we did, all those felonies, if you rat on me.”

Like I was supposed to live with this blackmailer for the next 50 years? She had to go.

Cynthia Denenholtz and I had two kids together before we split up and I married Judi Bari with whom I had two more kids. Cynthia didn’t want to be a radical anymore. Or a snitch. I was still pretending to be a radical and I was a real snitch for the FBI.

There are lots of old sellout rads like us out there; not that I blame any of them for going straight and not that I was ever on the left. I tried to go straight myself in Ukiah but my big mouth wife wouldn’t let me. She was always hanging the bombs we did together in Santa Rosa over my head. And other stuff, too, some of it seriously felonious.

All the temporary radicals we knew then went back to the upper middleclass privilege they’d come out of, and now they all have big houses in the hills. Heck, my house on Running Springs Road, off Orr Springs Road west of Ukiah, is pretty darn big on a pretty darn big 20 acres. If you didn’t know I was a car bomber and an FBI stoolie you’d think I was just like Dan Hamburg! Just another rich Stanford liberal in a big redwood solar house in the hills who’d done real well for himself.

By the way, my house on Running Springs is the only one on the road that isn’t numbered, and don’t ever try to drop in on me because it’s kinda dangerous, if you get my drift. Bruce Anderson and Kate Coleman were up here snooping around one day and they don’t know how close they came. I had both of them in my crosshairs; if either one of them had put one foot on my property — especially Anderson — they’d have both been wherever my ex-wife is now.

Way back in the late 1960s, as I’ve mentioned, I joined Venceremos, a Maoist-oriented college gang based at Stanford. As a kid in Santa Barbara I’d belonged to the Young Republicans, then and now my true people. My dad was a lawyer who worked for Chevron and then was an official in the Nixon Administration. I grew up in a nice house in Santa Barbara. (There are no not nice houses in Santa Barbara.) I never was a liberal, and I certainly never was a radical. I was always for capitalism and its government, but in college I joined the radicals so I could help the government destroy them. (My dad, by the way, always subscribed to the AVA because he was sure I'd have to defend myself in court against all the charges you were making against me in your newspaper.)

There was another Venceremos group that went to Cuba for a couple of weeks every year to cut a few stalks of sugarcane and generally have a good time showing solidarity with Castro. Our Stanford group thought that that Venceremos was a bunch of wimps. Besides which they were Stalinists while we were followers of The Great Helmsman, Mao Tse Tung, and practically memorized the fortune cookie maxims in his Little Red Book. Yes, we were that dumb. And natural fascists, a lot of us, as I will be the first to admit. A lot of rich kids who went to elite colleges in the 1960s played revolution for a while, and I was one of them. Sort of.

At Stanford, I snitched on the rads for the FBI at the same time as I committed crimes for the revolution, which partially explains why I haven’t been arrested yet for bombing my ex-wife, Judi Bari.

Back in my Stanford days my little group of revolutionaries planted bombs all over the Bay Area. Our leader was an English professor named H. Bruce Franklin. He wore leather jackets and stomped around campus like he was a tough guy prole and, of course, slept with his 18 and 19-year-old students. Rich radicals who’ve never worked still act like this. They think it’s “working-class.” It’s patronizing and stupid is what it is, but how smart do you have to be to get over on the Pacifica Network? The professor got some off campus real prole kids killed, but he landed on his feet in another English department without even breaking his tea cup! Being a fake radical in 1969 was the in-thing to do. Until people started getting killed

Judi Bari always pretended to be from the “working-class,” but she grew up in Silver Springs, Maryland, hardly a haven of wage workers. Her parents had been communists, but they weren’t communists by the time Judi was born. They’d been scared straight by events of an earlier era. Very nice people, like my parents, and conventionally successful. Mom was a math prof at Johns Hopkins, Dad a diamond cutter. Judi was a red diaper baby. Her sister, Gina Kolata, went on to become the lead science writer for the New York Times.

By the way, I knew another Mendo guy back at Stanford — Mike Koepf. He lives near Elk on Greenwood Road. He was just out of the Green Berets and back from Vietnam when he was hanging around Stanford in the 1960s. Some of the young writers in Wallace Stegner’s writing program — people like Max Crawford — were weekend radicals at the time. Koepf showed them how to wear camo and how to walk around in the woods looking like guerrillas. Koepf has always been a snitch, just like me. Koepf hated Judi Bari; hated her maybe even more intensely than I hated her, but much as he enjoyed seeing her get blown up, Koepf wouldn’t have had the cojones to do it himself in another 25 life times. He’s afraid of the cops and even more afraid of jail.

Anyway, as you can already see I’m jumping around a lot, chronologically speaking, as I tell my story, but it’s interesting how the 60s have come back to bite so many of us years after we all thought it was all finally over and everyone, even the cops, have closed the books on us.

Of course when you kill people it’s never really over, is it?

And I killed Judi Bari in 1990 but she didn’t die until 1997.

Mike Koepf’s pal, Max Crawford, wrote a semi-famous book about all of us pretend-revolutionaries at Stanford. Crawford’s opus was called “The Bad Communist,” but that book was no novel. It was a prose documentary. Max was obviously at ground zero to have written that one because his purported novel tells in insider detail about the real life black guy who was offed up in the hills of Santa Cruz. And that poor dupe wasn’t the only person we murdered in that period, which is what happens when a bunch of college whack-offs like we were bring real life criminals into our political groups.

The pseudo-left notion at the time was that criminals — prison inmates — were the vanguard of the proletariat. Good one, Professor H. Bruce. Got any more bright ideas? The vanguard we grouped with were the vanguard of sleep-with-the-naive coeds-and-ripoff-the-rest-of-the-young-fools for their credit cards and whatever else they’ve got; that was our prison vanguard. Between the vanguard and the feds, and the attention his book attracted, Crawford got so scared he took off for Paris to hide out for a couple of years.

A month before I tried to kill Judi Bari with my car bomb, I helped Judi and Darryl Cherney with the fire bomb at LP’s office just south of Cloverdale in April of 1990. It didn’t work the way it was supposed to, unfortunately, but it did start a small fire. Judi made a sign we leaned up against a tree facing Highway 101 that said, “L-P Screws Millworkers.”

As if millworkers didn’t know that, and as if a bunch of trust fund potheads in the hills were of any use to any working person anywhere anyway. (That sign, and a bunch like it, were propped up near the door of the MEC at 106 West Standley.)

Worse than unfortunately for me, the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department still has most of the apparatus from the L-P bomb. I understand that it’s been compared to the fire bombs Judi and I made in 1980 to get rid of the airstrip hangars southwest of Santa Rosa. Only one of the hangar detonators worked the way it was supposed to work; the other one didn’t go off. The cops have it, too. Signature bombs they call them. My signature. But so far they haven’t made the link to me; or if they have they aren’t saying because, well, I’ve got the feds by the short hairs.

The 1980 airstrip bomb in Santa Rosa that didn’t go off was supposed to ignite the 20,000 gallons of airplane fuel in the underground tanks outside the hangars. As it was, the kid asleep in the hangar that did explode the way it was supposed to had to run for his life. If the underground fuel had gone up that boy would have been a roasted marshmallow. Collateral damage, as they say.

Judi and I thought the explosions we’d set off at the old Santa Rosa airfield were funny, and the Press Democrat’s coverage even funnier. And we both knew the cops were way too dumb to pin it on us. Sure enough, they didn’t.

But Bob Williams was no dummy. He leased those hangars. He knew we did it but he couldn’t pin it on us. I was sure he looked forward to testifying against me as soon as the cops got around to making the DNA link. They’ve got me on the DNA, but so far so good. They haven’t subpoenaed any of us, and here we are material witnesses to big league felonies!

DNA. The FBI refused independent investigators access to original documents, but they finally returned the originals of the Lord’s Avenger Letter to the Press Democrat. Asked about it, an editor at the paper said it had been “lost,” although the paper, at the time, maintained an archival library and a full-time archivist.)

The problem I had with Judi was her big mouth. She had all this felony information on me and she just kept on bringing it up every time I talked about getting custody of the kids, she being an unfit mother and running around using dope at all hours with a bunch of degenerates like Cherney. If she talked, I’d go to the pen for a long time. But she’d go too because I had a lot of felony information on her. And I had the goods on Cherney and Pam Davis and Karen Pickett. And Utah Phillips. And Bill Simpich and Dennis Cunningham and Tony Serra and those obnoxious little pricks Ben Rosenfeld and Robert Bloom.

I’ve even got the goods on low-level folks like Gary and Betty Ball and the MEC’s landlord, John McCowen. Like I said, when I go all these people are going with me. And that’s why I haven’t gone to prison and won’t because I’m old and far, far away and, like I said, nobody cares except you, bro.

McCowen rented the MEC premises to the FBI for the Redwood Summer years, which is one big reason why I got to have my “office” there at 106 Standley, Ukiah, back when a few nuts were actually committing industrial sabotage by wrecking logging equipment, a federal crime, hence the FBI in Ukiah with their fake environment center. I even had my own key to the front door, to which I tacked one of the so-called death threats Judi used to say she was getting all the time. (She either wrote them herself or I wrote them.) And of course I wrote the Argus letter to the Ukiah cops about Judi doing her mail order marijuana business. Because I lived literally inches from her at 9691 Humphrey Lane, Redwood Valley, even after we were separated, I knew all her movements and everything she was doing; I was the only person who could effectively snitch her off. I wanted her out of my life peacefully by trying to frame her, but it didn't work and I did what I had to do.

I put that last bomb, the Judi Bari bomb -- my most famous bomb -- under the driver’s seat of her car while her car was parked in front of the Mendocino Environment Center on West Standley Street in Ukiah on the north side of the Mendocino County Courthouse. I designed it so it would explode far from Ukiah. Which it did. When Judi didn’t die like she was supposed to, I had to write The Lord’s Avenger Letter saying I, Mike Sweeney, aka The Lord’s Avenger, put the bomb in her car in Willits two full days before it blew up. I had to say I put the bomb in her car in Willits because I was with Meredyth Rinehard that Tuesday night before I put the bomb in her car, and I didn't have a solid alibi for any part of the next day, Wednesday, or Wednesday night. Judi drove down to the Bay Area Wednesday afternoon with the bomb and Utah Phillips in her car. The bomb exploded just before noon on Thursday, May 20th, 1990.

She could have been in on it, but people say, Would she have been crazy enough to knowingly drive around with a bomb under her seat? Sure, if she had been assured by me that it wouldn't got off and she had no idea how it worked, and she wanted it to be found there for her own cockamamie, self-aggrandizing reasons.

But Judi survived my bomb. And I had a big prob, which made me write my hurry-up Lord’s Avenger Letter to divert attention from myself, the ex-husband, always the first looked-at perp.

Meredyth, my alibi, my girlfriend, worked for the Mendocino County Health Department and, I can tell you, she is very unhappy to be involved in any of this after all these years. But she’ll tell the truth that I was with her when the Lord’s Avenger says he was putting the bomb in Judi Bari’s car in Willits because she was with me and the Avenger both, so to speak, and so were her two kids.

Nobody was with me on Put-The-Bomb-In-Judi’s-Car Wednesday when I did what I had to do, although I’ve made the mistake of placing myself, however vaguely, in three presumably different places that day. (1) “With my kids; (2) at work; (3) at home.” I was with my kids after Judi left Redwood Valley for Ukiah. I was at work in my office at the MEC with the bomb I’d made; and after I shoved the bomb under her seat with its timer and switch on I went back home to Redwood Valley.

But nobody can place me at any of these venues when I need to be placed at them!

My co-conspirators in the cover-up for all these years got their stories ready for court. They now say Utah Phillips was playing his guitar in the doorway of the MEC the day I put the bomb in Judi’s car so he would have seen me do it. He wasn’t in the doorway. Utah and the lawyers, who I’ll take down with me when I go because they’re also in this up to their shifty, dollar sign eyebrows, were merely doing some legal site prep by placing Utah in the MEC’s doorway so he can say he never saw me there.

In living fact, Judi was showing Utah off directly across the street in front of the Courthouse at her Redwood Summer press conference. He was kind of a trophy for her because a lot of the doofuses around here thought Utah was a real deal famous person anarchist. Which is about as impressive as saying you’re the tallest guy in Philo, but there it is.

I put the bomb in Judi’s car from my office at the MEC because (1) I knew our two little girls would definitely not be in the car because they were at Meredyth’s house in Redwood Valley (2) If I put the bomb in Judi’s car out in Redwood Valley where we all lived together, the girls might have jumped in to go into Ukiah with their mother for some reason, and I didn’t want to risk the thing going off with them in the car (3) I was afraid that if I put the bomb in Judi’s car in Redwood Valley real early Wednesday morning after she and Utah and Dakota Sid and Mrs. Utah and Mrs. Sid finally fell asleep about two in the morning, the 12 hours on my timer might elapse and activate the bomb in Ukiah, thus focusing a whole lotta attention on me. (4) I had total access to Judi’s Subaru at all times, just like I had total access to her garage-house inches from the trailer where we both lived out on Humphrey Lane in Redwood Valley.

And my “office” was at the MEC in downtown Ukiah in McCowen’s dingy cave of a slum structure opposite the Courthouse the FBI leased from him. Nobody would suspect anything peculiar if they saw me open Judi’s car door and put something in her car. Which is what I did. I walked right out of the MEC with the thing wrapped in a towel and shoved it under Judi’s seat, having constructed it so it would be a perfectly snug fit. I snapped the On switch On, set the clock going and wished my little creation a happy trip south, far from me, the perp, the man who’s made a lot of bombs but not a single known one that worked the way it was supposed to.

But the bomb got all the way to Berkeley and Oakland without going off. Judi had gone to a meeting with Seeds of Peace (another group of lurks and murks) in Berkeley then drove to Oakland where she spent the night in the busy home of mega-creep, David Kemnitzer. All this time the bomb was silently ticking off the hours. Some time between three and four in the morning the twelve hours on the clock had elapsed and my bomb was live! All it would take now was the sudden movement of the vehicle -- a sharp turn, sudden braking, even a lane change -- to ignite it. Which is what happened only a few blocks from Kemnitzer’s house in front of Oakland High School.

I was in Ukiah and Redwood Valley when my bomb went boom. I was shocked! that Judi lived. I could be implicated! One end cap blew off slightly before the other, thus diverting a lot of the device’s power laterally instead of upwards. If it had exploded the way I built it to explode, Judi and Cherney both would have been hugging trees eternally, far, far from redwood country.

And if she and Cherney had died in the explosion I would have been home free. Everyone would have assumed she was knowingly transporting my creation and all my problems and potential problems would have been over.

But because she didn’t die my problems were just beginning, and now here I was with two big books on the case coming up and a whole lot of people already giving me the perp look, people like Steve Talbot, for instance. Talbot made a whole PBS movie implicating me in the bombing, and then he went on Belva Davis’s KQED Television Show and said Judi Bari had told him I bombed her!

And now DNA. There’s DNA on three of the letters, including the Lord’s Avenger Letter, that can be linked straight back to me. It’s just a matter of time before everything comes apart.

As soon as I heard Judi had survived my bomb, I hustled down to the Oakland hospital where, as her husband (on paper) I got to see her. She was seriously injured, and groggy from the medications, but we quickly agreed if she told the truth about the bombing, that I had done it, we would both go to prison because I would rat her out too for all the felonies we’d committed together, and we would not see our daughters grow up. We agreed to blame the cops.

I wrote the Lord’s Avenger Letter with the hurry up help from a Concordance, a fact Don Foster, the best documents analyst guy in the country, confirmed in such excruciating and truly exact detail all I can do is squirm and say, “Not me. I didn’t do it.”

The idea of the Lord’s Avenger Letter was to divert attention from me onto every other male in the Redwood Empire. I wrote it like I was a religious nut case of a logger who was particularly irate about Judi’s performance at an anti-abortion rally in Ukiah. She and Cherney had walked right into the demonstrators, many of them visibly deranged, singing “Shall The Fetus Be Aborted,” a grotesque insult and infuriating to the Christians, many of whom were brandishing those tiny plastic Mr. Peanut-like fetuses and with their hands raised to the skies, talking in tongues to the sky gods.

Their leader was a huge guy who’d been an All-Pro defensive end with the Cleveland Browns. If Mr. All-Pro had gone off there would have been some serious mayhem the length of Dora Street. Fortunately for Bari and Cherney and the rest of us, including me, Mike Sweeney, who was there taking photos for my bomb plot and for my buddies at the FBI, Mr. Staley was in direct communication with God at the time and had failed to note the pests who’d invaded his flock.

Every smart person who’s paid any attention to this case always points straight at me. I can’t keep it in Mendocino County among the dummies much longer; the world outside isn’t all KMUD and KZYX and KPFA.

But something’s up, and it looks like it’s me. The cops are sniffing around and not one cent of the $3.2 million Darryl Cherney and my two daughters “won” in that phony federal suit has been paid out. I was pretty sure I was going to get arrested. But if I go I wasn’t going alone because a lot of people have helped cover up the truth about the bombing and I’m taking them down with me. Count on that.

I had a girlfriend right away when Judi and I split the blanket or, if you prefer, tore up the Little Red Book. Her name was Meredyth Rinehard. I had her kids seal the Lord’s Avenger letter that I wrote in a big hurry and mailed to Mike Geniella at the Press Democrat as soon as I heard my bomb hadn’t killed Judi. Meredyth's kids were little. Little kids will do whatever you ask them to do, and I asked them to seal the envelope and lick the stamp on it for me. DNA was just coming in as a criminal identifier in 1990, but just in case I didn’t want my DNA on the thing. Or Judi’s DNA on it through our daughters. So I asked Meredyth’s kids to do it.

If the subpoenas go out I know Meredyth’s gonna be real quick to give me up. Pam Davis and Karen Pickett will rat me out, too, but I’ve got so much felony-quality stuff on all of them, including their crumb bum “progressive” lawyers, and even more on that idiot Cherney, and on Brannan’s Redwood Summer Justice Project Scam-a-rama, and even on Judge Wilkins — her husband was a fellow Maoist, among her many disqualifying relationships — I’ll be taking a whole lotta so-called “progressives” down with me if the feds indict me. I’m not going to jail alone. And you watch the snitch fest when the DNA subpoenas arrive at certain addresses!

Never happened, and here I am on the other side of the world living the good life for the time left to me.

How did I pull it off? Simple. I was a snitch for the FBI all the way back to Stanford. If they had moved on me for the bombing, I’d have revealed their activities in Mendocino County during the Redwood Summer period, right down to their phony enviro office at the Mendocino Environment Center across Standley Street from the County Courthouse.

So the feds gave me a free pass to murder my wife rather than have me reveal their undercover operations based in Ukiah.

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ONCE MORE TO THE COLISEUM

by Tommy Wayne Kramer

A few days from now son Lucas and I will take our seats at the Oakland Coliseum, cheer on the A’s, have a long, last sentimental look around and go home.

The stadium is maybe the worst in baseball, the A’s are in last place and at the end of the season are leaving Oakland forever; it could be a melancholy affair.

Bart Giamatti, a former Commission of Major League Baseball and once an Ivy League academic, wrote “Baseball is designed to break your heart.”

I always took those words and sentiment to mean baseball is a game where defeat is likely; even the best hitters in the game, today and a hundred years ago, fail two out of three times to the plate, and even the best pitchers will get beat on a weak, broken bat dribbler that sneaks through the infield and scores the winning run in the 13th inning.

Or the umpire will miss a close play at home in the 14th. You lose. Again.

But baseball’s heartbreaking essence includes more than what happens on the field and which produces sufficient despair by itself. Baseball is a game that, learned young, takes hold of a heart and clings to it forever. And forever means baseball has a lot of time to break a lot of hearts.

Take the Cleveland Guardians. Please.

The Cleveland Indians, the team I grew up with and to which I gave the best years of my life, one fine day decided to chuck its history and checkered glories, give all its fans their unconditional release, and rebrand itself. It was a decision by the team’s corporate owners, guided by the misguided Wokester fad.

With the “Indians” eradicated and Chief Wahoo lynched from a light pole behind home plate, I’ve adopted the Athletics as my designated team. In response the team will duck out of Oakland (hard on the heels of the city’s Raiders and Warriors) leaving broken hearts scattered around the East Bay, just as the arrival of the A’s in 1968 caused moaning and despair and bitter tears in Kansas City.

So, it’s Oakland and the A’s in an afternoon game. Lucas the kid was a fan back in the Giambi-McGwire era but pays no more attention to baseball in 2024 than he does the S&P 500.

But the sun will shine, the game’s choreography will dazzle, the strategy will unfold and we will be rewarded as opera fans are rewarded with a grand and lively performance, with the added benefit of not knowing how the game will end.

It will be nice to walk the the cool concourse again, smell the hotdogs, eyeball the game-worn jerseys, grab a beer and go sit in a different section than your ticket allows.

Except when it’s over and the game, the A’s, and the Coliseum are additions to the memory bank. They’ll join the list of letdowns and heartbreak baseball has delivered me over the past 70-plus years.

But the game, truly, has been good to me.

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MORE BASEBALL

And how will you celebrate tomorrow’s anniversary of one of the more celebrated sports moments in local history? It will be exactly 40 years since Redwood Valley’s Kelvin Chapman, second baseman for the visiting New York Mets, stepped to the plate with the bases loaded at Candlestick Park and delivered a grand slam that delivered an 11-6 win over the Giants.

Heartbreaking? Well, yeaahhh. But thrilling too. Mike Krukow had started for San Francisco, but it was reliever Mark Davis that delivered the fastball Chapman rocketed over the left field fence. A grand day it was, as Local Kid Makes Good!

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MORE BASEBALL

How is it working out for the Cleveland Baseball Organization, Inc., following its bold masterstroke of killing off the team’s emblem and name?

Right now it looks as stupid as it did back then. The Cleveland team, Inc., has been in first place all season long, but is near the bottom (among 30 MLB teams) in average home game attendance for 2024.

This is the same city that, when the Tribe was winning in the 1990s, filled the ballpark to capacity every day, selling every single seat for every single game, 455 games in a row.

But those were the Indians, led by Chief Wahoo. So the smart people in the Cleveland, Inc., baseball team intervened and made the necessary corrections.

Choke on Woke, you geniuses in the marketing division.

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MY WILLITS ADVENTURE

by Paul Modic

They wheeled me into the extremely bright and white operating room early in the morning.

“Where’s the robot?” I asked.

“That’s the first thing everyone asks,” a nurse said with a laugh. “It’s not here yet.” (The anesthesiologist gave me the choice of a spinal shot or general, I said just do what you did last time.)

The surgeon came by my recovery room in the late afternoon, we looked at the pelvic X-ray of the two artificial hips, and he said he had repeated the procedure two or three times with the robot to get it within two millimeters, the idea being to get both legs equal length. He said that sometimes they can’t be exactly equal when chances of dislocation are factored in, one of the big hazards during the rehab process. (Those shiny new joints look like pretty cool additions.)

Day Two

I’m sitting in my hospital chair with a cuppa coffee at 7:45am with my breakfast in front of me, the CNA just got me out of bed where I’ve been since the hip replacement operation yesterday morning, and the physical therapist will come in an hour to help me get dressed. (Last night I watched two to three hours of convention speeches, often whooping loudly, then managed to get five hours of sleep with my leg squeezers humming, beeping, and flashing all night.)

Another big concern is blood clots, and that’s why I’ve had these leg wigglers attached below my knee to help prevent them from developing. (A blood clot in the leg can travel up and block an artery in a lung, causing a pulmonary embolism, which can usually be successfully treated with blood thinners.)

Two of my nurses are from Covelo, one a sharp handsome fellow who said his family has a 5000 acre ranch up there. I said I’d been feeling no pain, he said that was because I’d been getting strong liquid Tylenol into my arm nonstop since the surgery twenty hours before, and gave me a #5 oxycodone, the lowest dose. I asked how many would kill me, he said twenty, but was probably just trying to scare me straight. (His Covelo cousin is another of my friendly nurses, her twin sister also works on the floor, and several others told me they live in Brook Trails.)

There are many young Mexican men and women working as nurses and CNAs, one gorgeous one visited me in the middle of the night, a statuesque beauty with luxuriant hair. She spoke with a deep sultry accent as she handed me the pee bottle to take into the bathroom with my walker.

(I wanted to find out more about the nurse’s Covelo ranch, with that much land there must be meadows, creeks, and maybe a river, right? He said they have cows which go everywhere, even into the steep forest. He saw me scribbling, I talked about my writing, and he said he won an award in Hawaii for an essay about his culture: half white, half Yuki.)

Breakfast is done, it’s time to start the celebration of the new hip, and I just ordered carrot cake and ice cream for dessert. (Oh yeah, here we go!)

Day Three

This morning feels so weird, I have to try to get someone to help me with every little thing here. I need something to spit into after brushing my teeth, a shower might be nice, help to go pee, get up, get dressed, and put on my leg squeezers. It’s the busy time in the morning, they must be short-staffed, and so I wait. (They say this is elective surgery, and yes there is someone moaning loudly every morning down the hall, with major intestinal pain I was told, so I get no priority as my hip is not a life-threatening condition. I just heard an urgent alarm sounded to bring emergency help to a room)

You’re not allowed to leave your bed without an attendant there with you as you move along with a walker. If you do anyway they are alerted by a loud bed alarm, and then they come running. (Mmm, the coffee just arrived, that should even things out.)

Damn, I forgot what a project and commitment it is to get a total hip replacement: I won’t be able to drive for two months and won’t be able to sit at my computer desk unless I get a leg rest. All this so I won’t have to limp around all the time, and be able to walk in the park again. (Forget the shower and teeth: I got help getting dressed and into my chair, and am awaiting breakfast and the physical therapist.)

I watched Kamala give her speech last night, think she really nailed it, but what a crock, she probably won’t be able to do all those things she proposed or promised, it’s just a show.

One thing for sure, no matter who wins, half the country will be severely disappointed: all I care about is beating Trump and all the Trumpers care about is beating the San Francisco communist Kamala Harris. But then her husband Doug Emhoff knocked at my door holding his clipboard, asked if there was anything I needed, and I thought, “Jeez maybe she will pull this off.”)

(What brought me to this place? I may be paying the price for trashing my hips while hiking up and down the steep mountains out in the Gulch for a few decades. Should I have been more sensible about where I chose to grow those remote pot patches?)

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Home: Last night the pain hit and I felt this seemingly endless and boring discomfort. I took an oxycodone, and within half an hour I felt the sweet release of a hopeless drug addict.

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CATCH OF THE DAY, Sunday, August 24, 2024

JASON BALLEW, Ukiah. Paraphernalia, failure to appear.

LUIS BARRAGAN, Ukiah. DUI, suspended license for DUI.

POLICARPIO GALAVIS-RODRIGUEZ, Ukiah. Attempted robbery, imitation firearm, controlled substance, paraphernalia.

PATRICK JONES, Cotati. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, probation violation.

RICKEY KEYES-CROSLEY, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

AARON LONG, Redwood Valley. Failure to appear.

BERNABE MORENO, Covelo. DUI.

ABIMAEL SERNA-CASTILLO, Ukiah. Assault with deadly weapon not a gun, vandalism, probation revocation.

JOSHUA SLAUGHTER, Fort Bragg. Domestic abuse, false imprisonment.

CHERYL TURNER, San Francisco/Ukiah. Criminal threats.

HOLLAND VANHORN, Willits. Failure to appear.

NORMA VERDUZCO, Willits. Disorderly conduct-under influence, probation revocation, resisting.

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ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Maybe in some aspects not that great anymore, but America is still pretty good. I’d say better than most other places. You can still have a pretty decent life here. I tell my nephews to avoid alcohol & drug abuse & legal problems, be careful who you marry, and find a decent paying job that you like … and you’ll do ok. Not that complicated really. As far as the USA being a ‘War Mongering Nation” we didn’t enter WW1 until it had been going on for almost 4 years, and WW2 had been raging for 2 1/2 years before we got involved, and that was only due to Pearl Harbor, and a few days later, GERMANY DECLARING WAR ON US. So, at worst, we are a reluctant “War Mongering Nation.”

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ASSEMBLYMAN MURATSUCHI ON ISRAEL TRIP:“…To Go To The War Front To Witness For Myself”

As California Native Americans Chant In Legislative Chambers, Muratsuchi Answers Questions On His Trip To Israel; Anti-Ceasefire Letter Signed by 51 Elected Reps Uncovered; Your Questions Answered

by Eva Chrysanthe

https://marincountyconfidential.substack.com/p/assemblyman-muratsuchi-on-israel

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THIS WANTED POSTER was created as a promotional item by and for Jack Stevenson's magazine Pandemonium published in the mid to late 80s. Kind of fun! (Deb Silva)

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BEDEVILED DEMOCRATIC SONG

by David Yearsley

The devil is in the details. During this week’s Democratic National Convention, he was also in an elevator headed down to the infernal basement far below Chicago’s United Center, his hair flaming orange.

Performing the exorcism was the stalwart party songster and piano man John Legend clad in black-and-white vestments with a plunging neckline. He was joined by vocalizing percussionist Sheila E. in “Let’s Go Crazy,” the chart-topping rock-and-roll burner from the late Minnesotan musical genius, Prince.

“Are we gonna let de-elevator bring us down?” the pop stars queried to the searing beat. The brimstone was hurled back at the question with an exuberant “Oh no!” Instead, the Democrats were following Prince’s advice and punching the button for a “higher floor.” Their elevator was going to bust through the glass ceiling and follow a trajectory not directly up to the Pearly Gates, but instead trace an arc just inside the black-lacquered iron fence guarding 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

“Let’s Get Crazy” sounds like an ode to sex, but it is eschatological funk about getting through this life as quickly as possible and to the “afterworld.” Legend happily reminded us that “we’re all gonna die,” that the Grim Reaper would soon be “knocking at the door.”

For reasons of time, the profligate overspending of which had cost James Taylor his spot on the convention’s opening night, Legend skipped Prince’s Intro which begins “Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here today …”

That slow, churchy invocation was scrapped for the dance-till-you-drop Christian debauchery that was meant both to embody and to stoke the surging energy of the Democratic faithful.

Prince’s music was deployed often over these past nights to boost the Minnesota brand of vice-presidential nominee, Tim Walz. During the state-based playlist heard during the roll call, an instrumental version of Prince’s “Kiss” erupted when Minnesota’s turn came. Prince’s lyrics were prudently put on mute, since they open with: “You don’t have to be beautiful to turn me on / I just need your body, baby, from dusk ’til dawn.”

“Let’s Go Crazy” is just as libidinous, as is abundantly clear from Prince’s official video, even if the song lusts for long-term salvation more than for immediate sexual gratification. The track opens Prince’s album Purple Rain of 1984 and was featured in the movie of the same name and year. “Let’s Go Crazy” shot to no. 1 on the charts just as a previous Minnesota politician, former vice president Walter Mondale, was making a tepid run to unseat incumbent Ronald Reagan. Those old-guard Democrats would never have imagined that a Holy Rocker of such polymorphous erotic power could possibly be drafted into campaign service for the party’s good.

Indeed, that same election year of 1984, True Blue Democrat Tipper Gore, who would become Second Lady almost a decade later, discovered her teenage daughter listening to another track from Purple Rain, “Darlin’ Nikki,” a song that depicts the eponymous “sex fiend … masturbating to a magazine.” This revelation of adolescent musical tastes sent Tipper into paroxysms of censorial rage. She co-founded the Parents Music Resource Center the next year. Tipper was doubtless dumfounded by this week’s Democratic canonization of the Prince of Paisley Park.

Thanks to Prince and many of his non-posthumous musical colleagues, God was as ubiquitous as football across the conventions four nights, including Beyoncé’s official campaign song, “Freedom,” recently wrested back from a MAGA snatch-and-grab job: “Lord forgive me, I’ve been runnin’ / Runnin’ blind in truth.”

Still, those who endured the slog asked themselves on what day God had created the DNC and couldn’t He have rested on that day too.

Unconcerned by such theological ruminations, the opening musical act, Jason Isbell’s “Something More than Free” praised Him for supplying a job, any job:

I’m just lucky to have the work
Sunday morning, I’m too tired to go to church
But I thank God for the work
I thank God for the work.

Originally, the Lord was adamantly uninvolved in job creation. But then there was that episode, well-known to JD Vance, about a childless, presumably cat-loving woman, a snake and an organic apple. That was the end of the Edenic Welfare State. Fast-forward a few millennia and a housing crisis of Biblical proportions spread across, then Covid: both hammered on in the endless succession of speeches. It was time for stimulus from above, duly hymned by Isbell.

Bruce Springsteen, whose “Born in the USA” made an audio cameo late on Thursday night, is no longer sufficient to rally the working class with his 40-grit voice and unsustainably sourced power chords. New Jersey is not a Swing State, even if Count Basie was born there. Real, or apparently real, Middle American voices are required. Isbell is an Alabaman, but his rural twang and throaty prayers did the job of tugging at the Heartland strings as he stood alone with his guitar in front of the projection of an old wooden barn with a flag painted on it. The nostalgic backdrop was probably drummed up by AI.

Isbell’s bland sonic hors d’oeuvre got the political palate ready for the hot stuff to come from the likes of Stevie Wonder through to the convention’s concluding act—the surrealistic, onanistic beatings of the Chicago Bulls’ Drumline.

Amongst the soul food was more white-bread ballast from the Heartland—Maren Morris’s “Better Than We Found It.” Morris claimed recently to be leaving Country Music because of this branch of the industry’s failure to confront its racist, misogynist past. She was the musical variant of the ex-Trumpers who gave testimony against their former idol during the DNC.

It was through Morris that that the devil insinuated himself most cleverly, if also most clearly, into the Democratic details, revealing to those listening carefully the manipulations and moral triangulations so useful to campaign strategists.

“Better Than We found It” was conceived by Morris in support of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. Backed by a sincerely strummed acoustic guitar, Morris sang plaintively of the need to take a moral stand when brute reality demands it.

She arrived at the critical third verse, which, in the original version, runs:

Over and under and above the law
My neighbor’s in danger, who does he call?
When the wolf’s at the door all covered in blue
Shouldn’t we try something new?
We’re over a barrel and at the end of one too.

That “wolf in blue” had to be skinned by the DNC censors. So, Morris disarmed her own metaphor: “When the wolf’s at the door, what would you do?” she sang on Wednesday night.

Stevie Wonder does not redact. But kindred lines in Wednesday’s night’s “Higher Ground,” however critical, were already less specific in their imagery:

Powers keep on lyin’, yeah
While your people keep on dyin’.

These words were deemed sufficiently unthreatening by those same powers.

Already funereal in mood, Morris’s song became its own dirge for righteous outrage and reform.

Details like these don’t lie.

(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest book is Sex, Death, and Minuets: Anna Magdalena Bach and Her Musical Notebooks. He can be reached at dgyearsley@gmail.com.)

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CLASS CONTRADICTIONS WERE ON DISPLAY as Democrats Courted Labor at the DNC. Differences could remain between unions and a potential Harris administration on Gaza and corporate allegiances.

by Jacqui Germain

The morning after a string of labor leaders took the Democratic National Convention’s (DNC) Monday night stage, Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) President Stacy Davis Gates was feeling optimistic. As Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson walked across the stage to open the DNC, she was reminded of his background as a middle school teacher and labor organizer. Remembering SEIU President April Verrett’s own organizing roots in Chicago’s labor landscape moved the CTU leader too, as did recalling Gov. Tim Walz’s early years as a high school teacher.

The whole evening felt “surreal,” Gates said.

“The Democratic Party, it feels like, is making a better choice in the direction in which it is marching,” says Gates. “Look, Kamala says, when we fight, we win. We literally hear that at every labor rally we attend. That is a significant symbol of our fight. And I think it’s also a recognition that the democracy that we want to protect in this country is only possible if we are in solidarity, if we are organized, and if we are fighting for the many. That’s what I left [Monday] night with — that in this struggle to compel the Democratic Party, the progressive wing — along with organized labor — are making a run at the platform.”

United Auto Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain offered one of Monday night’s most memorable speeches, sporting a bright red UAW shirt with “TRUMP IS A SCAB” printed across the front. The pointed call-out at the former president comes a month after Donald Trump called for Fain’s firing, and a year after Trump deliberately tried to undermine the union’s historic Stand-Up Strike in 2023. Fain’s commitment to positioning Trump as an adversarial anti-labor figure for the working class could provide a winning path for the Democratic Party.

“On one side we have Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, who have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the working class,” said Fain, who noted he was representing the UAW’s 1 million active and retired members on the DNC’s top stage.

“On the other side, we have Trump and Vance, two lapdogs for the billionaire class who only serve themselves. So, for us in the labor movement, it’s real simple. Kamala Harris is one of us. She’s a fighter for the working class. And Donald Trump is a scab.”

The tens of thousands of Democratic National Convention attendees packing Chicago’s United Center couldn’t help themselves. Trump is a scab! Trump is a scab! Trump is a scab!

The declaration-turned-refrain caught on quickly. The insult evokes Scabby, the movement’s beloved, hideous rat, and serves as a reminder of the many strikes and boycotts the inflatable icon has watched over. It’s a well-known, age-old badge of shame and it’ll be tough for Trump to fight it off.

The DNC’s first night was in large part a response to the Republican Party’s attempt to claim working-class bona fides. Midway through the evening, half a dozen labor union presidents were welcomed to the stage to share joint remarks on organized labor’s support for the party: AFSCME President Lee Saunders, SEIU President April Verrett, LIUNA General President Brent Booker, IBEW International President Kenneth Cooper, CWA President Claude Cummings Jr., and AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler. (Teamsters President Sean O’Brien was notably absent. A Teamsters spokesperson reportedly told HuffPost the union hadn’t received a response to their request for O’Brien to speak at the convention.)

“This election is about two economic visions: one where families live paycheck to paycheck, where people have no right to join a union — a CEO’s dream, but a worker’s nightmare,” explained Shuler. “Or an opportunity economy where we lower the cost of groceries, prescription [drugs] and housing. Where we go after Big Pharma, corporate landlords and price gougers. Where there’s no such thing as a man’s job or a woman’s job or like Donald Trump would say, a Black job — just a good union job.”

The IBEW’s Cooper was greeted to the podium by a long, low Cooooooop! from the eager crowd. “She’s bringing back American manufacturing to forgotten places throughout our country,” he said of Harris, adding that she’d cast a key vote to protect the IBEW’s pension plans in California. “She’s lifted our apprentices up all over the nation, and guess what? She’s not afraid to use the word 'union.’”

The tone throughout the evening and in conversations following the pro-worker symphony was overwhelmingly uplifting. A movement that had largely been set back on its heels for decades seemed to be in position to have major influence again.

“I’m 61,” says UCLA Labor Studies Professor Victor Narro, “In my lifetime, [the Biden] administration has been the most pro-union administration. It took all these years to finally have a president who actually walked the picket line, you know? I’m hoping it continues with the Kamala Harris administration really prioritizing the working class and the labor movement.”

And yet, the Democratic Party remains full of class contradictions. For all the working-class imagery smartly threaded into speeches — and even the identifiable economic measures that have led to real financial gains for people across the country — the Democratic Party still maintains its own long-standing corporate allegiances.

Just 24 hours after their pro-labor showcase, the Democratic Party welcomed former American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault, who expounded on Harris’s “pro-business and pro-worker” stance. On Wednesday, the party invited Uber’s Chief Legal Officer Tony West to the stage for brief remarks. West, who is also Harris’s brother-in-law and an unpaid adviser to her campaign, is often viewed as an enemy to workers, both for his role in protecting Wall Street elites from accountability in the wake of the 2008 mortgage crisis, and for his role in Uber’s aggressive anti-worker efforts across the country.

Outside the bubble of the convention, the Biden-Harris administration hasn’t been able to push Congress to raise the national minimum wage, despite voters in both Democratic-led and Republican-led states successfully passing minimum wage increases at the state-level across the country for years. President Joe Biden appointed a National Labor Relations Board that has delivered crucial rulings in favor of unions amid labor disputes.

Often cited as the most pro-union president of our lifetime, Biden made history by walking the UAW picket line in 2023; the year prior, he kept with the historical function of the vast majority of U.S. presidents by helping break the railroad workers’ strike. After two years of negotiations and working without a contract, railroad workers’ unions began consolidating support and votes to escalate for the first time in decades. Instead, under the powers of the 1926 Railway Labor Act, Biden intervened by appointing a Presidential Emergency Board to produce a settlement for both sides to re-negotiate around, effectively neutralizing a labor fight many workers appeared to be hungry for.

The UAW is also reinforcing its footing as a fighting union. Fain might not describe himself as antagonizing his membership’s employers, but he certainly believes in leverage and in using it collectively to extract wins for everyone. The UAW’s decision to publicly support a ceasefire — the result of months of internal organizing on the part of rank-and-file workers — has also cultivated a new, energizing front. On Thursday, the UAW was a major force of support when it backed the Uncommitted campaign’s demand that the DNC allow a Palestinian American to speak on the convention’s main stage:

“If we want peace, if we want real democracy, and if we want to win this election,” reads the UAW statement, “the Democratic Party must allow a Palestinian American speaker to be heard from the DNC stage tonight.”

The UAW’s stance on a ceasefire and support for the Uncommitted movement’s push to bring Palestine to the forefront of the DNC stage may appear to put the union at odds with a Democratic Party that would likely prefer to think of organized labor and foreign policy as separate issues. In the end, the party ultimately spurned the request to feature a Palestinian speaker at the convention.

Fain has also taken the lead on calling on organized labor to coordinate their contract dates for May 1, 2028, in the hopes of consolidating enough labor leverage across industries to be the catalyst for major working-class change. Of course, if Democrats win, that May Day would fall under a Harris-Walz administration. And if the DNC’s Monday night lights and speeches are to be believed, the Biden-Harris administration was, and the Harris-Walz administration will be, a willing and enthusiastic partner in that decidedly pro-worker direction.

“If you have a White House that’s very pro-labor, it really does help so much — and especially in that kind of activity where they call for something that resembles a general strike,” says Narro.

Between now and then, there’s certainly time to build enough buy-in from both organized labor and those workers not yet unionized to offer a considerable show of labor strength, leverage and discipline. A Trump-Vance administration would most likely be not just opposed to, but pointedly hostile towards workers engaged in the kind of mass organized labor defiance. Many in the labor movement believe a Harris-Walz administration would be obviously better; Narro guesses the administration would, at the least, use the podium to support the right to strike and urge employers to come to an agreement with workers while keeping their pro-business priorities intact.

Depending on which wing of the labor movement you ask, you’ll get different perspectives on what it means to be pro-worker. Some argue being pro-worker doesn’t necessarily require an oppositional stance; positioning employers as labor’s necessary partners produces compromises and concessions that allow for benefits on both ends. Others argue that being pro-worker necessarily means being anti-big business. Being willing to be confrontational with an employer clarifies the union’s labor leverage and their readiness to use it to extract pro-worker wins. Broadly speaking, the history of organized labor itself is marked by different periods when unions found themselves on either side of the spectrum. The question remains: Which version of a revived labor movement would the Democratic Party, and a possible future Harris-Walz administration, be receptive to?

But more importantly, which version of a revived labor movement do workers envision for themselves?

(Truthout/In These Times)

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‘RUN, KAMALA, RUN’: MENTION OF HARRIS’S FATHER WAS A RARE HOMAGE TO A FLEETING FIGURE

In her convention speech, Kamala Harris told of being inspired by her father, a prominent economist who was otherwise largely a footnote in her personal story.

by Erica L. Green

“Run, Kamala, run.”

When Dr. Donald J. Harris uttered those words to his young daughter more than 50 years ago, he was encouraging her to whip freely through the parks of Oakland, Calif., not seek the highest elected office in the country. But in her address accepting the nomination as the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris said it was these words that helped inspire her.

“From my earliest years, he taught me to be fearless,” Ms. Harris said.

It was a rare homage to her father, a prominent economist but fleeting figure in her life who has largely been a footnote in her personal and political story. The first Black scholar to receive tenure in Stanford University’s economics department, Dr. Harris remains a professor emeritus there, and turned 86 the day after his daughter gave the most important speech of her life at the Democratic National Convention. He was not among the family members who accompanied Ms. Harris to the convention.

Her relationship with her father is a closely guarded part of Ms. Harris’s life about which she has spoken only sparingly. Her 2019 memoir, “The Truths We Hold,” referenced him only a handful of times. But in presenting herself as a nominee who understands the American dream through the complex lenses of personal, familial and social struggles, Ms. Harris tapped into the totality of the experiences that forged her.

That included when her parents divorced — or, as she would write in her memoir, “they stopped being kind to each other”— when she was in elementary school.

“My father remained a part of our lives,” Ms. Harris wrote. “We would see him on weekends and spend summers with him in Palo Alto. But it was my mother who took charge of our upbringing. She was the one most responsible for shaping us into the women we would become.”

Over the years, Ms. Harris has given reserved answers when asked about her father. In a 2003 interview with SF Weekly, she said: “My father is a good guy, but we are not close.”

In recounting how he instilled pride for their Jamaican heritage in 2021, Ms. Harris wrote in an email to the Washington Post that they were on “good terms,” which remains true today, according to people close to Ms. Harris.

Ms. Harris has been clear, however, that she is her mother’s daughter.

“There is no title or honor on earth I’ll treasure more than to say I am Shyamala Gopalan Harris’ daughter,” Ms. Harris wrote in her book. “That is the truth I hold dearest of all.”

She regularly praises the strength and courage displayed by her mother, while raising her and her sister, Maya Harris, alone. And she often credits her for instilling her fighting spirit — often through tidbits of wisdom that she regularly uses in public speeches and conversations.

On Thursday, Ms. Harris invoked her mother to drive home how she was no stranger to “unlikely journeys” — born to a woman who traveled to California from India alone at the age of 19, with an “unshakable dream to be the scientist who would cure breast cancer.”

Her mother died in 2009 of colon cancer at the age of 70.

In her address Thursday night, Ms. Harris described in detail her mother’s influence.

“And I miss her every day, and especially right now,” Ms. Harris said in her convention speech. “And I know she’s looking down smiling. I know that.”

Ms. Harris’s father has largely declined to weigh in on his daughter’s barrier-breaking political ascent in recent years, except in 2019 when he criticized a comment she made connecting her Jamaican roots to marijuana use. Since then, he has cited his aversion to seeking publicity. He did not respond to a request for comment Saturday.

In an essay published in a Jamaican publication in 2018, Dr. Harris described how interactions with his children came to an “abrupt halt” in 1972, after a custody battle that he blamed on “the false assumption by the State of California that fathers cannot handle parenting,” especially Black ones like him from the islands.

“Nevertheless, I persisted, never giving up on my love for my children or reneging on my responsibilities as their father,” he wrote in the essay.

Dr. Harris also reflected fondly on taking his girls on frequent trips to Jamaica, and imparting wisdom from what he learned there, particularly that it was “important not to lose sight of those who get left behind by social neglect or abuse and lack of access to resources or ‘privilege.’”

In his essay, he also vividly recalled taking his two daughters in 1970 to a mountain he once climbed called Orange Hill, and watching his daughter do what he had always urged her to do.

“Kamala, ever the adventurous and assertive one,” her father wrote, “suddenly broke from the pack, leaving behind Maya the more cautious one, and took off like a gazelle in Serengeti, leaping over rocks and shrubs and fallen branches, in utter joy and unleashed curiosity, to explore that same enticing terrain.”

(NY Times)

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THE CONFLICTS IN GAZA AND LEBANON REMAIN STUCK, even if a wider Middle East war has been averted for now, analysts say.

The day after Israel and Hezbollah exchanged some of the biggest salvos since the start of their 10-month cross-border battle, both appeared to have stepped back from the brink of a bigger confrontation. Israel’s defense minister spoke on Sunday of “the importance of avoiding regional escalation,” while the leader of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia, said “people can take a breath and relax.”

But even if a wider Middle East war has been averted for now, analysts said, Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah, along with the fighting with Hamas in Gaza, show every sign of continuing, their fundamental dynamics unchanged.

Israel and Hezbollah returned on Monday to a low-level conflict with smaller strikes, albeit one that could escalate at any point into a bigger war that could draw in Iran, Hezbollah’s benefactor. Hundreds of thousands of people in Israel and Lebanon remain displaced by the fighting. And Iran has yet to respond militarily to Israel’s assassination of a Hamas leader last month in Tehran.

— NYT

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