Peace Fresno Opposes Obama’s Escalation in Afghanistan

By Dan Yaseen and Camille Russell

Photo illustration by Dixie Salazar

On December 1, after three months of deliberation and 10 war councils, President Obama announced an escalation of 30,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan at a cost of $30 billion a year. It was regretful to watch President Obama shatter the hopes and dreams of the millions of Americans who elected him last year.

We need to end our occupations and bring our troops home. The longer we stay in Afghanistan and Iraq, the longer it will take to get our economy out of the recession and get it moving in the right direction. The cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is now
approaching $1 trillion. Further escalation of the war in Afghanistan will result in more cuts in education, social services and desperately needed infrastructure.

The people of Afghanistan have suffered from 30 years of wars, hundreds of thousands have died and millions have been displaced. They are sick and tired of death and destruction. Only 10% of our expenditure in Afghanistan goes toward rebuilding and social
services. We must do more.

Peace Fresno responded to President Obama’s plan by denouncing it in a press release to the media and by calling for a street protest on December 4. TV Channels 26, 30 and 47 and radio station KFCF 88.1 FM aired interviews with Camille Russell, the president of Peace Fresno, who reminded viewers and listeners that it is Congress that funds war and as citizens in a democracy we must pressure our representatives to withhold funding.

On December 5, 100 messages against the wars were written to local Congressional representatives at the Peace Fresno/Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) table by visitors to the Annual WILPF Peace Crafts Faire. The messages, written on 3×5 cards, were sorted by Congressional district and hand-delivered to the local offices of our three local Congressional representatives. Peace Fresno’s ongoing petition calling for an end to the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and the drone attacks on Pakistan was also circulated at the crafts faire, and an additional 100 petition signatures were delivered along with the cards.

Unfortunately, President Obama continued his war rhetoric on December 10 with his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. Although acknowledging the contributions of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., to peace and nonviolence, he insisted that war is the answer in Afghanistan and that we can achieve lasting peace by waging war. He delivered a "Just War" speech instead of a "Just Peace" speech.

As the U.S. government must do more for the people of Afghanistan, we, the people of the United States, now know it is up to us to demand an end to the occupation and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Come to Peace Fresno’s Peace and Justice Festival: 9th Annual Rally in the Valley on March 21. It will be the largest convergence of peace activists in the Central Valley on the day that marks seven years of U.S. war in Iraq. We will join people all over the United States in calling for an end to war.

And we will celebrate the richness of life with friends, live music, informational tabling, food, an actor portraying Abbie Hoffman, muralists, vendors and our featured speaker, Kathy Kelly. Kelly is a remarkable woman who has dedicated her life to peace action and knows from personal experience the effects of U.S. militarism on the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. She has visited Iraq 24 times since 1996. She also coordinates and participates in traditional political activism and direct action campaigns in the United States.

For more information about the Peace and Justice Festival, including registration for tabling organizations and vendors, visit www.peacefresno.org.

*****

Dan Yaseen is vice president–membership of Peace Fresno, and he is on the Editorial Board of the Community Alliance. Contact him at 559-251-3361 or danyaseen@comcast.net.

Camille Russell is a retired teacher, president of Peace Fresno and a member of the Fresno County Democratic Central Committee. Contact her at 559-276-2592 or camille.russell@att.net.

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Reaping Riches in a Wretched Region: Subsidized Industrial Farming and Its Link to Perpetual Poverty

Part 2 of a 2-Part Series

By Lloyd G. Carter

This two-part series shows how a long American tradition of helping small farmers has, in the past few decades in the San Joaquin Valley, morphed into a massive government aid program for large industrialized agribusiness operations—a program that not only drives small farmers off the land but also perpetuates rural poverty because agribusiness requires huge numbers of low-paid, seasonal harvest workers, many of whom are undocumented workers who choose to stay in the United States.

The Drainage Crisis Erupts

The soils of the western San Joaquin Valley (henceforth "the Valley) are composed of material eroded from the Coast Range Mountains, which are ancient seabed shale. These Cretaceous sedimentary rock shale include a host of salts, trace elements like selenium, arsenic and boron, and heavy metals, which created an alkali desert on the west-side over eons. Some farmland along the flood plain of the San Joaquin River, however, was suitable for farming, especially for a salt-tolerant crop like cotton.

To further complicate matters, several layers of virtually impermeable, thick subterranean clays run below the topsoil and impede the downward percolation of applied irrigation water. The result is that a "perched" shallow groundwater table develops above the clays and near the root zone of the crops and when irrigation continues, the salty shallow groundwater can rise to the root zone and kill the crops. Growers had known since before World War II that if northern California river water, which itself picks up dissolved salts on its long journey south, was continuously supplied to the west-side farmlands, there needed to be a disposal ditch to carry off the salty shallow drainage waters to the Pacific Ocean.

In 1955, the Bureau of Reclamation (henceforth "the Bureau") proposed a $7.2 million earthen ditch to carry the salty drainage waters of the San Luis Unit to the Delta for disposal, under a theory that the assimilative capacity of the Delta waters would safely carry the salts out through San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean. The theory, popular at the time, was that "dilution is the solution to pollution." It was to prove disastrously wrong.

Following Congressional approval of the San Luis project in 1960, farmers downslope of the proposed project, including Delta farmers, and San Francisco Bay Area urban interests expressed alarm that the agricultural drainage waters that were to be dumped into the Delta were not safe. Irrigation districts immediately north of the San Luis Unit were worried an earthen drainage ditch would leak salty water into their fields, harming their crops.

In 1965, Congress prohibited the selection of a final discharge point for the San Luis effluent until, among other provisions, a pollution study was completed by the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Planning for a drain to the Delta was completed by the late 1970s, but completion of the San Luis Drain was held up by funding restraints and California agency concerns. The State Water Resources Control Board demanded that the Bureau complete numerous studies to establish the safety of the drain water to be dumped in the Delta.

Between 1968 and 1975, the Bureau completed 82 miles of the cement-lined San Luis Drain to the 5,900-acre Kesterson ranch, a former cattle/dairy ranch in Merced County that was surrounded by the Grasslands Water District, a mixture of popular winter duck-hunting clubs and summer cattle ranches. The Bureau built the first 1,280 acres of "holding" or evaporation ponds at the Kesterson Ranch and agreed with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to establish a national wildlife refuge at that site for ducks, geese and migratory birds that would utilize the brackish drainage water, despite warnings by some biologists that the drain water would be lethal to wildlife. Drain water would be held at the Kesterson ponds in the summer and funneled north in the winter during the rainy season.

For the first few years of their existence, the Kesterson Reservoir ponds held fresh water and attracted large numbers of birds and wildlife. In 1978, some mixed drain water/freshwater was channeled to the evaporation ponds; by 1981, full-strength drain water was flowing to Kesterson ponds. The results were dramatic. By 1983, all the freshwater fish in the ponds (except tiny mosquito fish) had died off. In the spring of 1983, massive bird die-offs were observed, and federal biologists discovered grotesque deformities in hatchlings of several bird species and an almost total lack of reproduction in several bird species. The deformities were quickly attributed to selenium in the Kesterson food chain. The selenium occurring naturally in the Westlands fields had been dissolved by irrigation and carried to Kesterson in the drainage water.

In February 1985, the State Water Resources Control Board ordered the Kesterson ponds cleaned up or closed, ruling continued irrigation of high selenium soils could be a public nuisance. On March 15, 1985, in a dramatic public hearing of the House Subcommittee on Water and Power Resources in Los Banos, an Interior Department official, citing apparent violations of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in the bird deaths at Kesterson, announced the Kesterson evaporation ponds would be closed and water deliveries to the Westlands would be shut off.

On March 29, 1985, the Interior Secretary agreed to restore water deliveries to the Westlands and work with the irrigation district to resolve the drainage crisis. The Westlands could continue to funnel drainage to Kesterson until June 30, 1986, but after that the failed evaporation-pond experiment at the beleaguered wildlife refuge would be permanently halted.

Various local, university, state and federal agencies then launched a joint six-year, $50 million study on ways to resolve the agricultural drainage crisis in the western Valley. In September 1990, a report was issued, recommending, among other things, the retirement of at least 75,000 acres of salt-impaired farmlands.

In 1991, a group of original Westlands landowners filed suit in Fresno federal district court against the Bureau and the Westlands, charging damage to their land by the failure of the water district and the federal agency to complete a drainage system. On March 13, 1995, U.S. District Judge Oliver Wanger issued a partial judgment based on his conclusion that the San Luis Act established a mandatory duty of the Bureau to provide drainage, which had not been excused despite the developments at Kesterson. In the judgment, Judge Wanger ordered the Secretary of the Interior and the Bureau to "take such reasonable and necessary actions to promptly prepare, file and pursue an application for a discharge permit" with the California Water Resources Control Board.

Judge Wanger’s judgment was appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, and in 2000, a majority of the appellate panel in Firebaugh Canal Co. v. United States affirmed Wanger in part and reversed him in part. The majority concluded Congressional action in the long and tortured history of the San Luis Unit both before and after the Kesterson catastrophe indicated that in meeting its mandate to provide drainage service, the Bureau has discretion to apply to the state of California for a permit to build a drainage canal to the Delta or to explore other options for resolving the drainage crisis.

The dissent by Circuit Judge Stephen S. Trott in the Firebaugh ruling drew a far different conclusion. Judge Trott wrote that

Congress and various agencies of our government have failed for many years to come to grips with the difficult issues in this case, issues arising primarily from legitimate environmental concerns such as what the effluent from the project would do to the San Francisco Bay. The Kesterson Reservoir experience and its incompatibility with the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and other valid health and safety concerns proves once again that for every benefit, there is a cost somewhere that must be borne by someone.

The result of the 9th Circuit’s 2000 decision in Firebaugh was that the Bureau was ordered back to the drawing board to come up with another drainage plan that was effective, would protect wildlife and was economically feasible. Eight years dragged by while the Bureau worked on new solutions to the drainage problem. Everything was tried, from recycling, to treatment techniques to remove salts and trace elements, to salt-tolerant crops and trees, to sprinklers to more quickly evaporate the salty drain water.

In 2007, the Bureau released the 5,000-page San Luis Drainage Feature Re-evaluation Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). In brief, the preferred alternative in the EIS calls for idling 194,000 acres of high selenium farmland (mostly in the Westlands) and building 1,900 acres of evaporation ponds while continuing to work on technologies to safely remove salts, selenium and other potential pollutants from the drainage water at a reasonable cost. Costs of a government-built drainage system, with maximum land retirement at up to $2,600 an acre, were estimated at $2.7 billion.

In 2007 and 2008, cutbacks in water deliveries due to either drought conditions or fishery problems reduced the district’s water supply by an estimated 30%–50%. In 2008, for the first time in history, the commercial and recreational salmon seasons were canceled along the California and Oregon coasts because of a precipitous drop in Delta salmon populations the past few years.

In December 2007, Judge Wanger, responding to a suit filed by environmental groups, issued an order to protect the Delta smelt, a species protected under the federal Endangered Species Act. Western Valley growers argued the ruling would cut deeply into their Delta water supplies and cause major economic damage to the farming community.

The order followed a May 2007 decision by Judge Wanger that the Bureau’s assessment of the risk to smelt from the federal agency’s massive pumps in the south Delta was illegal and must be rewritten. State and federal water-project managers had relied on the flawed biological opinion by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to justify increased water exports to farms and cities south of the Delta. A rewritten "biological opinion" was issued in December 2008, confirming the suspicion of environmentalists that the Bureau’s Delta pumping was indeed hurting the fishery. It appears from these events that the go-go days of heavy pumping from the Delta are over, and environmental cutbacks in Delta pumping in all but heavy rainfall years will become the "new normal" despite the Westlands’ protestations.

Because of the enormous cost of completing a federal drainage canal, the Westlands has suggested to the government that it would take over resolution of the drainage crisis in exchange for debt forgiveness, a guaranteed water supply and takeover of some federal project plumbing. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D–Calif.) was approached about the possibility of brokering a deal for the Westlands in Congress. The Bureau proposed draft legislation in November 2008 and circulated it to interested parties. The reaction of environmental and fishing interests was swift and hostile.

In exchange for relieving the federal government of responsibility for finding a drainage solution, growers in the San Luis Unit and the federal irrigation districts immediately north of the Westlands in the Delta-Mendota Service area wanted the draft legislation to include the following:

• Congressional approval of the Grasslands Bypass Project.

• A water-delivery contract in perpetuity.

• A $100 million reduction in the bill the San Luis Unit owes the federal government for capital costs associated with its construction.

• Subsidized electricity for any drainage-treatment options requiring electrical power.

• Relief from certain provisions of the 1992 CVP Improvement Act.

• Transfer from the federal government to the Westlands of title to all pumping and diversion facilities along the San Luis Canal or the Mendota Pool, the Pleasant Valley Pumping Plant, and distribution and drainage-collector systems.

• A provision to allow the Westlands and the adjacent federal water districts to have two years after the legislation is passed to provide state and federal authorities with an acceptable drainage plan.

Undiscussed was the fact that neither Judge Wanger’s order of 1995 nor the 9th Circuit’s 2000 decision in Firebaugh requires the federal government to actually pay for a drainage solution. The ultimate financial burden for any drainage fix still remains with the San Luis Unit.

Critics of the proposed legislation, including farm groups, anglers and environmentalists, suspect the Westlands’ real motive in taking over the unsolvable drainage problem could be to secure a reliable water source that it can then sell on the open market (including for urban uses) in California, reaping windfall profits as the marginal lands in the district continue to salt up and go out of production—a charge the Westlands denies.

In public comments on the proposed Westlands bailout legislation, the California Water Impact Network (C-WIN) and the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance (CSPA) noted that the National Economic Development Alternative cost/benefit analysis for the San Luis Drainage EIS showed that the Bureau, by favoring a proposal to idle only 194,000 acres of selenium-tainted problem lands (similar to the proposed Westlands legislation) instead of the maximum land-retirement scenario of 394,000 acres in the San Luis Unit (favored by wildlife agencies and fishery groups) could end up costing taxpayers an extra $780 million by 2050.

An estimated 100,000 acres in the Westlands have already gone out of production in the last few years because they salted up for lack of drainage. This includes land covered by a $140 million 2002 Interior Department settlement of a lawsuit against the Bureau and the Westlands filed by 19 old-guard Westlands families who saw 32,400 acres of their farmland ruined by lack of drainage. That controversial settlement included $70 million for just four prominent farming families.

On Dec. 1, 2008, the C-WIN and the CSPA filed suit in Sacramento Superior Court seeking 1) to halt all water exports from the Delta until the fishery is stabilized and 2) to have the court declare irrigation of high-selenium soils an unreasonable use of water and a public nuisance. A week later, the Westlands and a coalition of water districts filed suit to block the reductions in Delta pumping ordered by the California Department of Fish and Game to protect fish, contending the U.S. Constitution bars state control over CVP water.

In January 2009, state and federal fishery biologists said populations of two indicator species of Delta fish, the smelt and the threadfin shad, again dropped to record lows in 2008. Biologists are not surprised.

Westlands Today and the Subsidies That Keep It Going

As of September 2009, the Westlands growers were awaiting the introduction of a bill by Sen. Feinstein that would provide them a secure—if diminished—supply of northern California water and relieve the Bureau of responsibility for the half-century-old drainage problem.

While the Westlands growers contend that cutbacks in water supplies have devastated the western Valley economy, it should be remembered that many west-side communities were desperately poor decades before the current cutbacks in water to the Westlands, back in the days when cheap water flowed freely and the Westlands got its full (or nearly full) annual allotment of 1.15 million acre-feet of Delta water—enough water to meet the needs of 11 million urban users.

In July 2008, California newspapers reported on a study that revealed only 6.5% of the 20th U.S. Congressional District’s adults were college graduates, compared to 62.6% in the top-ranked district, the wealthy Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. Most disturbing, residents of Manhattan’s Upper East Side lived, on average, four and a half years longer than the residents of the 20th district. In Fresno County, the poverty rate runs at 20%. It is 17.2% in Kings County and 18.1% in Kern County.

In Huron, which had an estimated population of 7,174 in 2007, and which is the Westlands district’s biggest town and 98% Hispanic, 34.6% of the town’s residents live below the poverty line, compared to 12.4% statewide. Fourteen percent of the town’s residents had income levels 50% below the poverty level.

Eighty-two percent of the children at Huron’s continuation high school qualified for the free lunch program. Of these students, none qualified for gifted and talented programs. A quarter of the children were in migrant education programs and 71% were designated as English learners, meaning English was their second language. Eighty-eight percent of the students’ parents did not graduate from high school.

In 2005, Fresno County Supervisor Phil Larson, who represents the Westlands area, described inadequate housing in Mendota, a town in the Westlands: "A lot of people are living in garages here." Some live in their cars or trucks or camp in secluded spots with no sanitation or piped water. And, surprisingly, there is hunger among the poorest in this land of plenty, the nation’s fruit basket. In a 2007 report by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, researchers estimated 120,500 low-income adults in the Valley had skipped meals and occasionally gone to bed hungry in the previous year.

Unsafe drinking water in farmworker encampments remains a serious health threat, and air quality in the Valley is considered among the worst in the nation. Its childhood asthma rate is California’s highest. The Valley exceeds the state standard for particulate matter an average of 90–100 days per year.

The unemployment and the limited formal education among some second-generational children of seasonal workers may also be linked to evidence of increased gang and drug activity in such rural communities.

In a speech to Congress on Dec. 13, 2005, Rep. Jim Costa, who represents the 20th district, urged support of the Methamphetamine Remediation Act to combat the scourge of methamphetamine abuse nationwide, noting that "meth is California’s largest drug threat, and the Valley suffers one of the highest rates of abuse, both in production and use."

Children having children is also a problem among the offspring of farmworkers. "Latinos still have the highest incidence of teen pregnancy in California, but look at the hot spots: San Joaquin Valley, Imperial Valley, patches around Salinas," says Hugo Morales, a Harvard University graduate who operates Radio Bilingue, which serves Fresno’s farmworker community. "That’s where the poverty is. This is the common factor, and education is the key to getting out of poverty."

However, education is difficult. The Fresno Unified School District graduates only 58% of eligible students from high school and only 41% of Latino children. Mendota High School, on the Westlands border, did not even open until 1993. There are no high schools inside the Westlands boundaries. Some 98.7% of the Mendota High School students are Latino. Only 0.5% of the students are white, suggesting that the children of the growers, who are overwhelmingly white, live far from their parents’ fields.

There are also reports of high teenage pregnancy rates in some rural Valley communities with higher percentages of immigrant farmworkers. The Valley’s overall teen birthrates are the highest in the state and more than twice that of the San Francisco Bay Area.

In contrast to the squalid conditions of the farmworker towns and the bleak prospects for the offspring of immigrant farmworkers, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) estimates that annual subsidies to the Westlands’ claimed 700 farms, in the form of crop subsidies ($6 million), water subsidies ($24 million) and power subsidies ($71 million), total more than $100 million a year.

One little-noticed subsidy is cheap electricity to pump all that water uphill from the Delta to the Westlands. The EWG estimates the electricity subsidy for the CVP is $100 million a year, with the Westlands getting $71 million of that annual power subsidy in 2002—an average of $165,000 per farm.

In addition to traditional crop subsidies for cotton, wheat and rice, there are many other subsidies for growers in the Valley, including tax breaks for farmland under California’s Williamson Land Act (which reduces local property taxes on farmland by 20%–75%); technical aid from local, state and federal farm advisers; low-interest or interest-free loans and outright grants from state water bond programs or state agencies; and many state and federal tax breaks for various farming activities.

Most Westlands growers live far from the bleak and industrialized farmlands of the district; many reside in an exclusive enclave of mansions in north Fresno, in the 93711 zip code, which receives more federal farm subsidy money than any other zip code in America. And even the City of Fresno (with an urban area population nearing half a million), which has long prided itself as the capital of the nation’s most productive farm county (with a gross annual farm income of more than $5.3 billion), was the poorest of America’s 50 largest cities, finishing even behind post–Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, in a 2005 study by the Brookings Institution. The study found that 43.5% of Fresno’s poor people live in "extreme poverty neighborhoods" compared, for example, to 22.4% of the poverty-stricken in Los Angeles.

Conclusion

The subsidized factory farm economy, it seems, does not have much of a trickle-down effect for the families and communities of workers who bring in the harvest. In fact, it appears as though this system has helped to foster a culture of unsustainable farming practices, caused large-scale environmental degradation and created a massive socioeconomic rift between landowners and their primarily Latino workforce. Despite efforts by numerous environmental groups and myriad other community organizers, this publicly supported system of subsidized factory farming in the region has caused considerable damage to both the local community and the natural environment.

Now, even with new legislation that will determine the future viability of the Westlands’ critical irrigation import infrastructure, it seems inevitable that the political clout of the nation’s most powerful irrigation district will somehow prevail to perpetuate this culture of social, economic and natural inequity.

Indeed, one cannot help but see two different agricultural worlds among the eastern and western flanks of the Valley. The east side, where the original irrigation colonies began 130 years ago, is full of orchards and vineyards and farmhouses every quarter of a mile and small towns every few miles. In the Westlands, with a single giant farm sometimes reaching tens of thousands of acres, one can drive for many miles down I-5 through cotton and row-crop fields without ever seeing a farmhouse or the all-but-invisible farmworker communities. It is a stark contrast indeed. The original drafters of the 1902 Reclamation Act, who wanted to populate the American West with small family farms, would not recognize it and would certainly not approve.

Read the entire series, complete with footnotes, online at http://www.ggu.edu/lawlibrary/environmental_law_journal/eljvo13
/attachment/carter.pdf.

*****

Lloyd Carter has been writing about Valley water issues for 40 years. His Web site is www.lloydgcarter.com.

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From the Editor

By Mike Rhodes

You would think that Fresno City College, like other institutions of higher learning, would do everything in its power to support academic freedom and free speech. Our faith was shaken a couple of years ago when we asked the administration if we could place Community Alliance newsstands on the FCC campus. We were given the runaround and told that they were concerned the newspaper would be a littering problem. As if a possible littering problem trumps our right to free speech and the Constitution of the United States. We pressed them on it, and they relented.

But our problems at FCC are dwarfed by those who have had the misfortune to run into members of the campus police there. This month, I devote this space to the issue of due process and free speech at Fresno City College.

The Outrage of the Month

Does your constitutional right to free speech, freedom to assemble and protection from unreasonable search and seizure vanish into thin air when you step onto the Fresno City College campus?

Ask Greg and Demone Moultrie, who are still sitting in the Fresno County Jail, what they think. According to witnesses, Greg Moultrie was walking on campus with his skateboard in his hands on September 25 when he was stopped by a campus police officer. The officer ordered Moultrie to hand over his skateboard. When he did not want to comply with what he felt was an unreasonable request, the incident escalated and Demone Moultrie, Greg’s brother, got involved. As officers scuffled with the Moultries, a student at the Native American Intertribal Student Association table got on the group’s PA system and encouraged students to use their cell phones to film the incident.

In video on the Internet, you can see the chaotic scene, including one of the officers hitting Demone with his baton. Greg was sprayed with mace. Greg is now—more than three months after this incident—still sitting in the Fresno County Jail. He has just been sentenced to a 3 year sentence for charges filed against him in the skateboarding incident. When I went to visit Demone on December 22, Greg was in The Hole - solitary confinement. Demone is also still in jail and is scheduled to be sent to Chino State Prison on January 21, all because of this skateboarding incident. How could something as simple as walking across the FCC campus with a skateboard end up with two young men in jail for a prolonged period of time?

In an attempt to find out the answer to this question, I talked to students at FCC and contacted the Public Information Office. I received a response from Joseph Callahan, Chief of Police with the State Center Community College District who defended their "skateboarding is a crime" policy by stating that "once skateboards get away from their owner, they are little more than missiles capable of great harm." 

Just before school let out for winter break, I talked to JP, who was sitting on a bench next to the fountain where the incident had occurred. He had his skateboard with him. I asked if he had ever had any trouble with the police, and he told me about two incidents when he had his skateboard confiscated. "They took my skateboard when I was on the sidewalk on the McKinley side of the campus, and I had to pay $16 to get it back."

Callahan says that if the fine is not paid within twenty-one days it doubles.  He went on to say that "skateboards that are not claimed will be held for ninety days. After ninety days a letter will be mailed to the owner advising them that if they do not come in and pick up their property within thirty days, it will be transferred to the Director of Maintenance and Operations for auction." That might explain why the police have a more than causal interest in confiscating skateboards, whether or not students are in violation of any rules.

Rigo Garcia is a member of the Sustainable Action Club at FCC. He said that "after the skateboarding incident in September, we tried to hold a forum on campus to discuss the incident." Even though the club is a campus group, the school administration refused to allow them to use a building for the forum, in part because "they said we are an environmental group and that this issue didn’t have anything to do with the environment." Garcia said that Sustainable Action is a social and economic justice group and that they should be able to discuss issues of concern on the campus. He feels the refusal by the FCC administration to allow them to use a room to discuss this issue was a violation of their free speech rights.

The FCC administration, immediately following the September 25 incident, banned campus groups from setting up tables near the fountain. Garcia said they claimed that it was a "security concern" because emergency vehicles would have a hard time getting on campus with student tables in the fountain area, but it is commonly understood at FCC that the ban was in response to the student group that got on the PA system, announced that the police were attacking students and asked if someone could turn on their cell phone and video the incident. The December 2 FCC Rampage (the student newspaper) had an in-depth story connecting the ban on tables at the fountain and the skateboarding incident.

"FCC has a new video surveillance system with a camera focused on the fountain, but they are telling us that somehow that camera was not working on September 25," Garcia said. The missing video could have shown what happened before the police confronted, hit and arrested Greg and Demone Moultrie. Instead, what you have is missing video that would have given insight into the incident and the FCC administration retaliating against student groups because they encouraged fellow students to document the incident. In addition, they tried to prevent students from discussing the incident by refusing to allow Sustainable Action to hold a forum on the incident. What is it about academic freedom that the FCC administration doesn’t understand?

An unrelated, but equally baffling, incident happened to Joshua Trevino as he was getting ready to leave the FCC campus on November 22. Trevino describes what happened to him:

I was unlocking my bike when I received an important phone call. I finished unlocking my bike and stood next to it while I continued my phone conversation. Officer Cadwell drove up behind me, stopped and listened to my conversation. I thought that he would see that I was a student (I was wearing the standard overloaded backpack) that had just stopped to answer my phone, and then he would move on. Instead, he interrupted my conversation to say: "Is everything alright over here?" (This was said with a heavily sarcastic tone of mock concern.) I turned, nodded and waved that I was fine.

I then turned back to my bike and conversation, trying to politely indicate that I was trying to have a private conversation. I was hoping that this would be the end of our interaction and that he would continue his patrol. Instead, he sat there for another minute and then sarcastically said, "Have a good night." I turned and waved again.

He sat there another minute and then said, "Make sure to have a happy Thanksgiving!" This was said with the heaviest sarcasm yet and yelled loud enough to make the person I was speaking with stop mid-sentence to ask, "What the hell was that?" I told them that I was being hassled by campus police and that we should rap up our conversation.

Officer Cadwell drove a couple hundred feet N/E to the traffic circle, turned around and came right back. Officer Cadwell then asked me what my phone conversation was about. I told my friend to hold on a minute and answered Officer Cadwell that I was making plans for the evening. He told me, "You better not stay here." I responded that I had no intention of staying the night on campus.

He then drove around the main fountain and came right back. As Officer Cadwell was driving up to me for the third time, I figured that his plan was to keep harassing me until I left campus. So I told my friend that I would have to call them back, hung up and took my bike off the rack.

Officer Cadwell pulled up, jumped out and seized my bike. He told me to put my backpack down and sit down with my hands on my knees. He then asked for a driver’s license, and I said that I wasn’t carrying one because I was riding a bike. He told me that I was required to carry my driver’s license anyways, and I told him that was not true.

He then asked me for a student ID, and I told him that I didn’t have mine on me. He told me that I was required to carry a student ID anytime I am on campus, and I told him that was not true.

He told me to give him something with my name on it, and I told him I didn’t have anything like that with me. He insisted that I must have something in my backpack with my name on it. So I took my welding gloves out of my pack and showed him that my name was written on them. He said that I must have a piece of paper in my pack with my name on it, and I restated that I didn’t. I gave him my student ID number, and he had his partner run it.

While we were waiting, Officer Cadwell searched me, including sticking his hands in all my pockets. Officer Cadwell’s partner told him that my ID checked out and that I was a student enrolled in the welding program.

Officer Cadwell no longer had any lawful reason to detain me and therefore was required to release me from custody. Instead, he asked me if he could search my backpack, and I told him no. He said, "Well I’m going to search it anyways." I told him that was illegal, and his partner told me, "We don’t need your permission to search your pack, it just makes it easier." I told him that was not true.

Officer Cadwell then took his time, searching my pack very thoroughly. After this illegal search and detainment, Officer Cadwell then assumed the most threatening posture and tone he could, and told me that I must leave campus immediately.

Garcia has a theory about why the FCC police behave the way they do. He says that when officers in the notoriously aggressive Fresno Police Department get into trouble, they end up with the FCC campus police. That could explain the culture at the FCC campus police, but it does not explain why the FCC administration allows these violations of basic constitutional rights to continue. If these violations continue, it is only a matter of time before an organization such as the American Civil Liberties Union becomes involved and files a lawsuit, resulting in a huge settlement or judgment against the college.

The "Outrage of the Month" is an ongoing series of articles in the Community Alliance that we write to illustrate some of the crazy incidents that happen in this city. If you have a story that you would like us to consider for the next issue, e-mail editor@fresnoalliance.com.

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SEIU’s Civil War
American workers need a labor movement grounded in social justice, not fractured, fighting unions.

By Bill Fletcher, Jr., and Nelson Lichtenstein

(This article was originally published by In These Times at InTheseTimes.com. For more In These Times stories about the labor movement and workers’ rights, visit the magazine’s workers’ rights blog at WorkingInTheseTimes.com.)

What can one make of the civil war playing itself out inside the Service Employees International Union? “Civil war” is not far from an exaggeration. When the SEIU leadership decided to move against one of its largest locals—SEIU United Healthcare Workers-West—and place it into trusteeship early this year, they unleashed a storm that few of the leaders apparently believed possible.

The widely unpopular trusteeship not only has met with internal resistance within the local, but resulted in the establishment of a split-off union—the National Union of Healthcare Workers—and fights over who will represent workplaces that SEIU-UHW had held for years. This fight has drawn in many outside friends and observers who have hitherto been loath to get involved in the internal affairs of a national/international union. Given the stakes, it has been less and less possible to sit on the sidelines.

Trying to keep a bubble under water?

This internal conflict and the emergence of NUHW can only be understood in the context of both the evolution of SEIU since the assumption of leadership by Andrew Stern, and by the 2005 split in AFL-CIO, the labor federation.

After his election in 1996, Stern set out to transform what was already the fastest growing union in the AFL-CIO. Ostensibly he wanted it to grow faster and serve as a flagship for the rest of the union movement. His broader vision was somewhat vague, but clearly contained at the time the rough outlines of a left/progressive contour.

As it turned out, this vision evolved into something else—but in the late 1990s, it appeared that Stern wanted to turn SEIU into an organizing machine that would sweep through a large slice of the nation’s swollen service sector. Many people inside and outside SEIU responded with great hope to Stern’s aggressive leadership and the ambitions he put on labor’s agenda.

Although the SEIU has grown by about 50 percent during the last 13 years, the evolution of the union has been misunderstood by those who have assumed that this growth was a product of progressive and democratic structural change within the organization. While important changes did take place in the governance of the SEIU, it is perhaps better to see these transformations through the prism of the union’s shifting internal alliances and leadership purges. Over time, those reconfigurations paralleled the SEIU’s development of a new and disturbing set of objectives that it moved to the top of labor’s organizational and political agenda.

In his struggle to win the SEIU presidency and consolidate the power of his slate, Stern formed two sets of alliances and inaugurated one important purge of his opponents. First, when Stern sought the presidency he needed the support of then-SEIU President John Sweeney, if only because Stern himself was but a mere staff officer of the union.

Sweeney gave Stern a position on SEIU’s International Executive Board (IEB) to insulate Stern from exile if Sweeney’s own constitutionally-based successor, the late Richard Cordtz, chose to fire him in the immediate aftermath of Sweeney’s victory at the AFL-CIO. Cordtz did try to purge Stern, but Stern, being on the IEB, held a secure post from which he could and did campaign to become SEIU’s president. But this challenge would have failed had Stern not succeeded in working out important alliances with key local unions in SEIU. These alliances were built on popular opposition to Cordtz and Cordtz’s running mate, Gus Bevona (the autocratic leader of a large building service local in NYC). In this sense, the 1996 Stern candidacy was primarily an oppositional movement, a throw the bums out candidacy (or, perhaps, a keep the bums out of the International’s leadership), rather than a programmatically progressive coalition, despite some innovative proposals from his slate.

Nevertheless, Stern reached out to long-standing critics of John Sweeney, including Sal Rosselli, president of northern California’s big Local 250 (and later UHW) and Dennis Rivera, leader of the then independent 1199 National Healthcare Workers Union in New York. Rivera would, shortly after Stern’s internal victory, lead 1199 New York into SEIU.

Once in office, Stern reorganized the union in dramatic and traumatic fashion. Departments were closed, others were reorganized, and with Steve Lerner and other veterans acting as a kind of brain trust, Stern emphasized massive and rapid growth, either through mergers, organizing blitzes, or corporatist-style accommodations with key service-sector employers. The “Justice for Janitors” campaign experience had taught Stern and Lerner that unionism would remain but a weak and barely tolerated presence unless organized labor achieved sufficient “density” within an entire labor market or occupational niche.

In Los Angeles, the SEIU could not push wages upward when it controlled but 20 percent of the janitorial labor market, but once that figure moved past the halfway mark, employer opposition to unionism declined. This was an important insight—and a potentially winning strategy—but the quest for “density” could become an organizational fetish, eclipsing and then eviscerating the militancy, participation and democracy that were also essential to union success.

Consolidating power, stifling debate

But all this was in the future. In the struggle to eliminate old enemies, the Stern leadership took on the more corrupt and backward local union leaders. In almost magical fashion, one leader after another fell. In many if not most cases, the weapon of the trusteeship was utilized in order to eliminate this strata, composed in most cases of leaders from Sweeney’s generation.

They were replaced with Stern allies, usually younger and progressive. The culture of SEIU, however, permits trustees—the individuals running the local unions during the period in which the SEIU leadership controls the local—to run for office at the time that the trusteeship ends. Thus, many of these trustees had the power of incumbency and the ability to gain and hold office. This became a powerful inducement to align with the leadership of the International even if, and sometimes directly because, one lacked an internal base in that local union.

As this process unfolded, it should be added, attention was turned toward the reorganizing of local unions. The principal vision was that of large local unions allegedly designed to match the power of regional, national and international employers. But the process of local union reorganization eliminated many longer-term local union leaders, particularly those of color. And large, state-wide locals made it very difficult for oppositional candidates to successfully challenge those in control of the mega local’s affairs.

As one might expect, these large locals had few tools to elicit informed participation by non-activist members. In furthering consolidation, a process of elimination of potential opponents took place. They were quietly driven from their posts and replaced with individuals whose allegiances were directly to Stern and his soon to be Secretary-Treasurer, Anna Burger.

Such consolidation made the SEIU an increasingly inhospitable venue for dialogue, debate, and dissent. American trade unions have never figured out how to operate with a functioning, internal two party system, so Stern stands in the same tradition as that of John L. Lewis, Walter Reuther, and even Caesar Chavez. But the more sophisticated union leaders have provided a space for disagreement, even if their latitude is carefully constrained. Stern and his leadership team did not do this, and in the new century they made it increasingly difficult for dissent to operationalize itself, either at the SEIU convention or on the international executive board. Thus when local SEIU unionists disagreed, they did not challenge the leadership but merely ignored it insofar as that was possible.

Paralleling this process of internal consolidation, SEIU leaders grew increasingly frustrated with the pace of change at the AFL-CIO. Despite the bold rhetoric that accompanied John Sweeney’s accession to the presidency of the federation, the new leadership there had been unable to convince many old-line unions to ramp up their organizational effort and expenditures. Thus the AFL-CIO was losing millions of members in the wake of the dot.com bust and the offshoring of U.S. manufacturing in the early Bush era.

By 2003, Stern and other impatient union leaders had begun to openly criticize the AFL-CIO in a series of articles and interviews regarding the future of organized labor. This built into a near crescendo in 2004 when, at the SEIU Convention that June, Stern announced in front of former SEIU President John Sweeney that if the AFL-CIO did not change, SEIU would leave the AFL-CIO.

Although something of a cease fire took place during the rest of the 2004 electoral season, the die had been cast. In the summer of 2005, Stern led the SEIU and five other unions out of the AFL-CIO and into a new federation, “Change to Win.” The split in the AFL-CIO is directly relevant to the later civil war in SEIU, precisely because many of the issues that needed to be debated at the time were suppressed and replaced with sound bites. This is especially true about matters such as core jurisdiction (over what sectors a particular union should have responsibility for organizing and representing) and the relationship of bargaining to organizing (and vice versa).

Yet in the absence of debate, the confrontation leading to the AFL-CIO split became more about posturing than substance. Indeed, the split in the AFL-CIO actually hid the fissures that existed both among the Change To Win unions and within them. Subsequent to the split, these internal conflicts began to emerge and today C-T-W finds itself fragmented and adrift.

The end of the beginning

The circumstances leading to the SEIU civil war leaked to the surface in 2007. By then it was clear that the alleged promise of the Change To Win federation had gone unfulfilled. It was also becoming clearer that there were differences within the ranks regarding how the union movement should grow.

The unofficial release of documents from SEIU-UHW in 2007 signaled the opening of what could have been a constructive and insightful debate. As San Francisco Weekly, the documents constituted a criticism of SEIU’s leadership for its approach toward collective bargaining. Originating from within UHW, but shared in other parts of SEIU, the critique focused on the “density” issue, charging that SEIU was sacrificing collective bargaining standards, as well as local union autonomy and democracy, all in the name of membership growth.

SEIU responded with a manifesto, “‘Just Us’ or ‘Justice for All’?” in which the SEIU asserted that “History demonstrates that ‘I Got Mine’ – ‘Just Us’ unionism has hurt all workers, including existing members.” SEIU charged that even militant locals like the UHW were doing a disservice to the union movement by concentrating on improving their own contacts, even as the majority of workers in the rest of the healthcare industry remained unorganized and poorly paid. The SEIU thought that it might be necessary for existing locals to moderate their wage and benefit demands as part of a “bargaining to organize” strategy, in which companies ceased their opposition to unionization in return for uniform standards throughout the firm or even outright concessions at the bargaining table. (This was a tactic that SEIU imposed on UHW when the International persuaded the big California local to reach a template agreement in the nursing home industry in 2004).

Certainly one could find examples, in history and in the contemporary union movement, of militant but insular unions who protected their own membership but ignored the larger working-class interest. But the UHW was hardly such a trade union. Within the SEIU, UHW had one of the most active, if not the most active, organizing postures in hospitals, nursing homes and among home healthcare workers. UHW leaders thought there was no contradiction between militancy at the bargaining table and an effective effort to extend the benefits of unionism to others in the health care industry. High standards in the core UHW jurisdictions, such as Kaiser Permanente, set a standard for unionism everywhere and made it more attractive to potential union recruits in non-union facilities.

Equally important, the UHW saw itself as a union whose jurisdiction took in all healthcare workers, from doctors and skilled technicians to the more than 60,000 home healthcare workers who had been organized in the last decade. In contrast to the SEIU, which wanted to put all nursing home and home healthcare workers into mega locals that would have the “density” to bargain for all such workers, UHW thought that the home health care workers would be best served if they were part of a larger amalgamation of hospital and nursing home workers.

The SEIU determination to sever 60,000 home healthcare workers from the UHW jurisdiction was therefore not just a turf fight over members and their dues. It reflected key strategic issues of which “density” captures just a part. The SEIU drive to put all these home healthcare workers into one big California local—so as to more effectively lobby for higher levels of support in Sacramento—consigned these tens of thousands of largely immigrant women to the status of welfare recipients. The SEIU drive for “density” was proving the handmaiden of an increasingly austere welfare politics. Indeed, the union’s big home healthcare locals in Southern California have failed, for nearly a decade, to materially raise the wages and benefit levels of the hundred thousand plus workers they represent.

As this conflict unfolded in 2007 and 2008, it became intertwined with issues of local union autonomy, the UHW critique of SEIU’s overall trajectory, and the personalities and ambitions of the leading antagonists, notably the UHW’s Sal Rosselli and the SEIU’s Andrew Stern. Had the SEIU leadership taken the high ground, this debate could have been quite instructive for the rest of the movement.

There were a number of issues at stake, including: What sacrifices should newly organized workers be asked to make—in the realm of collective bargaining—in order to be unionized? Specifically, should the standards of a collective bargaining agreement be significantly lowered in order to gain the right to collective bargaining, with the hope that over time standards will be raised? What is the relationship between high standards in collective bargaining and the ability of unions to organize and recruit workers? How should decisions be made in a national/international union when it comes to standards?

The high ground, however, was not taken. Instead, a campaign of vilification began almost immediately, focused on attacking the person and character of UHW President Sal Rosselli. The intensity of the struggle quickly led to an effort to isolate and demonize UHW’s leadership. The release by the SEIU leadership of a peculiar letter (written by a defecting UHW leader, and former SEIU International staff person) critical of Rosselli and UHW leadership further distracted from any real discussion of the issues that UHW tried to surface. This was accompanied by a proposal from the SEIU leadership to seize a significant portion of the UHW membership—long-term care workers (nursing home and homecare workers)—and place them into a state-wide long-term care workers local union.

The factors that led to the actual trusteeship are both complicated and to a great extent mystifying. By early 2008, it was clear to most outsiders that preparations for a trusteeship of UHW were underway, in large part because of UHW’s vehement opposition to giving up their long-term care members without an honest, democratic voting process. SEIU openly denied that there was any plan for a trusteeship, even after accusing the UHW leadership of moving union money around inappropriately.

After the release of a letter by dozens of academics calling upon SEIU’s leadership to engage in principled struggle with UHW and to not repress them via a trusteeship, an orchestrated effort was undertaken to have key SEIU personnel—local leaders and staff—contact signatories of the letter to not only assure them that there was no trusteeship in the works, but that it had been insulting to suggest that Stern had anything other than an honest and restrained attitude toward UHW. (Lichtenstein signed the letter and then received an SEIU phone call.)

Legitimizing the trusteeship

Shortly thereafter, events changed rapidly. First, an internal email was released that demonstrated that the SEIU leadership had misled outsiders. The email confirmed that discussions were underway to trustee or “implode” the local. Secondly, stories came out in the media concerning the leadership of SEIU Local 6434, the California state-wide long-term care workers local into which the SEIU leadership proposed placing UHW members. Tyrone Freeman, head of the local, had for years been a very close ally and protégé of Stern. The allegations against the leadership of the local for corruption became so intense that SEIU trusteed the local, thereby removing
Freeman.

SEIU leadership then moved into blitzkrieg mode and announced hearings against the UHW leadership, a precipitous action quite at variance with earlier assurances that SEIU leadership had no intention to trustee the United Healthcare West local.

SEIU chose former Labor Secretary Ray Marshall as the hearing officer for a set of lengthy hearings in the late summer and early fall of 2008. These focused on allegations of financial improprieties on the part of UHW leadership involving the establishment of a multi-million dollar fund that the local seemed ready to use to fight the looming SEIU trusteeship. The hearings had the feel of a big time lawsuit with hundreds of thousands of dollars spent to pay dueling teams of outside legal counsel and expert witnesses.

When Marshall finally delivered his 105-page report in early January 2009, he agreed that many of the charges put forward by the SEIU leadership against the UHW officers were valid, i.e., that the big California local did attempt to move several million dollars to a non-profit educational fund that was in reality a resource designed to fight the SEIU should a trusteeship be imposed. Marshall also ruled that the trusteeship threat was not a “retaliation” against UHW’s decision to speak out against what many of its members considered undemocratic SEIU policies.

But Marshall made none of this the basis for a trusteeship, arguing instead that the “the underlying issue is a conflict over jurisdiction” involving the home healthcare workers. In effect, Marshall sided with UHW when it argued that the charges and countercharges involving financial malpractice were really “symptoms of the fundamental relationship between the International and the UHW.” Marshall called for a peaceful resolution of this conflict, based on a view shared by many unionists that “the main beneficiaries of this conflict are anti-union employers and politicians.”

But Marshall’s report was not that of a disinterested judge. The former labor secretary sided with UHW in recommending that the SEIU International board not establish a trusteeship on the basis of the specific issues (largely those involving finances) pressed by the SEIU during the lengthy hearings. But in what many observers saw as a tacked-on, last minute concession to Andrew Stern, Marshall amended his report (the typeface is actually different) to call for trusteeship if the UHW refused to abide by the SEIU’s decision to force UHW to relinquish jurisdiction over 65,000 long-term care workers and put them in a single state-wide unit.

UHW made an 11th hour compromise offer to the effect that should the long-term care workers vote to leave UHW, the California local would abide by their wishes. But the senior leadership at SEIU was not looking for a way out of the crisis. They ignored the offer and imposed a trusteeship at midnight on January 27, not a minute later than legally possible.

First moments of a new day?

In the history of the U.S. labor movement, as well as that of the SEIU, imposition of trusteeships normally encounter some discontent, but resistance is uneven and generally short-lived. A 1959 law, Landrum-Griffin, enacted when Teamster corruption was in the headlines, is designed to give national union officers overwhelming power to reorganize a local, install new officers, and run its affairs. Even when a trusteeship has been imposed in an autocratic fashion, most union reformers believe the wise course of action is to “take” it, organize an opposition, and then fight to win a new election in a few years.

The leadership of UHW, however, backed by a broad stratum of key activists, has chosen a more radical, confrontational, and democratic path. In a series of meetings in the spring of 2009, the old UHW transformed itself into an entirely new trade union, the National Union of Healthcare Workers. It would challenge SEIU for the allegiance of tens of thousands of hospital, nursing home, and healthcare workers in its old jurisdiction and quite possibly in new ones as well. This was and remains a bold effort, in which virtually all legal, organizational and economic resources are monopolized by the SEIU.

But the NUHW has a powerful resource of its own: the determined support of thousands of workers in some of the best organized and most militant workplaces in the entire healthcare sector. Unlike so many SEIU locals, the old UHW was led by a stratum of activists that reached deep into the ranks of the workforce. Doctors, nurses, technicians, and healthcare aids at Kaiser Permanente have long been in the vanguard of unionism, in the Bay Area and throughout the hospital sector. (Indeed, when SEIU put the old Kaiser local, Local 250, into trusteeship in the 1980s, workers there defeated the leadership put forward by the national SEIU and elected Rosselli as local union president once the trusteeship was lifted.)

It is unclear that SEIU’s top leadership truly anticipated the extent and scope of the resistance that emerged in UHW following the trusteeship. They probably did not imagine that this resistance would take the form of the establishment of an independent union that positioned itself as the legitimate successor to UHW. In either case, shortly after the beginning of the trusteeship, the NUHW went about building a resistance movement to the trusteeship. The core founding principles included both the notion of (1) one union for one industry (in this case, a healthcare union for all healthcare workers), and (2) an institutionalized set of participatory, democratic governance practices which devolved power from the staff to the working members.

What has been particularly striking about the NUHW effort is the manner in which its influence has spread within the former UHW jurisdiction. Within weeks, over 50,000 members signed decertification petitions indicating their desire to leave the trusteed UHW and enter into the new NUHW. And in the first major contest between SEIU and the NUHW, which revolved around homecare workers in Fresno, Calif., SEIU won what can only be described as a pyrrhic victory.

In that case, SEIU reportedly spent about $10 million dollars, including the deployment of nearly one thousand staff people, and then won the decertification election by a margin of less than two hundred votes. The NUHW has challenged the result, citing numerous irregularities. Irrespective of the final outcome, the fact remains that in a region and among workers that had not been a strategic base for NUHW, they nevertheless forced SEIU to spend an immense sum of money, and nearly won! Union activists expended all this time and money on a civil war that never should have happened in the first place, rather than on actions desperately needed to generate new growth or advance the political mobilizations necessary to fulfill the promise of the Obama victory just months before.

The underdog’s reclamation

Assessing what to make of NUHW and its potential is, at this time, a matter for speculation. Despite having pitifully few resources, the new union is capable of winning. In the NUHW’s key jurisdictions, particularly Kaiser Permanente, it is quite conceivable that they will overwhelm the SEIU’s imported and maladroit leadership.

This is true for at least three reasons. One, the former UHW has a very capable steward’s system and member involvement at Kaiser. Two, the trusteeship is an affront to thousands of staunch unionists and their allies in California where NUHW has won the backing of some prominent liberal politicians and many key unions, including San Francisco’s big hotel local.

Three, many among the SEIU staff, imported to California or back in the East and Midwest, are demoralized and do not see NUHW as a true enemy. Thus, if the NUHW can win just a few NLRB certification elections and restart the dues flow, then it will have sufficient resources to hire key staff, “organize” among a wider group of workers, and prevail in California over the still alien group of leaders imported into the state by SEIU. Recent NUHW victories at Los Alamitos Medical Center in Southern California and at an assisted living facility in the Portola Valley indicate that this strategy may be working. There is no reason, short of resources, that NUHW cannot prevail, irrespective of whether they choose to return to a reformed SEIU.

The larger significance of NUHW, however, can be found in possibilities. At this moment, it would be accurate to describe the NUHW effort as a process of reclamation. In other words, the establishment of NUHW is a form of resistance to an unjustified trusteeship. There is an attempt by the sacked leadership of UHW to rebuild the union and to reclaim what was ‘occupied’ by the International. This point cannot be overemphasized: It illustrates why the fight between NUHW and SEIU is not a question of an old-fashioned “raid” but instead a process which seeks to reestablish an ongoing, democratic, and highly successful trade union whose health and outlook is essential to any revitalization of trade unionism, on both a state and national basis.

In the most common circumstances of raiding, an existing union will target the workers represented by another union and seek to steal them away. (In South Africa, this is called “poaching,” probably a more accurate term.) In the AFL-CIO this is supposedly restricted by Article 20 of the AFL-CIO Constitution. For those unions not in the AFL-CIO, however, there are no such restrictions. Thus, it is not uncommon for certain unions to grow precisely by raiding bargaining units of already represented workers.

NUHW bears no resemblance to the traditional raider. In fact, one could argue that their activities do not represent a ‘raid’ at all, but instead are more akin to an insurrection. Specifically, the activities of NUHW are aimed at regaining representation over units of the old UHW that are controlled by the trustees. There is no indication that NUHW has its eyes on any other part of SEIU. What it may be considering, however, is a broader, national effort to develop and implement the idea that the former UHW leadership had embraced some time ago when it sought the construction of a truly national union of healthcare workers across all the usual employer and occupational boundaries.

But the first question is whether the reclamation effort will succeed and the trusteeship be defeated. The next question is whether reclamation can evolve into union transformation.

And what of SEIU?

The NUHW insurgency has created a crisis within SEIU. While the leaderships of most SEIU locals have failed to stand against the trusteeship—and in some cases actively collaborated with it—there are varying opinions at the staff and local level. A number of resignations from the International staff, the SEIU’s California State Council, and some locals have taken place, revealing clear disaffection with current policies. In other cases, staff people who were deployed merely went through the motions rather than throw themselves into an active and energetic re-organizing effort.

Even if it does defeat NUHW, it is unlikely that SEIU will regain the stature that it once had or resolve the internal conflicts that have risen in recent years. The problem for the SEIU, as well as for many of the other unions in the service sector, is that they are essentially staff-drive entities, legal/administrative constructs that are organizational hybrids. They stand halfway between fundraising and propaganda vehicles like MoveOn.org and the self-organized auto workers who once made institutions like UAW Local 600, representing tens of thousands at Ford’s River Rouge complex, a watchword for working-class militancy and union democracy.

This tension is apparent in all the service sector unions, where an influx of college-educated activists has revitalized organizing, research, and political mobilization, but where the conditions for genuine internal democracy, i.e., locals that really are local, an elected leadership with actual bargaining power, and the development of an organizing cadre that is responsive to the membership rather than a distant organizing director, remains elusive.

Although some SEIU locals have had histories of varying degrees of internal democracy and transformational politics, the SEIU has looked askance at such localist examples of democratic participation—not because the leadership of SEIU is hostile to mobilization or democracy in any formal ideological sense, but because it has had other agendas that all too often seemed to conflict with a decentralized and democratic structure. Efforts to democratize and transform the union controlled and led by rank and file members have been largely absent. This absence represents a major obstacle for a full renovation of SEIU.

All this has engendered something of a leadership cult within SEIU, a tendency present even prior to Stern’s assumption of leadership in 1996. Thus, whether it is Stern, Burger, or a local union president, it is the progressive leader that puts forward a militant and imaginative program and calls for the members to embrace it. Such a scenario guarantees a degree of hero/heroine-worship as well as a tendency to suppress dissent in the name of union solidarity. If truth rests with only one person, how can dissenters be anything other than traitors?

An alternative scenario is that NUHW becomes a catalyst for more widespread change within SEIU. There are reasons to believe that this is quite possible. The actual cost of the SEIU civil war may, at some point, quite literally break the bank and force a realignment of priorities. Local union leaders who have otherwise been unswerving in their loyalty to SEIU leadership may have to examine the checkbook and reconsider their position.

Less cynically, the issues that are at stake in the NUHW insurgency may indeed spread. While the SEIU leadership seems to be going out of their way to continue to demonize NUHW, it is far from clear that this assault is having much impact. What does seem to be the case is that many local leaders and staff activists are keeping their heads down and trying desperately to stay uninvolved in the civil war.

Yet the ideas contained in the NUHW insurgency are contagious. It is not just a question of union democracy, but of how labor is to organize itself in order to confront and defeat major employers and push social policy in a more progressive direction. In this conflict, a structure of democratic participation is not just a moral imperative, but an organizational weapon that sustains struggle and insures that the union remains part of a larger movement for social justice.

NUHW, therefore, offers a challenge not only to SEIU but to the basic question of what constitutes a union in the 21st-century, when the power of employers is aimed at eliminating any sense of worker control and empowerment. One hopes that humility and class consciousness will lead SEIU leaders to understand that their trusteeship of UHW, their current war against NUHW and the bargains they seek to strike with some corporate entities do little but diminish the concept of unionism in the eyes of workers and their allies at a time when we desperately need a social justice movement and social justice unionism.

*****

Bill Fletcher, Jr., is the executive editor of BlackCommentator.com, the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum and the co-author of 
Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path Toward Social Justice.

Nelson Lichtenstein teaches history at the University of California Santa Barbara, where he directs the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy. He is the author, most recently, of The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business, a portion of which was adapted for this InTheseTimes.com feature.
 

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Green Washing the Milk

By Robert Gammon

(This article was originally printed in the East Bay Express.)

The organic dairy industry has fallen on rough financial times in the past year. Small farmers have been especially hard hit, as the recession prompts price-conscious consumers to buy cheaper alternatives. Yet despite the severe downturn, two giants of the organic milk industry are going strong. And the secret to their success appears to be a loophole in federal law that lets them market their milk as “organic” while raising their herds in a manner that critics say mocks the term.

Two companies have come to dominate the world of organic milk in recent years: Dean Foods, which owns the Horizon brand, and Aurora Organic Dairy, which provides milk to major retailers who then convert it to house brands. For example, if you buy organic milk marketed as Safeway Organics, it’s actually produced by Aurora. The Colorado-based company also supplies so-called private-label organic milk for Wal-Mart, Costco and Trader Joe’s.

Dean and Aurora continue to gain market share in part because lax federal organic standards allow them to operate or contract with massive farms that maintain dense herds of cattle. Aurora operates five big milk-producing farms in Colorado and Texas. By the company’s own count, the farms range in size from 630 heads of cattle to 5,250. Dean Foods, which also owns Berkeley Farms of Hayward, contracts with at least 10 privately owned farms with more than 1,000 cows each. Some environmentalists contend that huge operations are nothing more than factory farms, where cows are crowded into tight confines, and then milked to death as they stand in their own feces.

Critics also say these relationships enable Aurora and Dean Foods to undercut the prices of smaller milk producers who own or contract with farms that provide ample grazing room for their cows and are stewards of the environment. “The smaller farms just can’t compete,” said Mark Kastel of the Wisconsin-based Cornucopia Institute, a leading environmental advocacy group and watchdog in the organic industry. “They’re having to compete on an unlevel playing field.”

Kastel and other critics contend that it’s not just their massive size that gives Horizon and Aurora a big edge but also how they practice their “organic” farming. The companies appear to be taking advantage of a federal standard that only requires farmers to provide their cows “access to pasture.”

This standard, critics argue, has allowed large companies to herd milk cows onto giant feedlots where they’re given organic feed. The well-fed cows are later provided “access to pasture,” but it’s essentially meaningless because they’ve already eaten. And because the cows don’t actually rely on the pastures for food, they can be kept in unsustainably crowded conditions. They also are often milked three times a day, instead of two, in order to extract as much milk as possible. “What you have is giant feedlots of thousands of cows that are overly milked and then die young from stressed-out lives,” Kastel said.

In an interview, Aurora spokeswoman Sonja Tuitele maintained that her company’s ownership and operation of its own farms—and not the size or practices of those farms—have allowed it to weather the economic downturn. The privately held company has posted relatively flat sales compared to last year, she said. But that performance has come at a time when smaller organic milk companies have experienced significant losses or exited the business entirely.

Sara Loveday, a spokeswoman for WhiteWave-Morningstar, a division of Dean Foods that includes Horizon organic milk, Silk soy milk and Land O Lakes butter, credited the “diversity” of her company’s operations for keeping it financially healthy. And healthy it is. In the company’s latest quarterly report filed recently with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, it boasts that “Horizon Organic outperformed the overall category with an increase in market share.” Horizon already was the biggest player in the organic milk industry before the recession started.

Both spokeswomen also made a point of saying that their companies and suppliers abide by federal law. But there’s no denying that both dairies have experienced some substantial embarrassments in the recent past. For example, in 2007, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) revoked the organic certification on a 10,000-cow farm in California’s Central Valley that supplied milk to Dean Foods because it wasn’t providing access to pasture at all.

That same year, USDA staffers recommended that a massive Aurora-owned dairy in Colorado lose its organic certification as well. But then a top Bush administration appointee overruled the recommendation and gave the company what amounted to a slap on the wrist—one year of probation—after it agreed to change its practices.

Both companies also have been sued repeatedly by small farmers and consumers because of their business practices. And some organic advocates are urging the USDA to change its organic rules to require that cows actually have to graze at least 120 days a year so that producers who don’t honor this standard won’t have such a huge advantage over those who do.

Aurora spokeswoman Tuitele said her company now grazes its cows at least 120 days a year on all of its farms, and that most cows are now milked only twice a day. However, in late August the Cornucopia Institute filed an official complaint with the USDA, alleging that the grazing practices at Aurora’s High Plains Dairy in Colorado still flout the intent of federal organic laws.

For starters, the organization says it has evidence that the High Plains Dairy is providing its cows with pasture that is unsuitable for grazing. It also contends that even if the company were supplying its herd with nutritious crops to graze on, such as alfalfa, the huge numbers of cows would quickly overrun it. According to Aurora, the dairy provides its 3,690 cows with just 660 acres of grazing land, which works out to about six cows per acre. By contrast, the accepted standard for ensuring that a pasture remains sustainable is two cows per acre. In its complaint, Cornucopia contends that Aurora’s lack of pastureland coupled with the large size of its herd makes “meaningful grazing, even if appropriate crops were available, a dubious proposition.”

Consider the Alternative

So what should consumers do? Well, there are plenty of alternatives to Horizon and the house organic brands at Safeway, Farmer Joe’s and Costco. One exemplary Bay Area milk supplier is Clover-Stornetta of Petaluma. The family-owned company operates a cooperative with small North Bay organic farms that employ sustainable farming practices. “Our philosophy is that cows should have continuous access to pasture and they should get nutrients from that pasture,” explained Clover-Stornetta President Marcus Benedetti.

Eco Watch recently visited one of Clover-Stornetta’s longtime organic milk suppliers—the Triple C Ranch on the outskirts of Petaluma. Owner Bob Camozzi said he grazes about 400 milk cows on 920 acres of land, which works out to about one cow for every two acres. In other words, Camozzi’s cows get 12 times as much space as Aurora’s. Camozzi, however, is not one to brag about his methods or criticize others. “I don’t want to point fingers,” he said. “But I do think people should be educated.”

His cows spend most of their time during the spring growing season grazing on the far reaches of his sprawling acreage. And he said he never milks the cows more than twice a day—once in the morning, before they go out to graze, and then again in the late afternoon, when they return. “If you push a cow, she doesn’t last very long,” Camozzi explained. “And if you don’t milk them as much, they last a long time.”

Clover-Stornetta is available at most independent grocers, including Berkeley Bowl and Farmer Joe’s in Oakland. In addition, Whole Foods’ California stores have replaced Horizon with Clover-Stornetta. And if organic milk is too expensive for you, Clover-Stornetta’s traditional milk also comes from small farms that practice sustainable farming, don’t use hormones and ensure that their cows graze on viable pastureland.

On its Web site, Cornucopia rates organic milk and dairies throughout the nation. It gives Clover-Stornetta a four-cow rating, with five being the highest possible. Straus Family Creamery in Marshall, near Point Reyes, also received a four-cow rating. By contrast, both Aurora and Dean Foods’ Horizon milk received zeroes after refusing to partake in the survey.

What about Soy?

Dean Foods also came under fire this year when it changed its popular soy milk brand—Silk—from organic to “natural,” without altering the traditional packaging. The term natural has little meaning under federal law in terms of soy milk. In fact, Dean Foods admits that its new “natural” Silk product comes from soybeans sprayed with insecticides and pesticides.

Not surprisingly, consumer groups immediately accused the company of trying to dupe consumers in order to maximize profits, noting that the new “natural” line was still more expensive than traditional nonorganic soy milk. “It was sneaky,” said Kastel of the Cornucopia Institute. “It’s representative of what’s going on.”

Company spokeswoman Loveday said they informed their largest customers of the change, as well as their major suppliers. Dean Foods later altered the packaging to make the switchover to “natural” more apparent and introduced a separate line of Silk organic milk with new packaging as well. Overall, Silk owns about 70% of the national soy milk market. Loveday said the company was not trying to take advantage of consumer confusion over “organic” and “natural.”

Nonetheless, a study last year showed that tricking consumers is pretty easy. The study revealed that most shoppers think “organic” is just a fancy way of saying “expensive” and don’t realize that it’s regulated by the federal government. By contrast, they think “natural” is regulated, when it’s really not.

The study, by the Shelton Group, a Texas-based marketing firm, found that 57% of consumers thought foods labeled with “100 percent natural” or “all natural ingredients” meant that they were superior. Only 26% thought the same about food labeled with “100 percent organic” or “certified organic ingredients.”

Although it’s not local, Eden Foods makes an excellent organic soy alternative to Silk. Cornucopia gives the Michigan-based company its highest rating—five beans. The consumer’s group also gives four beans—the second best rating—to Whole Soy of San Francisco, which makes soy yogurt and soy frozen yogurt.

*****

Robert Gammon is a staff writer for the East Bay Express, an alternative newspaper serving Alameda and Contra Costa counties since 1978.
 

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Fresno Melts Down

By Dan Waterhouse

As 2009 draws to a close, some 125 City of Fresno employees know that their New Year’s Eve will not be a joyous one: When they wake up on New Year’s Day, they will be unemployed due to an immediate $28 million hole in the municipality’s budget, which if nothing is done will grow to $88 million in six years.

Mayor Ashley Swearengin’s budget wonks said that projected revenues had not materialized and expenses had gone up. To temporarily close the gap, she said that major cuts had to be made immediately, hence the layoffs. Among the laid-off employees are 92 civilian staff in the police department.

According to Police Chief Jerry Dyer, 16 dispatchers, 25 community service officers, all the cadets, some administrative clerks, crime scene investigators, property room personnel, data transcribers, the firing range masters and staff assistants were laid off. Dyer added that 23 police officer slots stayed vacant (which is expected to grow to 38). In the last 12 months, the department has lost 249 employees (or 50% of the civilian employees).

Swearengin has been frank in saying that the next wave of cuts—and there will be a next wave in 2010—will include sworn officers. Sources say that Swearengin has returned federal grant money intended for police officer hiring.

Playing out in the background are the Metropolitan Museum and Granite Park debacles, the dire condition of the Grizzlies minor league baseball team and the parking garage that no one needs. Bluntly put, the City Council spent money like drunken sailors for years. They took endless rounds of federal dollars to beef up the police department, knowing full well the general fund did not have the wherewithal to sustain those jobs. But they thought the artificially induced hyper-housing market would last forever. It did not. Anyone with an IQ higher than “warm” had to know it could not.

Almost as soon as the cuts were announced, the screaming started: “Wahhh!! You can’t cut public safety!”

As far as the complaints about Swearengin returning the federal grant dollars are concerned, she has to. All that fed cash comes with a big string attached: If you use it to hire cops, you cannot lay them off. If you know that you are going to lay off officers in less than a year, why take the money in the first place? It is more prudent to hand it back and move on.

I expect to see pressure from the public safety supporters to reduce or eliminate things like code enforcement, downtown revitalization (which needs serious reexamination) and the homeless re-housing efforts.

Here are my thoughts for greater efficiencies or cuts:

• The police department (PD) has no business providing social welfare services. Right now, the PD is funding tattoo removal and job training as part of the “Mayor’s Gang Initiative” put in place when Alan “Bubba” Autry was sinking—running—the city’s ship. Social welfare services are the province of the county, not the city. Likewise, the federal grant money funding positions through the police department over at the Salvation Army drug treatment program should be retrieved and returned to Washington, D.C., or used to fund positions inside the department.

• Streamline the department’s organization chart. Eliminate two of the deputy chiefs; the PD operated just fine with three for many years. Consider re-centralizing patrol. Consider closing two of the policing districts. Examine the specialized units to see which ones can be reduced or eliminated outright.

• Cold property crimes must be added to the no-report category whenever there is no suspect(s), no fingerprints, no witnesses or identifiable property. In fact, the department discontinued taking non-injury collision reports many years ago. Whenever there are no positive solvability factors, these reports are simply filed and no follow-up occurs unless the victim develops new information. The day when the PD has time to document losses for insurance companies has long passed.

• End the territorial expansion dreams. The City can no more afford to take over the county islands than I can. It is time for the city to work cooperatively with the county, not continue to pick fights over whether certain county firefighters are “adequately trained” enough to respond to calls inside the city limits.

• Speaking of the fire department, (sadly) it is time for it to hand over responsibility for the vast majority of “red light and siren” medical aid responses to American Ambulance. The City’s paramedic program was abolished years ago. Although all City firefighters are certified emergency medical technicians, they are limited in what patient care they can provide compared to American’s paramedics. American Ambulance service delivery has improved to a point that probably more than 85% of the time fire units are cancelled while enroute by dispatchers. It is not uncommon to hear a fire unit that had been “enroute” for several minutes immediately report “available in quarters” when acknowledging being cancelled.

The reality is that government in general, and the City of Fresno in particular, has to reinvent how services are provided. The old way of doing things is unsustainable in the current economic climate.

*****

Dan Waterhouse writes “Queer Eye.” He can be reached at bdsmdanfresno@yahoo.com.

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The ACLU: Defending Your Civil Liberties

By Bill Simon

It has been a busy month at the Fresno Area Chapter of the ACLU-NC. Civil liberties just keep trying to go away!

Several members of the Board were present at the Fresno State Study-In on November 20 as the students protested budget cuts and especially the weekend closing of the Henry Madden Library. The Fresno State students followed up at our December Board meeting with discussion about campus free speech issues and alleged violations of open meeting laws resulting in a lack of transparency in the student government.

Not to be outdone, Fresno City College students contacted the Board and came to the meeting to discuss discrimination in a health class (referred already to the affiliate legal staff), free speech issues and alleged abuses by Campus Police against students and staff alike.

Through e-mail or the Board meeting,we have been approached with civil liberties problems in Orosi, police problems in Dinuba, illegal charges for programs in Sanger public schools, disregard of property rights in Madera County and public endangerment consequently created by a government agency. In Fresno, we heard about the attempted closure of a medical marijuana clinic and questionable representation by the attorney in the case. When we get such issues, we refer them to the Northern California Affiliate legal staff when appropriate or try to find other legal help to which we can refer people.

If you ever feel like you need help with a civil liberties issue, call the ACLU civil liberties counselor in San Francisco at 415-621-2488. They can let you know if it is ACLU appropriate or perhaps refer you to other legal services. You can also contact the Fresno Chapter at simonaclu@sbcglobal.net.

The Northern California Affiliate continues to collaborate with Californians for Justice (CFJ) in their common campaign for Schools for All or Schools Without Barriers. Several local ACLU members participated in CFJ’s end-of-year celebration on December 10.

The Affiliate and the Fresno Chapter are also collaborating with California Rural Legal Assistance’s Proyecto Poderoso “Orgullo y Poder Latino” Leadership Conference to be held on January 23 at the Big Red Church (2131 N. Van Ness Ave.). The goal of the conference is to empower LGBT people and allies, in particular those who speak Spanish, to build understanding and support for LGBT people and their families in rural California. Participation is free and registration closes on January 15. For more information, call 559-441-8721.

Meanwhile, we are moving forward with the lawsuit about the City of Fresno’s failure to respond to a Public Records Act Request in the Glen Beaty beating and the City’s apparent policy not to release officers’ names in a timely manner (at least not until the lawsuit was filed) and in preparing to file a request for a pattern and practice investigation of the police department by the federal Department of Justice. Oh, and, after receiving an invitation, we applied for membership on the Police Chief’s Advisory Board.

We continue to work with homeless issues and video surveillance issues, participated in an Immigration Advocacy Training Workshop and lobbied U.S. Rep. Jim Costa’s office about the Stupak-Pitt amendment, which would severely limit women’s medical care as regards reproductive rights.

That is most of it. It has been a busy month!

*****

Bill Simon is the chair of the Fresno Area Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. He can be reached at simonaclu@sbcglobal.net.

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Credo

By Richard Stone

Matthew 25:26 says, “I was in prison and you came to visit me.” My colleague, Maria Telesco, understands the passage as a pronouncement by Jesus that the redemptive work his life represents is epitomized in the care given to society’s “poor in spirit.” It is a quotation she often uses when people question her for devoting so much of her time to what she calls a “prison ministry.” She says, “It is my deeply held conviction that every one of us has a piece of God in them that is to be acknowledged and respected. It is a blessing for me to have been led into this work.”

She frequently cites a line found in Dead Man Walking, written by Sister Helen Prejean, Maria’s friend and her guide into the wilderness of the criminal justice system. Sister Helen writes, “No one can be judged on the basis of the worst thing they have done.” An important part of Maria’s work has been in connecting with the better parts of people who have done terrible things and thereby finding the part of herself that can go beyond easy judgment.

Maria has come to this work by indirection, not by specific choice or vocation. She is the first to make clear she is no Mother Teresa following a holy mission. In fact, her path probably began as a child who underwent a difficult upbringing, receiving little emotional sustenance to help her find her way in the hurly-burly of New York City. “My great solace was Grandma Jenny. She stood up for me, offering kindness and acceptance.”

Maria recalls how her grandma could not abide religious hypocrites who identified themselves as Christians but whose actions lacked charity. “Bible-thumpers and bead-clackers is what she called them. And she taught me well.” It is not hard to see how Grandma Jenny’s protection of the vulnerable and often-rebuked youngster has resurfaced as a model for Maria’s prison work.

Maria says that she also gained an early awareness of political and economic injustice through association with her Irish immigrant forebears, along with knowledge of their extreme impoverishment and ill treatment. The feelings connected with this history have been at play throughout her life.

When I asked for a book or song that she considered expressive of her credo, she chose, “Field of Atheny,” a song about a prison ship removing Irish inmates to Australia, away from all they knew. She says, “The punitive and extreme measures inflicted on prisoners still enrages me. To see life sentences for minor third strikes, disrupting the lives of whole families, not just the offenders…it is intolerable.”

Maria’s youth was also injected with compassion by her family’s move to a place not far from Sing Sing, home of New York’s death row, and specifically by the impact on her of the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. “I grew up disturbed at hearing people speaking callously of those to be executed…you know, the ‘fry the s.o.b.’s’ kind of stuff. And when I read about the Rosenberg children being taken to see their parents for the last time, I was overwhelmed by the inhumanity of it. I remember thinking that I would dedicate my life to changing this. Of course, I didn’t, at least not then.” She was 20—marriage and a nursing career came first.

The marriage was not a success (though it did result in a much-loved daughter), but the career was. “I was a little precious about nursing; my colleagues jokingly called me Florence. Looking back, I’d say my altruism was a little overblown and premature. I was looking primarily for decent-paying work, and as a care provider I was no more than competent. I became an excellent administrator, though, and when I was offered a plum supervisory position I jumped for it, even though I didn’t trust the organization I’d be working for.”

The company eventually went down in legal flames, amid accusations of fraud, but the job provided a crucial transition for Maria. She was terminated for refusing to sign off on false claims, and the sudden loss brought the realization that status and income did not provide happiness. “I returned to my high school ideology—a rejection of greed and materialism. I also discovered that being in the corporate world had compromised my health: ulcers, anxiety, insomnia. These all disappeared when I left the job. In fact I took my retirement pay, gave up the fancy house and lived for a year recovering my humanity by loafing on Venice Beach.”

Her return to work was in a job that brought her into contact with lawyers and the legal system, eventuating in visits to jails and awareness of the conditions that later became the basis of a class action medical malpractice suit on behalf of women prisoners. At a work-related conference, she met the as-yet-unknown Sister Helen, who Maria sought advice from. Before going their separate ways, Sister Helen asked Maria if she would correspond with “one of my guys on death row.” Maria demurred, saying she could not possibly take on such a relationship. To which Sister Helen said, “Famous last words, honey.”

It was shortly thereafter that Maria found herself involved with Death Penalty Focus (DPF) in Los Angeles and with an old friend who had been (Maria believes falsely) convicted of a capital offense. When Maria moved to Fresno to be near her daughter, she took on the task of organizing a local DPF chapter, and her career as one of Fresno’s most public voices for reform of the criminal justice system was launched.

Over the years, Maria’s involvement has deepened, and the nature of her work changed. As she began meeting death row prisoners and became familiar with their personal and spiritual struggles, she could only smile while remembering Sister Helen’s parting words.

She began to realize that punitive treatment of offenders is counterproductive: “85% of inmates will one day be back on the streets. Who do you want as your neighbor—someone who’s been treated respectfully or someone treated as a savage animal?”

She also saw that the families of prisoners were being cruelly punished in tandem with the inmates. She befriended families of prisoners she knew and began reaching out to other families. The book she co-authored with Toni Weymouth, Outsiders Looking in: How to Keep from Going Crazy when Someone You Love Goes to Jail, is intended to give guidance and practical support to anyone with incarcerated people in their lives.

Maria has seen the seamy side of our criminal justice system—where convictions are sought with little or no evidence but to get the case solved for the photo ops; where judges collude with DA’s and trials are mockeries; where sentencing is way out of line with the offense; where inmates are stripped of all dignity and hope. This aspect of her work—the search for justice—led her into affiliation with the Fresno Center for Nonviolence, where she is a longstanding Board member and which sponsors her current Prison Ministry.

One piece of her recent work has been as a key organizer/procurer for the Goody Bag project, which distributes thousands of bags of toilet items and treats to the women at Chowchilla’s prisons. She has also been accepted as a lay Unitarian minister serving the population of Avenal State Prison. This is the work she feels she has been preparing for these many years, touching directly the hearts, minds and souls of her confidantes, and being touched by them in return.

“Yes, I’ve met some inmates unrepentant and trying to beat the system. But most of the men and women I meet are grief-stricken by what they’ve done to others and themselves. They teach me what it means to attempt atonement with true humility. What breaks my heart is that so often they will forgive others for all the crap that helped turn them to crime, and even those who abuse them in the system. But they do not forgive themselves.”

As an advocate for the decent treatment of prisoners, Maria says she is constantly attacked for seeking to coddle perpetrators and ignore victims. But, she says, she learned early on in the work, from Sister Helen, to make every effort to include victims and their families in the justice-making process, though few take the offer seriously. When they do (as have those in the Friends and Families of Murder Victims for Reconciliation, a group that Maria brought to Fresno a few years ago), their stories are immensely powerful and moving.

Maria has also been touched by the Community Alliance’s “in-House” correspondent, Boston Woodard. “I admire his courage and fortitude, knowing each piece he writes can land him in trouble, if not ‘the hole.’ He dares speak the truth and suffer the consequences.”

Maria says her recent reading in the texts of many religions all concur in the essential commandment to “love thy enemy,” to acknowledge the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Perhaps it took being a ridiculed child for her to become a respect-giving woman. If so, she has used her travails well.

*****

Richard Stone is on the Editorial Board of the Community Alliance.

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Locked Up, But Not Forgotten

By Bill Sanford and Maria Telesco

On the wall, a sign said: Goal 3,900. That was the number of Ziploc bags to be filled for the inmates of the Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF) in Chowchilla, the grand finale of the 2009 Goodie Bag project. On Sunday afternoon, December 6, 84 volunteers gathered at the United Methodist Church (UMC) of Merced to meet the challenging goal. And meet it they did, in three hours and 15 minutes!

The number of bags to be filled was significantly down from past years, when the prison census had approached 4,500.

The project was under the auspices of the prison’s Inmate Family Council (IFC). The Merced coordinator of the effort was UMC parishioner Dave Hetland. Fresno coordinators were Glenda and David Roberts, Larry Mullen and Maria Telesco. The Visalia coordinators were IFC Chair Nancy Turk and Rev. Francie Levy.

This was the project’s fourth year, and Hetland has the organization close to perfection. He also showed talent as a statistician. When the day was done, he reported that 17 items had been placed in each of the 3,900 bags. The bags were put into 60 boxes (65 packets per box). The boxes were transported to the prison on December 9. Total items in the shipment: 66,300.

The items in the bags were small but useful and in some instances tasty. There were soaps and shampoos, pencils and greeting cards, toothbrushes and toothpaste, candy and teabags.

Gathering the items was itself a major undertaking that extended over much of the year. Individuals and businesses contributed. Gifts of cash enabled the purchase of items to reach the quantities required.

Still, the big push centered on Sunday the 6th. People from 18 organizations demonstrated laudable compassion and teamwork. They achieved the goal in record time.

A year ago, a number of inmates wrote thank you notes telling how much being remembered during the holidays meant to them. Here are several of their comments:

• “This is just a quick note to let you all know that we here at CCWF appreciate your
efforts so much. There are times when we feel forgotten and cast off, but then little things like the holiday gift bags remind us that people do care.”

• “I really appreciate the gift you gave us. It got me through a really bad time. God bless you.”

• “Thank you very much. You brought a smile to my face on a sad day. Much love.”

• “Thank you for all you do for us. Some of us do not have family who care and support us. Your presents are the only presents most of us receive. Thank you.”

The fourscore volunteers were associated with groups that included the Unitarian Universalist Church of Fresno; the Fresno Center for Nonviolence; the Green Party; the United Methodist Church of Merced; UC Merced; several churches, schools and fraternities in the Merced/Modesto area; and the IFCs of both the CCWF and the Valley State Prison for Women.

But the Goodie Bag Project is never really over. We count, sort and bag them, then ship them to the prison. We finally exhale and pat ourselves on the back. Then, early in the New Year we start developing a new flyer—this time for 2010—with an updated “shopping list.” We expect to have those in circulation by Valentine’s Day, and the process will begin anew.

*****

Bill Sanford is a retired pastor in Madera.

Maria Telesco is a retired registered nurse who has volunteered in various aspects of prison ministry for more than 25 years. E-mail her at maria.telesco@sbcglobal.net.

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Speaking up for the Homeless

By Nigel Medhurst

Human Rights Day is an international event sponsored by the United Nations. In Fresno, a press conference was held on December 10 where speakers at a gathering of advocates for the homeless lambasted the inability of the city and the county to address homeless problems. Specific ways of taking action to address the homeless issue were outlined.

Although there were many supporters and organizations who wanted to address the homeless problem, the local news media and government showed little support or concern for the event. This reaction is indicative of a dysfunctional view of the homeless problem.

The event’s spokesperson, Rev. Floyd Harris from Street Ministry in west Fresno, gave a rousing speech in which he pegged the City of Fresno as “perpetuating a fraud” in relation to its dealings with the homeless. Rev. Harris cited the poorly managed funds for the homeless. He was referring to the looming federal stimulus money (close to $5 million) that Fresno’s homelessness czar, Greg Barfield, has been promising to dispense for several months. The release of these funds has stipulations that seem to change weekly. Based on the city’s history of dealing with the homeless, these changes and delays are seen as extremely suspect and a possible rerouting of federal money through government and nonprofit agencies.

Rev. Harris’s voice boomed, “We have a government that is supposed to be looking out for the well-being of its homeless citizens. This is the same government who went out and violated the human rights of the homeless they were supposed to be helping,” referring to the evictions and destruction of homeless property in 2006.

These actions came from an unsound way of thinking about the homeless that sees the homeless as flawed citizens who are not worth saving. As a result of this thinking, the City tries to solve the homeless problem by chasing them off, imprisoning them, putting them in drug and alcohol rehabilitation, evicting them or harassing them until they leave town. The City is not trying to end homelessness; rather, it is trying to rid the city of the examples of homelessness.

Mike Rhodes, the editor of the Community Alliance who is known (on the street) as the “Messiah” for the homeless in Fresno, said that until the city changes the way it thinks about the homeless problem it will not solve the problem and will waste millions of dollars in the process.

“I think the people at City Hall don’t like to think about the homeless,” Rhodes said. “They treat them as errant children that need to be disciplined. City Hall doesn’t address the problem. They work to discipline the people by putting them in rehab, prison, making them leave town or they let them die. None of this works to end homelessness, but the city keeps doing it because of their short-sighted, backward vision.”

The City’s funding is designed to prevent homeowners from falling into foreclosure. Once a citizen becomes homeless, the City will offer rehab, imprisonment, eviction or harassment. The City will not even offer and will adamantly refuse to put out dumpsters or Porto-potties to enable the homeless to live in sanitary conditions. These conditions are inhuman. The City could only treat the homeless this way because they see them as something other than human.

There have been small, short-lived attempts to offer public housing for the homeless. This has been proven to be the most effective and cost-efficient way of dealing with the homeless problem. “Housing First” is a proven program that provides housing for the homeless. Supportive and rehabilitative services are then provided for the homeless citizen. The problem is the way governments must think and view the homeless will have to change. They will have to provide the homeless with housing before that citizen stops drinking or while that citizen is still in the throes of mental illness.

Barfield was championing the Housing First program, but he has recently shifted in his thinking to follow in the traditional thoughts and actions of the City.

Rhodes says that Housing First is less expensive than having homeless people on the street. “Multiple issues develop from living on the street. These homeless go to the Emergency Room and get checked into the hospital. This costs the City about a $100K a year per homeless person. Housing First could be managed for as little as $10K per person per year.”

The City seems oblivious. Either they don’t see or they don’t care. Homeless conditions are deteriorating. The City planned to evict the F Street encampment on December 16 but rescheduled that to January 6. The homeless are having their tents removed, and the City isn’t giving the homeless an option to go anywhere else. Does the City actually think this will rid these homeless from the city? Does the City think these homeless will not set up camp somewhere else?

Before the press conference, there was a meeting of homeless advocates, with representatives from Fresno, Sacramento, San Francisco and San Jose. John Kraintz, from Sacramento’s Homeless Safeground, came to support the homeless in Fresno. He suggested that rising rents have collided with falling wages, which has caused a dysfunctional society. He thinks if foreclosed properties aren’t rented then the entire city of neighborhoods will fall into urban decay. “I ask the government to stop concentrating on banks and corporations and start enabling small businesses. Think about the people. We have to make jobs,” Kraintz said.

Sandy Perry, from San Jose’s CHAM Deliverance Ministry, came to “express solidarity and build unity, exchange ideas and educate each other.” Perry explained that “many people in the United States are not aware that they have a right for shelter, food and medical care. If these citizens don’t have these attributes they see the lack as their fault.”

Perry called on the government to return to providing affordable housing to all citizens. “We used to have a public housing program dating back to the 1930s. Every person in the USA had access to affordable housing until 1970. That’s when governments stopped funding.”

The next big action on the homeless issue will be in San Francisco on January 20. The “Thousands of Voices, One Message: Fund and Build Affordable Housing!” rally to demand an end to mass homelessness and the criminalization of the poor will occur from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the San Francisco Federal Building (90 7th St.).

*****

Nigel Medhurst is a freelance writer and photographer in the Fresno area. E-mail him at nigelmedhurst@hotmail.com.

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Know Your Rights: What To Do if You Are Stopped by the Police

To fight police abuse effectively, you need to know your rights. There are some things you should do, some things you must do and some things you cannot do. If you are in the middle of a police encounter, you need a handy and quick reference to remind you what your rights and obligations are.

Print this page and carry it in your wallet, pocket or glove compartment to give you quick access to your rights and obligations concerning police encounters.

Think carefully about your words, movement, body language and emotions.

Don’t get into an argument with the police.

Remember, anything you say or do can be used against you.

Keep your hands where the police can see them.

Don’t run. Don’t touch any police officer.

Don’t resist even if you believe you are innocent.

Don’t complain on the scene or tell the police they’re wrong or that you’re going to file a complaint.

Do not make any statements regarding the incident. Ask for a lawyer immediately upon your arrest.

Remember officers’ badge and patrol car numbers.

Write down everything you remember ASAP.

Try to find witnesses and their names and phone numbers.

If you are injured, take photographs of the injuries as soon as possible, but make sure you seek medical attention first.

If you feel your rights have been violated, file a written complaint with the police department’s internal affairs division or civilian
complaint board.

1. What you say to the police is always important. What you say can be used against you, and it can give the police an excuse to arrest you, especially if you bad-mouth a police officer.

2. You must show your driver’s license and registration when stopped in a car. Otherwise, you don’t have to answer any questions if you are detained or arrested, with one important exception. The police may ask for your name if you have been properly detained, and you can be arrested in some states for refusing to give it. If you reasonably fear that your name is incriminating, you can claim the right to remain silent, which may be a defense in case you are arrested anyway.

3. You don’t have to consent to any search of yourself, your car or your house. If you DO consent to a search, it can affect your rights later in court. If the police say they have a search warrant, ASK TO SEE IT.

4. Do not interfere with, or obstruct the police — you can be arrested for it.

IF YOU ARE STOPPED FOR QUESTIONING

1. It’s not a crime to refuse to answer questions, but refusing to answer can make the police suspicious about you. If you are asked to identify yourself, see No. 2 above.

2. Police may “pat-down” your clothing if they suspect a concealed weapon. Don’t physically resist, but make it clear that you don’t consent to any further search.

3. Ask if you are under arrest. If you are, you have a right to know why.

4. Don’t bad-mouth the police officer or run away, even if you believe what is happening is unreasonable. That could lead to your arrest.

IF YOU ARE STOPPED IN YOUR CAR

1. Upon request, show them your driver’s license, registration and proof of insurance. In certain cases, your car can be searched without a warrant as long as the police have probable cause. To protect yourself later, you should make it clear that you do not consent to a search. It is not lawful for police to arrest you simply for refusing to consent to a search.

2. If you’re given a ticket, you should sign it; otherwise, you can be arrested. You can always fight the case in court later.

3. If you’re suspected of drunk driving (DWI) and refuse to take a blood, urine or breath test, your driver’s license may be suspended.

IF YOU ARE ARRESTED OR TAKEN TO A POLICE STATION

1. You have the right to remain silent and to talk to a lawyer before you talk to the police. Tell the police nothing except your name and address. Don’t give any explanations, excuses or stories. You can make your defense later, in court, based on what you and your lawyer decide is best.

2. Ask to see a lawyer immediately. If you can’t pay for a lawyer, you have a right to a free one, and should ask the police how the lawyer can be contacted. Don’t say anything without a lawyer.

3. Within a reasonable time after your arrest, or booking, you have the right to make a local phone call: to a lawyer, bail bondsman, a relative or any other person. The police may not listen to the call to the lawyer.

4. Sometimes you can be released without bail, or have bail lowered. Have your lawyer ask the judge about this possibility. You must be taken before the judge on the next court day after arrest.

5. Do not make any decisions in your case until you have talked with a lawyer.

IN YOUR HOME

1. If the police knock and ask to enter your home, you don’t have to admit them unless they have a warrant signed by a judge.

2. However, in some emergency situations (like when a person is screaming for help inside, or when the police are chasing someone) officers are allowed to enter and search your home without a warrant.

3. If you are arrested, the police can search you and the area close by. If you are in a building, “close by” usually means just the room you
are in.

We all recognize the need for effective law enforcement, but we should also understand our own rights and responsibilities — especially in our relationships with the police. Everyone, including minors, has the right to courteous and respectful police treatment.

If your rights are violated, don’t try to deal with the situation at the scene. You can discuss the matter with an attorney afterwards or file a complaint with the Internal Affairs or Civilian Complaint Board.

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Housing is a Human Right

By Nigel Medhurst

Homeless advocates believe that housing is a human right. On December 10, International Human Rights Day, a press conference was held at the Pam Kincaid Neighborhood Center in Fresno where speakers declared that the political and economic system had failed. Mike Rhodes, a homeless advocate and the editor of the Community Alliance newspaper said, “There is something fundamentally wrong when you have thousands of abandoned, foreclosed and bank-owned houses in this city and at the same time you have thousands of homeless people on the streets.”

Al Williams, another speaker at the event, said that some of the homeless are starting to move into those abandoned houses. “It is a matter of survival,” Williams said. “It is not reasonable to expect people to freeze to death in the cold, when there are homes available all over the place.”

The idea of talking about the homeless moving into abandoned homes during the Human Rights Day event was contentious, even within the progressive community. Peace Fresno would not initially support the event because their members were concerned with endorsing an activity that is illegal. Eventually, Peace Fresno agreed to support the event because there is nothing illegal with demanding that the city do more to house the homeless.

Speakers at the press conference proposed that banks, bailed out by U.S. taxpayers, invite homeless families to live in foreclosed homes as caretakers. “If the political and economic system made that one change—to allow homeless families to be caretakers of the bank-owned, foreclosed and abandoned houses in this community, homelessness would end almost immediately,” Rhodes said.

The homeless are already moving into abandoned houses.

These aren’t the homeless who live in tents at encampments. The small group gathered around the picnic table look like they are out enjoying the fresh air in the park. They play cards as their hamburgers sizzle on the BBQ and their cell phones charge on electrical outlets. There is no backdrop of tents or sleeping bags.

Everyone is expected to contribute and carry their own weight in this community that is part pirate, part outdoorsmen. The survival of the group depends on the individuals supporting each other. They drink their grog and shrug off the lack of common niceties we all take for granted. The wooden benches are practical, but there is little comfort in their rustic lifestyle. Sometimes, even with all their toughness they still occasionally need to get out of the elements and go inside. That is when they move into abandoned homes.

Homeless like these only go in when the weather gets extremely intolerable, like during freeze warnings or when it rains. Their first choice isn’t a shelter but an abandoned building. They feel they can still maintain their freedom and individuality in these homes. The shelters are far away, and there is a strict process for getting one of the few beds available. To spend the night, the homeless sometimes have to sit through a two-hour religious sermon. I will refer to the three people I interviewed as Larry, Carlos and Lance to protect their anonymity.

Carlos is Hispanic, 51, and looks like an ex-biker or roadie in a band. The weather and effects of being on the street have taken their toll on him. “I can’t jump into the dumpsters like I used to,” he said. “I have to take a milk crate and climb up on it in order to look in for the cans.” He makes all of his money from collecting recyclables. He usually walks five or more miles a day collecting cans. The money he makes he uses to buy beer and food for his friends.

When the weather gets bad, he finds an abandoned house and sleeps. “We go into houses that are already open. We take advantage of houses that are emptied and unlocked,” he said. If the police do come, the homeless hear, “‘Fresno PD!’ and they come in. If you have priors, then they’ll take you but mostly they tell you to move on. We wait 15 minutes and then go back in.” If the police ever give a ticket, it is usually only for trespassing. Carlos explained that it is always in the best interest of the homeless to look after the place. “We’re not kids. We’re not jerks. We don’t spray paint them or break anything. We just sleep in them,” he said. When they find a place, they only go there to sleep.

Larry, a Vietnam veteran and African American, 53, has been homeless the longest. He has pride in his lifestyle and considers himself a hobo, not a bum. “There’s hobos and bums. In the 50s, hobos were self-contained people. They were the independent homeless. A bum goes to the Rescue Mission, gets meals and sits in front of the Rescue Mission.”

These homeless distinguish themselves by their ability to look after themselves. “We’re not the ones who give up and live off the Poverello House. They eat and they go out and they wait for lunch,” he said. After Larry eats, he has to go make money to buy the food he and the others need for their next meal.

Lance, a Native American, has only been homeless for a short time. He was working in construction, but since the economic downturn he has been unable to pay his rent. He collects cans to make money to eat. He was glad to join up with the others. They look out for each other. This sort of homelessness he can accept. He didn’t want to move downtown to the camp on Ventura Street. “What’s the difference between prisons and the homeless down on F Street? They’re told when to eat, when to sleep. Homelessness is surviving on your little hustle like collecting cans or holding up signs.”

This group of homeless seem to display more pride and spirit than the homeless near the shelters. Still, Lance admits it can be hard. He said some nights he sleeps with one eye open and only gets three or four hours of sleep. He was shocked when he woke up with frost covering his sleeping bag. There are occasional squabbles like one with a park worker who got upset at Lance for taking the recycling cans he wanted. The park worker called the police on them. Lance said the police were nice and told them to leave which they did. Fifteen minutes later, they went back into the park.

When the weather gets unbearable, they will move into an abandoned house. “We’re out everyday so we go past these houses,” Larry said. “We see nobody’s there or there’s a ‘For Sale’ sign or its boarded up. We know where these houses are and we remember.” The action of moving into a house happens in an almost natural way. The homeless get kicked out of the park or driven out by the weather, and they wind up at the abandoned house. Sometimes the home is already occupied by other homeless, but the homeless will usually share with each other. “There is a code of honor among the homeless. We look out for each other and offer each other respect,” Larry said. And they make it through another night.

However, these rustic outdoorsmen aren’t the only homeless squatting or moving into previously abandoned or foreclosed homes. Meg, 26, from Fresno squats or couch-surfs. She lost her job at Starbucks and then lost her apartment. She moved around staying with friends and relatives, but that has run its course. She is now looking to find a full-time place to squat with her boyfriend. She explained that sometimes the apartments she finds are “furnished with couches, beds and running water and electricity.” She is probably sleeping in an abandoned home tonight.

*****

Nigel Medhurst is a freelance writer and photographer in the Fresno area. E-mail him at nigelmedhurst@hotmail.com.

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China’s Clash of Religions

By David E. Roy

On my recent trip to China, I was struck over and over by the extreme contrasts between the newly emerging and highly commercialized China and the steeped-in-history China that proudly honors its millennia-old traditions.

This trip was occasioned by an unexpected invitation to deliver a paper at the 12th Chinese Congress on Psychology. The event drew upwards of 3,000 Chinese students and scholars in early November 2009. My son, Dylan, joined me on the journey. (More on father-son bonding at another time).

Initial Impression: The New is Swallowing the Old

My initial impression of the contest between the two modes of China is that the new appears to be almost completely swallowing up the old. One example we saw first hand is the commercialization of the very sites devoted to preserving and honoring the ancient ways.

In the relatively small town of Qufu (small by Chinese standards), Confucius is the hometown hero and an enormous draw. Our hotel had a huge statue of him outside and an even bigger one in the lobby.

The city contains the Temple of Confucius, a large (2.5 acre) estate that includes many buildings and ceremonial gates. The grounds are beautiful and peaceful.

The Cacophony in the Temple of Confucius

By contrast, while we were attempting to wander in quiet rapture with our soft-spoken guide, we were swamped by the sounds and commotion generated by a dozen different tour groups. Each of the group’s leaders was equipped with a microphone and a bullhorn loudspeaker. If two or three groups overlapped at a particular scenic location, the guides seemed intent on drowning out the competition. (The word “cacophony” kept springing to mind.)

Whether or not the cause of Confucianism is furthered by a tour of this temple was not clear to me. While there were no Confucius bobble heads, the experience did not seem to honor the deeply interior and long-lasting wisdom that ties its origins to Confucius.

On another day, Dylan and I took a tour of select sites in one of the most ancient of China’s cities, Xi’an. This city, under a variety of names, traces itself back more than 3,000 years to one of the earliest Chinese dynasties (Zhou) when it served as the dynasty’s capital.

A Buddhist Temple with Electronic Billboards

Our first stop in Xi’an was at an enormous Buddhist temple, known as the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda. It was originally constructed more than 1,400 years ago. The grounds are beautiful, relaxing, meditative. In walking up to the main entrance, however, we were confronted with two billboard-size LED displays, one on each side of the stone steps leading up to the entrance.

Now, I know that the commercialism in the US exceeds anything we experienced in China. China really is just getting warmed up while our media conglomerates are asking how many messages can be delivered simultaneously before the human nervous system explodes.

Commercially, China is Catching Up

At the pace that China is moving, however, it may not take long before it equals or even exceeds the US commercially. The fact that they are moving at an extraordinary rate is broadly evident.

Everywhere we went, we saw countless construction cranes, horribly polluted air, mobs of cars (whose drivers make Mexico City drivers look staid), and an increasingly visible yuppie-like middle-class.

The Amazing Rise of the Chinese Middle Class

It is the rapid rise of a middle class that is perhaps the most striking contrast between the old and the new China. Upon returning to Beijing before heading home, Dylan and I stayed at a hotel close to the East Entrance to the Forbidden City.

A few blocks away, the financial interests have created a commercial zone with dozens of expensive stores all accessible from a street filled with only people, no cars. This is an opulent shopping street that replicates on a grand scale what can be found in many cities in the commercialized West. Amazingly, considering China’s pride in everything Chinese, the imitation extended to the huge electronic billboards that often featured western (white) models, not Chinese men and women.

China: Now Buying Locally

Around the time of my trip, I read news stories about two critical shifts in the Chinese financial development story. One simply announced that the number of cars being sold in China had surpassed US car sales. (“Help, I can’t breathe!”)

The other was the radical change that is occurring in the Chinese economy: Instead of exporting virtually everything, the Chinese are intentionally starting to market goods to themselves at a rate that is making the economy expand even more rapidly and that will protect them a bit more when faced with an economic slowdown elsewhere in the world.

The Economy Emerging as the New National Religion?

Yes, I am saying that the development of the financial system in China is modeling itself after the US in big and small ways. Whatever we have become, they are seeking to be this as well.

To take this analysis a step deeper and closer to the topic of religion, one can make the case, as some theologians and ethicists have, that our economic practices have come to function as our national religion.

And China, for all its professed disregard, if not outright disdain, for formal religion, is moving rapidly in the direction of making their economy the religion that it has become in the US. So far, it appears that commercial interests take functional and unconditional priority over the health of the physical environment and the humane organization of communities.

These interests obviously are serving a higher power, one that says go as fast as your are able, even if you have to annihilate entire ancient towns and cities, even if the pollution from the progress sickens and kills hundreds of thousands of people.

Will China’s Traditions Modify and Humanize Their Growth?

We certainly know what that is like here. We’ve done it repeatedly and are continuing to do it. Yet, unlike the US, China has these rich traditions that call for the care of others in ways that are basically similar to the values upheld in the world’s great religions.

Mao, in his single-minded efforts to bring China into something approximating the 20th Century, attempted to banish and destroy all connections to these ancient traditions, particularly Confucianism and Buddhism. Though this tragic move has long been repudiated, there may be still some deep-seated reluctance, rooted in fear, to open up fully to these sources of wisdom about human to human and human to world relationships.

Neuroscience on the Brain and Greed vs. Compassion

Another fundamental issue that has to be included in this analysis is the fact that this drive for more and more, quicker and quicker, is deeply rooted in how our brain and mind work.

Research today suggests that for us to be fully and uniquely human, we must capitalize on the most recently evolved portion of the primate brain, namely the frontal lobes that host the prefrontal cortex. Neuroscientists believe these areas of the brain augment and support such features as long-range planning, outcome assessment, even empathy and compassion.

An important part of the work of these higher cortical regions is to modulate the activity of the more primitive parts of our brain, including what has been traditionally called the limbic system (in a sense, our emotional brain).

If we are operating at the level of the limbic system, it is easy to get carried away with greed – I want it all and I want it now, as Freddie Mercury said.

Inclusiveness Leads to Compassion

If, on the other hand, we have been able to transcend that, then we can place priorities on making our economy one that is sustainable and one that supports, is in the service of, the human community as well as the natural world.

This, I believe, is something that is desired when people have come by one means or another to see and feel the larger perspective, beyond themselves, beyond their kin, even beyond the human population. This inclusive perspective can be arrived at rationally, as with humanism, but also through the deepest core of many religious traditions.

Which Values Will Guide Development in China—and the United States?

We must hope (and, if so inclined, pray) for the ability to encourage today’s leaders in China to turn to their ancient traditions for guidance about how that nation moves forward with its efforts to build a strong and capable nation.

Doubtless, the best way we can do this is if we as a nation adhere to similar principles to guide our actions. Our economy must be transformed into a force that supports human communities and enables the natural world to flourish instead of the other way around as it is today. This means ending the alter calls to $god$.

As Confucius, the Buddha, and Jesus, among many other religious leaders, would say, compassion is good and greed is not good.

*****

Ordained in the United Church of Christ, David Roy is a pastoral counselor and a California licensed Marriage and Family Therapist who directs the Center for Creative Transformation. He has a Ph.D. in theology and personality from the Claremont (California) School of Theology. Send comments to him at admin@cctnet.com or 5475 N. Fresno St., Ste. 109, Fresno, CA 93711.
 

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2010 Election Information for Fresno County

Important Dates
Candidate Filing: Feb. 16–March 12
Candidate Extension Filing: Ends March 17
Mailing Vote by Mail Ballots: May 10
Last Day to Register to Vote in the June 8 Primary Election: May 24
Special New Citizen Voter Registration Period: May 25–June 1
Last Day to Request Vote by Mail Ballot by Mail: June 1
Last Day to Request Vote by Mail Ballot in Person: June 8
Primary Election: June 8

2010 Partisan Offices
U.S. Congress (Districts 18, 19, 20 and 21) State Controller
State Senate (Distircts 14 and 16) State Treasurer
State Assembly (Districts 29, 30 and 31) Attorney General
Governor Insurance Commissioner
Lt. Governor State Board of Equalization (District 2)
Secretary of State

Seminar for Primary Candidates
The Fresno County Clerk/Registrar of Voters is presenting a seminar for candidates running for local office in the June primary. Candidates will learn about various filing requirements, voter registration drives, voting by mail and other election information. The seminar will take place on January 13 from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. at the Registrar’s office (2221 Kern St., Fresno). Those interested in attending should contact Kathy McClue at 559-488-2609 or kmcclue@co.fresno.ca.us.

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POETRY CORNER

Edited by Richard Stone

Community Alliance staff member Elly Orrin has contributed another round of poems for our thought and pleasure. We thank her for these, and for her behind-the-scenes contributions to the paper.

to be protected

may we be protected from
orators
self-righteousness and
speakers who will save us from ourselves

let us be protected from
zealots
vicious animals
unopenable jars and
subliminal messages

from
people who know us better
than we know ourselves – and
who tell us how to do what
while they do not

let us be protected from
mercenaries
the need to have zoo’s
and circuses with animal acts

we must find protection
from those who speak
in our name
doing the opposite of our being

to be saved from
ill health
plutonium
bad joke tellers and
stacks of dirty dishes

may we be protected
from governments
borders and
religion
as a reason for killing

from depression
lecturing elders when young
opinionated young when older
outrageous fashion designers

let us find protection from
and for ourselves
to protect others
harmed by us

*****
observation

becoming extinct is possibly the most concrete way of telling the world to go to hell.

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Latest Election Results:

National Union for Healthcare Workers (NUHW) 283 votes

Service Employee International Union (SEIU) 13 votes

A big NUHW victory in Santa Rosa!

December 18, 2009, Santa Rosa, Calif.—Caregivers at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital voted to join the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) today in an election victory that caps their six-year struggle to win a voice at work.

“We are all so excited to finally have a voice to make our hospital a better place to work and better for our community,” said Nancy Timberlake, a telemetry technician at the hospital. “We stuck together for six years and we finally did it. I’m so relieved and so happy that we won.”

The vote was 283 for NUHW, 263 for No Union, and only 13 for SEIU, a rival organization that tried to interfere in the election.

The workers’ effort drew national attention last year after political leaders and religious leaders rallied with caregivers at the motherhouse of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange, the founding order of St. Joseph Health System, which owns Memorial. Under pressure from the community, the hospital administration agreed to negotiate with workers’ representatives to establish ground rules for a free and fair union election.

This April, a majority of Memorial caregivers petitioned the National Labor Relations Board for an election to join NUHW. But the election was delayed for more than five months because of frivolous “blocking charges” filed by SEIU, the rival organization. When the labor board rejected those charges, SEIU demanded a spot on the ballot and blocked negotiations over ground rules—giving hospital management a free hand to mount an aggressive anti-union campaign.

SEIU ignored appeals from religious leaders, the North Bay Labor Council, and even former Labor Secretary Robert Reich to negotiate ground rules. Despite having virtually no support at Memorial Hospital caregivers, SEIU bombarded workers with dozens of mailers and visited them constantly at home and at work, urging them not to vote for NUHW.

NUHW filed charges with the labor board on Wednesday, after workers alleged that hospital administrators broke the law by engaging in illegal surveillance of union supporters, threatening and disciplining union activists, and giving SEIU staff unfair access to caregivers at work so they could campaign against the union.

“It was really transparent what SEIU was doing,” said Melissa Bosanco, a Care Partner at the hospital. “It was like they were management’s anti-union team. They wanted us to fail. But we saw through it and stuck together in NUHW.”

In January, more than 2,300 Kaiser Permanente professionals in Southern California will vote to quit SEIU and join NUHW. In all, a majority of the 100,000 workers at 360 facilities across California have petitioned to join NUHW and are waiting for similar elections.

*****

The National Union of Healthcare Workers is an independent, member-led union, dedicated to improving the lives of healthcare workers and the people they care for. More than 100,000 workers in hospitals, Kaiser Permanente facilities, homecare and nursing homes have petitioned to join NUHW since January 2009. | NUHW.org

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