Mendocino County Today: Tuesday, May 5, 2015

• Grateful Pardinis
• Navarro Mystery
• Drought Map
• Charter Project
• Kitten Season
• Mendo Flu
• Catch of the Day
• A Kick
• Lonely Parade
• Speaking English
• Higher Education
• Cop Show
• TPP Debate
• Maroniez
• FOER Celebration
• Presidential Candidates

THANK YOU

To the Anderson Valley Community:

There are no words to adequately express the gratitude we feel for the outpouring of love and support we’ve received since the passing of Marianne. We feel truly blessed to live in such a wonderful place filled with so many special people. You are far too many to name individually, but our heartfelt thanks go out to each and every one of you. Without you we couldn’t have gotten through this difficult time. Again, we wish we could adequately express how truly grateful we are. But as mentioned before, there are no words. In light of that all we can say thank you, thank you, thank you.

Sincerely,

The Pardini family: Donald, Ernie, Tony, Julie

NAVARRO By The Sea remains closed despite the rains of a week ago. The river is closed at the mouth, the water is backed up, flooding the campground and preventing beach access.

http://waterdata.usgs.gov/usa/nwis/uv?site_no=11468000

WHAT SEEMS odd to us is that the weekly USGS chart shows an increased Navarro flow with periodic plateaus mid-day (pumping?). But where is this increased flow coming from? The Noyo, with no significant up-river draws on it, shows the usual spring flow decline.

http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/uv?site_no=11468500

The battered Albion, the Garcia, the Gualala are not gaged.

MAPPING THE DROUGHT: How much water must your community save? http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Mapping-the-drought-How-much-water-must-your-6240882.php

CHARTER ANYONE?

Editor,

The Charter Project of Mendocino County announces that, in order to empower the voters of the county to create the kind of county they want, it is starting its petition drive to put the Charter question on the ballot in the November 2015 election.

The title and summary are as follows: Shall a Charter Commission be elected to Propose a Charter that Will be Put to a Vote of the People of This County?

Initiative Measure to be Submitted Directly to the Voters:

The County Counsel has prepared the following title and summary of the chief purpose and points of the proposed measure:

It is being proposed that an initiative be placed on the ballot that will ask the voters if they want to elect fifteen (15) people to form a charter commission to draft a charter for the County that will then be voted on by the People.

This is a three-step process. First, the voters will decide if they want to elect commissioners to draft a proposed charter. Second, if a majority votes in favor of doing so, on the same ballot, the voters will be asked to choose fifteen commissioners. Third, the fifteen candidates that receive the most votes will then draft a charter that, when completed, will be put to a vote of the People.

This initiative must be adopted by a majority of the voters. Dated: April 28, 2015 Doug L. Losak, Interim County Counsel, County of Mendocino

The printed names of the proponents are as follows:

Norman de Vall, Peter Kafin, Doug McKenty, Robin Sunbeam, RN, MSN, PHN, and Mary Zellachild

FROM MONDAY'S CHRON: The California drought has had a pronounced effect on the animal kingdom — salmon are getting stuck up dry riverbeds, bears are wandering farther in search of food and water, and newts have stayed in hibernation longer, perhaps because it’s not wet enough to come out.

Now, there may be another critter to add to the list of the drought-afflicted: kittens.

Animal shelter officials in Oakland made a public plea for donations Monday after announcing at a news conference that warm, dry weather had put love in the air in the East Bay, at least in the feline world. Cats appear to be mating more — and producing more offspring than they can care for.

“We get a lot of kittens every year, but it has started early this year,” said Rebecca Katz, director of Oakland Animal Services, as a quartet of month-old cats that had been lost or abandoned joined her in front of television cameras.

The agency estimates that 30% more newborns than usual have been dropped off at its Fruitvale shelter, mostly by concerned neighbors who come across a litter with no mother cat watching over her young.

THE GREAT FLU OF 1918, MENDOCINO COUNTY

by Katy Tahja

For fascinating listening there is “The Great Influenza” by John Barry. It’s available from the County Library and provides hours of informative material on a disease that killed millions worldwide in 1918-19. The book set me to wondering how the Mendocino Coast persevered through the national epidemic back then. I went to the archives of the Kelley House Museum and read almost century-old Mendocino Beacons for a local perspective on the epidemic. The newspaper archives of the county historical society’s Held-Poage Library on Perkins Street in Ukiah has reports on how the rest of the county fared.

Called Spanish Influenza, the disease started in Camp Funston, the 14th National Army Cantonment in Kansas. A viral variation of the illness developed and spread through the soldiers, and as those men were transferred they took the disease with them.

October 19, 1918 was the first mention of the great epidemic in Mendocino County. In a story called “Flu was busy in the County Seat — Spanish influenza has Ukiah in its grippe.” The Grammar School and the High School were closed and public gatherings were prohibited. No dances, motion picture shows, lodge meetings or religious gatherings were allowed.

Uncle Sam’s advice suggested guarding against droplet infection. “It’s as dangerous as poison gas shells!” a reference to the introduction of poison gas in the First World War then being fought in Europe and Asia Minor. “No one but a nurse should help the sick and it is foolish to ask a druggist to prescribe patent medicines as they are useless,” it was reported.

The Beacon warned, “Cover up each cough and sneeze; if you don’t you’ll spread disease.” Masks were to be worn in the business section of town. By the end of October, Fort Bragg had 175 cases and the Apple Fair in Mendocino was cancelled. Families were being notified if their military sons were sick with flu. Dr. Preston’s mansion, where the Mendocino Art Center is now, was turned into a private hospital with 20 beds.

Young and healthy folks in the prime of life were often the first to fall sick. Tie makers, donkey bosses, and choppers in the logging camps, undertakers in town, and especially doctors and nurses, died. The wife of the owner of the Cecil Hotel in Ukiah was a graduate nurse and did everything she could to save her husband, but he died at age 30. The malady secured a foothold in the State Asylum at Talmadge where 85 persons fell ill. All saloons and pool halls were shuttered and stores closed from noon to 2 p.m. daily on the coast so employees could go out and catch some fresh air.

Fort Bragg had five people die in one November week. There were 35 cases reported in Albion and doctors were being called to Point Arena. The Albertinum Orphanage in Ukiah said 50 boys and three nuns were in bed sick. Turnout in the November election was low. Caspar Lumber Company stopped operating their night shift because so many men were ill. At Fort Bragg, undertaker Constantine Silveradio, from the Azores, died at age 38 with his wife and four children sick. Schools in Mendocino stayed closed for seven weeks.

In Comptche John Peterson was reported busy motoring patients to the doctor in Mendocino. So many men in the logging camps outside Caspar and Greenwood were ill work was at a standstill.

By December 1918 things were improving. Services were allowed in churches for Thanksgiving. Most every issue of the Beacon listed Influenza Death Notes. One week listed a merchant, a child, a lumber company employee and a housewife as taken by the flue. But by year’s end it was reported, “Influenza is Pretty Well Stamped Out Here.”

“Don’t diagnose your own condition. Become a fresh air crank and Enjoy Life!” the newspaper advised. People whose immune systems were weakened after the flu were now contracting tuberculosis and pneumonia. The camp boss at Wages Creek died caring for his sick workers. But by mid-February 1919 Greenwood residents declared the epidemic was over and staged a Grand Ball. It was July 1919 before the Beacon did NOT notice a death due to influenza.

In Mendocino the big news in July 1919 was “John Barleycorn Given an Enthusiastic Farewell” as every saloon in Mendocino drank up their stock of booze. The town had voted to go “Dry” ten years before the rest of the USA and Prohibition had begun, much to the distress of the average working man.

CATCH OF THE DAY, May 4, 2015

SHANNON BARDEN, Willits,. Under influence of controlled substance, suspended license, resisting arrest.

BALDOMERO BERNABE, Ukiah. Possession of controlled substance, probation revocation.

CHRISTOPHER FRANCE, Willits. Vehicle theft, dirk/dagger, possession of burglary tools, possession of drug paraphernalia.

JULIE HARLOW, Willits. Drunk in public.

AMANDA JEWELL, Willits. Under influence of controlled substance, possession of drug paraphernalia, destruction or concealing evidence.

ELIZABETH MCALLISTER, Ukiah. Under influence of controlled substance.

TIMOTHY MCCOSKER, Ukiah. Petty theft, trespassing, probation revocation.

JOSE PEREZ, Boonville. DUI.

RIGO PEREZ, Richmond/Ukiah. Reckless driving, driving on suspended license, child endangerment.

MIKEL REXRODE, Fort Bragg. Petty theft, probation revocation.

ANN TAYLOR, Ukiah. Under influence of controlled substance, probation revocation.

TIMOTHY TOLOY, Ukiah. DUI.

ERROL WASSON, Fort Bragg. DUI, probation revocation.

GERI WHARTON, Ukiah. Possession of controlled substance, probation revocation.

SCOTTY WILLIS, Ukiah. Court order violation, probation revocation. (Frequent flyer.)

I GET A KICK OUT OF YOU

My story is much too sad to be told

But practically everything leaves me totally cold

The only exception I know is the case

When I'm out on a quiet spree

Fighting vainly the old ennui

And I suddenly turn and see

Your fabulous face

 

I get no kick from champagne

Mere alcohol doesn't thrill me at all

So tell me why should it be true

That I get a kick out of you

 

Some get a kick from cocaine

I'm sure that if I took even one sniff

That would bore me terrific'ly too

Yet I get a kick out of you

 

I get a kick every time I see

You're standing there before me

I get a kick though it's clear to see

You obviously do not adore me

 

I get no kick in a plane

Flying too high with some gal in the sky

Is my idea of nothing to do

But I get a kick out of you.

— Cole Porter

ENGLISH SPOKEN HERE

by James Kunstler

Of course, the Freddie Gray riots in Baltimore last week prompted the usual cries for “an honest conversation about race,” and countless appeals to fix the “broken” public school system. So, in the spirit of those pleas, I will advance a very plain and straightforward idea: above all, teach young black kids how to speak English correctly.

Nothing is more important than acculturating ghetto kids out of their pidgin patois and into real English with all of its tenses, verb forms, and cases. It’s more important initially than learning arithmetic, history, and science. I would argue that it is hardly possible to learn these other things without first being grounded in real grammatical English.

When these kids grow up, their manner of speech will identify them and their prospects for success at least as much as the color of their skin — and probably more, in my opinion. Their ability to speak English correctly will be the salient feature in how others assess the content of their character.

I’m sure by now that the racial justice hand-wringers are squirming over this proposal. All dialects are equally okay in this rainbow society, they might argue. No they’re not. Have you noticed that TV news, business, show biz, education, and politics increasingly employ people whose parents came from India and other parts of Asia. Do they speak in a patois lacking in complex verb forms? Apparently not. Are they succeeding in American life, such as it is? Apparently so.

Notice that the speech issue — how people talk — is never part of the “honest conversation about race” that we are supposed to have. Has anybody noticed that in his public speeches Martin Luther King spoke regular English correctly, if with a Southern inflection? Has anybody noticed how important that was in his role as “a communicator?” Why is this crucial question of language absent from the public conversation about “the intractable problems of race in America?” Is it because both blacks and whites are too fearful, too cowardly, to face this particular problem of how English is spoken?

Perhaps this raises the specter of IQ. I’d like to know how any IQ test can be meaningful when the person taking it can’t speak the language that the test is given in. I’m sure that any ghetto kid drilled in English for two years would show substantial improvement in such a generalized test. But, of course, first the American people of all skin tones would have to admit that this is important.

We don’t want to. We’d rather wring our hands over “structural racism” and other canards. Why? Because Euro American whites have been programmed to “not offend” at all costs; Asian Americans are too busy being successful; and African Americans are too invested in their own excuse-for-failure industry, wringing money from offense-o-phobic whites.

A year ago, I gave the opening day lecture to the entering honors freshman class at Rutgers, New Jersey’s State University. I swear at least half of that class of about 400 young people was made up of first generation kids of parents from India — owing, I suppose, to the current demographic of the state. Many of these kids were very dark-skinned, as dark as African Americans. Guess what? They didn’t speak in any kind of pidgin patois. They spoke regular American English. Do you suppose during their childhoods that the household fretted about “sounding white?” I doubt it. By the way, not only did these very bright, dark-skinned honors students speak English correctly, they also behaved politely. No fights broke out during the convocation. They effervescently launched themselves into their college careers — and then they went out for pizza.

How about it America? Job number one: learn how to speak the English language. Everything else depends on it. Excuses not admissible.

(Kunstler’s new World Made By Hand novel is now available! Kunstler skewers everything from kitsch to greed, prejudice, bloodshed, and brainwashing in this wily, funny, rip-roaring, and profoundly provocative page- turner, leaving no doubt that the prescriptive yet devilishly satiric A World Made by Hand series will continue.” — Booklist)

‘THE GAME DONE CHANGED’

Reconsidering ‘The Wire’ Amidst the Baltimore Uprising

by Dave Zirin

I fanatically loved HBO’s Baltimore-based television drama, The Wire. It’s difficult to even imagine my pop-cultural brain without the presence of Omar Little, Stringer Bell, Bunk and “McNutty." When I started doing my sports radio show eight years ago, I scheduled interviews with as many of the actors as I could for no other reason than I wanted to breathe their air. Talking to Michael K. Williams about the method of Omar’s “long-game” while he aggressively chewed on a sandwich will forever remain a career highlight. In every interview, I would always ask the same question: I wanted the cast to tell me whether working on this program was just another acting gig or if they all knew that they were doing something utterly unique in television history. When I asked this of Seth Gilliam, who played Officer Ellis Carver, he said, “It felt to us more like we were a movement, on a mission, in an army to bring awareness.” What really stoked me back then was the bracingly original political message that ran through The Wire compared to a typical Hollywood production. Most assembly-line entertainment is a variation on the shop-worn theme of lone-heroes confronting obstacles and then overcoming them. The connective thread of every Wire season, as described by show co-creator David Simon was that when individuals, no matter how heroic, fight to change entrenched power structures and bureaucracies — whether in the form of City Hall politics, police or organized crime — the individual is going to lose.

That’s why I always shoved it to the back of my mind when my friends in Baltimore — I live about 45 minutes from the city — almost uniformly would tell me they either did not like or would not watch the show. People were hostile toward The Wire for a multiplicity of reasons. Some felt it was like gangster rap for a more sophisticated audience, glorifying black-on-black hyper masculine street violence while selling itself as somehow more literate and ennobling to consume. My friend Mark once pissed me off fiercely when he told me that my favorite show was “NWA for people who read The New Yorker.”

My Baltimore friends who had seen the show, also believed, given the police violence in their town, that The Wire's view of Baltimore's finest was almost comically kind. The one policeman, who accidentally shoots someone (a fellow officer), not only isn’t prosecuted but gets reintroduced later in the series as a big-hearted public school teacher. And then other people just said to me that living in Baltimore was a struggle and the idea of anyone making commerce out of their pain was simply not their idea of entertainment.

I would casually dismiss these concerns thinking people were being overly sensitive, overly critical, or just not “seeing” the brilliance in front of them. I also politically defended the show as one of the few spaces on television that, through its brilliant multiracial cast, looked at issues of crime, corruption and urban blight in a systemic manner. The fact that it actually cared about the hopes, dreams and lives of street criminals and not just cops felt more than radical. It felt revolutionary.

The events of the last two weeks however, have changed my view of The Wire in a very fundamental way. I have spent most of my time listening to people in Baltimore speak about how this uprising came to be and why the anger runs so deep. I’ve been primarily speaking to black Baltimoreans in grassroots organizations who have, in a state of MSM invisibility, been building movements for years to fight poverty, end street violence and challenge police brutality. This is humbling to admit but this experience has made me reassess my favorite show, as if a very dim light bulb was being switched on above my head. I am now seeing what the The Wire was missing, despite its much lauded, painstaking verisimilitude: the voices of people organizing together for change. Everyone on The Wire seeks individual solutions for social problems: the lone cop, the lone criminal, the lone teacher, the lone newspaper reporter. Yes, it is certainly true that when entrenched bureaucracies battle individuals, individuals lose. But when bureaucracies battle social movements, the results can be quite different.

It is also impossible for me to separate David Simon’s view of people as either passive sheep or lone-wolf heroes, from his comments about the events last week in Baltimore. Not his comments to “end the fucking drug war,” which are surely welcome but his other public perspective.

With the fires in Baltimore just hours old, Simon wrote, “But now — in this moment — the anger and the selfishness and the brutality of those claiming the right to violence in Freddie Gray’s name needs to cease… This, now, in the streets, is an affront to that man’s memory and a dimunition of the absolute moral lesson that underlies his unnecessary death. If you can’t seek redress and demand reform without a brick in your hand, you risk losing this moment for all of us in Baltimore. Turn around. Go home. Please.”

It’s always cringe-worthy when a wealthy middle-aged white guy lectures young black people about who they are and what they should do. In other words, if you had said two weeks ago — in the battle of prominent Baltimore Caucasians — that Orioles Manager Buck Showalter would represent himself better than David Simon, I think many would have been surprised. But his comments also revealed far more than was intended. The idea that David Simon, praised as someone with an ear to these Charm City streets like no one since H.L. Mencken, could look at what was happening in the Baltimore of 2015 and not see the social movements and organization beneath the anger, makes me wonder how much he truly "saw" when producing the show. That David Simon could tell people with bricks in their hand to "go home,” and have no direct words of condemnation for the violence displayed by the police made me remember my friend Dashon — from Baltimore — who told me he would never watch The Wire because he believed it to be “copaganda,” since it was created not only by Simon but by long time Baltimore police officer Ed Burns.

Now, I cannot help but recall all my favorite Wire moments through a lens that has me wondering if the show was both too soft on the police and incredibly dismissive of people’s ability to organize for real change. In the season that took place in the public schools, where were the student organizers, the urban debaters and teacher activists I’ve met this past month? In the season about unions, where were the black trade unionists like the UNITE/HERE marchers who were—in utterly unpublicized fashion—at the heart of last Saturday’s march? In the season about the drug war and “Hamsterdam,” where were the people actually fighting for legalization? In the stories about the police, where were the people who died at their hands? It all reveals the audacity — and frankly the luxury — of David Simon's pessimism. Perhaps this pessimism, alongside the adrenalizing violence, created, as Jamilah Lemieux put it in Ebony, a show steeped in the voyeurism of “Black pain and death” for a liberal white audience that “cried for Stringer Bell and a burned out CVS, but not Freddie Gray.”

I am not saying that art should conform to a utopian political vision of struggle like some dreck from the Stalinist culture mills. But I am asking a question that I wasn’t before: why were those fighting for a better Baltimore invisible to David Simon? I don’t mean those fighting on behalf of Baltimore — the (often white) teachers, the social workers, and the good-natured cops who are at the heart of The Wire — but those fighting for their own liberation? Why was The Wire big on failed saviors and short on those trying to save themselves? And if these forces were invisible to David Simon, shouldn’t we dial down the praise of the show as this “Great American Novel of television” (Variety!) and instead see it for what it is: just a cop show? There’s no shame in that. I’ll even call it the greatest cop show ever, a cop show with insanely brilliant dialogue, indelible performances and more three-dimensional roles for black actors than 99% of what comes out of Hollywood. But all the same—still just a cop show.

After reading stories like this, I think I’m done with cop shows for now. There’s a line from the Bible that says, "When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things.” In the wake of the Baltimore Uprising, The Wire’s pessimism seems childish to me and I’m going to put it away for a while. I could see myself revisiting it in the future, maybe amidst a more dreary political moment. But that moment isn’t now. Baltimore in 2015 shows that we can do more than just chronicle the indignities imposed by entrenched urban power structures — we can challenge them. David Simon should listen to the folks who are engaged in that collective project. As Cutty said, “The game done changed.”

I DARE YOU PRESIDENT OBAMA

Debate Senator Warren on Global Economic Pact

by Ralph Nader

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear President Obama:

You have taken a strong across-the-board position favoring the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) nearing completion and scheduled for a fast track clearance vote in the Congress. Indeed, you have descended admirably from your presidential perch to take on the most informed critics of this agreement with Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam.

You have accused critics of spreading misinformation, including Senator Elizabeth Warren and Lori Wallach, the director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, who is known for her meticulous research and who was at Harvard Law School during your time there.

With the barrage of commentary on an agreement, labelled singularly as trade promotion by unknowing newspaper columnists and reporters, and the less reported rebuttals that the TPP is far more than a trade agreement (aka treaty) and places serious environmental, health, consumer and labor conditions within its grip, isn’t it time for you to engage with concerned citizens and their representatives rather than assert unilaterally that “Elizabeth Warren is wrong on the facts”? It is time to clarify the issues before a skeptical public and others who are downright confused. Why not debate Senator Elizabeth Warren before a national TV audience?

There are many reasons for you to use this format to engage the American people. They will be the ones paying the price in many dire ways if the mega-corporate promoters of TPP turn out to be as wrong as they have been with prior trade deals, most recently the Korean Trade Agreement (2012) which you espoused and which has worsened the trade deficit with South Korea and caused job loss in the United States.

Vice President Albert Gore debated NAFTA on nationwide television with Ross Perot.
You and Senator Warren have been teachers of the law and share a common law school background—Harvard. A debate would be deliberative and, assuming you and she have read the 29 chapters of the TPP (only a handful of chapters dealing with trade), would be revelatory far beyond the narrow prisms reflected in the mass media.
Like NAFTA and the World Trade Organization, the TPP is a transnational system of autocratic governance that subordinates and bypasses our access to our own judiciary in favor of secret tribunals whose procedures contravene our country’s system of due process, openness and independent appeals. These agreements, as you know, have enforceable provisions regarding the rights and privileges of corporations. The rhetorical assurances regarding labor, environment and consumer rights have no such enforcement mechanisms.
Notwithstanding all the win-win claims of promoters of past trade agreements, our country’s trade deficit has continued to grow over the past 35 years. Enormous trade deficits mean job exports. Given this evidence, the public would be interested in listening to your explanation of this adverse experience to U.S. workers and our economy.

You believe Elizabeth Warren is wrong on the facts relating to the “Investor-State Dispute Settlement” provision of the TPP, which allows foreign companies to challenge our health, safety and other regulations, not in our courts but before an international panel of arbitrators. A perfect point/counterpoint for a debate process, no?

Over the years, it has been abundantly clear that very few lawmakers or presidents have actually read the text of these trade agreements involving excessive surrender of local, state and federal sovereignties. They have relied on memoranda prepared by the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) and corporate lobbies. Given the mass of fine print with portentous consequences for every American, a worthy debate topic is whether to put off submitting this trade pact so that copies can be made accessible to the American people to discuss and consider before going to Congress under very limited debate for an up or down vote without any amendments being permitted. Why the rush when the ink isn’t even dry on the page?

Some may wonder why you don’t call this agreement a “treaty”, like other countries. Could it be that an agreement only requires a 51 percent vote, rather than a two-thirds vote in the Congress for treaty ratification?

You are quoted in the Washington Post decrying “misinformation” circulating on the TPP and pledging that you are “going to be pushing back very hard if I keep on hearing that.” Fine. Push back before tens of millions of people with Senator Elizabeth Warren as your debating counterpart. If you agree, be sure that interested Americans have a copy of the TPP deal first so that they can be an informed audience.

I look forward to your response.

Sincerely yours,

Ralph Nader

(Ralph Nader’s latest book is: Unstoppable: the Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State.)

FRIENDS OF THE EEL’S 20th Anniversary Celebration is on Thursday, May 7 at the Arcata Playhouse.

“We are honoring the Humboldt Resource Conservation District for their success in implementing the Salt River Ecosystem Restoration Project, a collaborative effort nearly 30 years in the making. Enjoy refreshments as you learn from educational displays and record your personal memories of the Eel River.

See you there!

Arcata

WHERE: Arcata Playhouse - 1251 9th Street, Arcata

WHEN: Thursday May 7, 5:30 pm - 8:30 pm

Volunteer opportunities

Briceland 

WHERE: Briceland Vineyards Winery - 5959 Briceland Thorn Rd, Redway

WHEN: Friday, June 5, 4:30 pm - 7:30 pm

Volunteer opportunities

Petaluma

WHERE: Lagunitas Tap Room - 1280 N. McDowell Blvd, Petaluma

WHEN: Friday, September 11, 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm

Volunteer opportunities

Our legal case against the NCRA will be heard by the

California Supreme Court this year.

Read our press release Read news coverage

FRIENDS OF THE EEL RIVER

PO Box 4945

Arcata, CA 95518

eelriver.org ~ foer@eelriver.org ~ 707-822-3342

BERNIE SANDERS has announced for President. Good luck, Bernie when you've got a process rigged for Hillary, a faithful servant of the One Percent and an enthusiastic advocate for war forever, your chances range from none to none. The last time the Democrats went for a candidate who promised to at least try to represent the true interests of most Americans, that candidate, George McGovern, was ridiculed by mass media and Richard Nixon went on to his catastrophic reign, finally flaming out in a narco-haze of prescription drugs and clinical paranoia. Sanders has his drawbacks, but he's the only candidate, besides Warren, who we could vote for without a post-election impulse to suicide.

WHO DECIDES who gets the Demo nomination? Draw yourself a mental composite of the amalgamated public liberals of Mendocino County — KXYX's board of directors; the 3-2 majority at the Fort Bragg City Council; Supervisors Hamburg and Woodhouse; the MTA board; the entire non-profit apparat of the County, all our public bureaucrats, and you understand not only the Billery mentality but you also understand why the Democrats are actively hostile to your interests, Mr. and Ms. Joe Blow. (All of the above are enthusiastic Democrat, although Hamburg, when it's to the Democrat's advantage, will pretend to be a Green. He's what is called a rally killer in baseball, the automatic out with the bases loaded. The slightest political energy to the left of Obama-Clinton, here comes Hamburg, Joe Louis Wildman, Lynda McClure, John Lewallen, etc. to kill it.) The difference between the two political parties is that the Republicans are at least honest enough to kick you to the curb while laughing in your broke, no hope face. The Democrats kick you to the curb while they tell you they're doing it for your own good, and how much they love you. Both parties represent the comfortable and the very comfortable. A majority of Americans are no longer comfortable.

THE LOCAL ANGLE: In 1972, my Boonville house functioned as McGovern headquarters for much of Mendocino County. We worked the phones hard for George, got out signs to the few people who would even accept one let alone post one on their property, and talked up the guy to whoever would listen. Which meant we mostly talked to ourselves. Which, come to think of it, is what the local libs are still doing 40 years later. (cf any talk program on KZYX) And Nixon took Mendo with well over 80% of the vote. Hillary will take Mendo 60-40% with more than half of our eligible voters not bothering to vote, most of them realizing that the choice is between bad and worse.