Bad news from the Blue back woods

 Bad news from the Blue back woods 

Here in Oakland California, we had our own slip into darkness on election day. 

Our local version of the reactionary backlash in the deep Democrat part of dark Blue California does not conform to the liberal-radical reputation we have across the country. 

That is a good reputation that we do not deserve. 

To start with, two reactionary recalls won hands down. Oakland will be without our mayor and our Alameda County will be without our progressive district attorney. They are being blamed to for high crime rates and other things that have nothing to do with them and had started literally before they were born. 

Our own Oakland Local mini-Musk bankrolled the expensive signature gathering required, starting only weeks after the mayor and DA had been sworn into office, two years ago. 

The subsequent, well-funded advertising campaign sounded a lot like the campaign against the progressive San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin two years ago. We all know the Trump song about how the liberals just let the criminals go without consequences and how we need to teach those bad people a lesson with harsh policing and harsher punishments. Well, the song sung around here by recall people should open them up for copywrite infringement. 

It is all BS of course, but it tugs at the heart strings of the common people who are sick of seeing their car windows broken. The failure of local law enforcement and total failure of rehabilitation was not on the ballot, or even discussed. The public is at wits end and these demagogues who have failed to provide public safety found a convenient scapegoat that that they also used for political revenge. What Chesa Boudin in San Francisco in 2022 and our Alameda County Pamela Price had in common was that they were progressive district attorneys. There is no reason to believe that they would not prosecute criminals. There is every reason to believe that they would prosecute misbehaving police, and that is why they faced recall. 

And yes, some of the people who backed the recalls on this side of the bay were involved in the one on the other side of the bay. For some history, that was the second time San Francisco got rid of a progressive DA. The first time was via the ballot box and the “moderate” replacement was none other than Kamala Harris. 

And after all of this, crime in San Francisco had not gone down. 

Just as disappointing as the recall campaign, was the campaigns for some of our local offices. There was not a lot to get excited about on the local lists, but there we some bad apples. 

The bad apples got elected. 

We have a local state legislator called Buffy Wicks. She used to work for Obama and once called herself “Buffy the Bernie Slayer”. After running a campaign with dirty false accusations against a local progressive, her parachute landed her in state house after a long history of doing absolutely nothing in local politics. 

Buffy’s candidates did really well this time. One for state Senate against the same highly qualified local representative Buffy slandered in her run. One for Alameda County Supervisor with a union busting track record, running against an honest progressive, president of the local Oakland City Council. 

The ballot in California is eight pages long, so I will cut this short right here. 

It is only after the election that one gets a look at how bad some of the candidates are. We don’t like Trump in the White House. Well, we got little blue Trumps in State House and County Court House. 

Not all of the worse ones won. A few were really good. Some were shoe-ins provided by our local Democrats giving the public a pre-managed limited choice. Other candidates were just people working on their careers. Few stand out in a good way. A couple stand out in a bad way. 

All in all, it was another good election for the funders representing real estate ownership, real estate speculation and real estate development along with the Silicon Valley money that is spreading out from San Francisco. Our mini-Musk of the recall fame is into hedge funds or something like that. 

Our all-blue elections were swamped with all-blue campaign funding. 

There was a constant, misleading barrage of advertising in Oakland and across the state. 

San Francisco takes the lead with rich people paying to get themselves elected mayor and supervisor. 

Other big winners who are telling us about how good their work is and how this election shows progress of our values are the local pro-charter school NAACP, the pro charter Great Oakland Public Schools and the pro charter school group Faith in Action. The school board elections were not great, and the only good news was that we may at least keep a couple good people. The school board majority? Meh… 

While on the subject of the local NAACP, lets keep in mind that their pro-recall community includes the former prosecutor, now judge, who ran against our recalled district attorney, the former council member who lost the election to our freshly recalled mayor and the police chief that our recalled mayor fired for not implementing internal discipline. The undisciplined officer in question was racking up something like a quarter million in extra salary, and did things that included setting off his gun in an elevator. 

You see, we don’t need Republicans to be a farce. 

Not all of the turn to the right required knowing who the players were. The mood of so-called progressive California showed its colors in some statewide ballot initiatives. Of course, the vote to take the prohibition of gay marriage out of the state constitution won. It was only necessary because not too long ago, an anti-gay marriage proposition called Prop 8 had passed. 

This time we add to our shameful votes a big NO on an end to prison slavery. NO was also the answer to raising the minimum wage. The answer was NO on allowing local governments to have rent control. 

A YES vote was there to punish the AIDS health and housing people who promote rent control. Another big YES vote was there to punish criminals more than we already do. 

We saw bucketloads of the same advertising themes as used for our local recalls, but statewide. 

The advertising against rent control was exceptionally dishonest. 

Our governor is holding an emergency session of the California State Legislature to discuss how to keep our civil liberties. I suppose that means keeping the religious extremists out of our bedrooms, clinics and the panties of little girls trying to go to the bathroom. But what else? Not electoral reform. 

Are they going to tell us that people voted Trump because they are ignorant? 

Will any of them recognize that their own shenanigans turn people off? 

When you actually live here you can see why the Democrats don’t really offer a lot in leadership. 

Thanks to the Berkeley Daily Planet for putting this one out there. 

Bad News from the Blue Backwoods. Category: Extra from The Berkeley Daily Planet

Adapting to climate change means spending the money to do it

With the “cyclone bomb” and the “atmospheric river” both hitting California again, the resulting floods are showing us again that we are not ready for the rain.

A good watershed protecting forest coverage will not be able to do more than slow down the high-water flows produced by excessive rains.  But we do not even have that kind of watershed protecting forest health.  When it rains in California we have floods.  Some of them are avoidable.  Some can be mitigated and some just cannot be helped.  Our land management does little to slow things down or get out of the way. 

And now we have bigger swings in our weather.  It is dryer for longer and then it rains harder.  There are a lot of details, exceptions, caveats and questions that need more study.  What does not need more study is that we are not doing what it takes to deal with the weather that we should expect.

The call for strategic reforestation embracing our waterways and traditional prescribed burns to keep the forests healthy and fire safe has been gaining ground.  The result is a lot more than lip service.  The people fighting the wildfires are taking proactive measures. Some of the landowners have come around. 

And it is all insufficient. 

It is not insufficient because nothing can be done.  It is insufficient because we are not spending the money.  Making the decision to reverse the land management policies of the last century and a half is not easy.  It is a case where we are telling people what to do with their property in name of the greater good. It is the larger society that is deciding what that greater good looks like. 

It is time that society at large be willing to pay for what we are telling individuals to do in our name.  

Some of the new rules need not cost much.  A field is just as productive when the fence is a few yards away from seasonal and all year creek beds. 

Some of the rules should cover things that people are going to have to spend money on anyway.  A roofing tile should not be made out of flammable materials, not in this state.

Then there are things that will cost quite a lot, and the state should help pay for.  If we need to move houses away from repeated flood or burn zones, the public needs to pick up the cost. We need to reclaim wastewater and capture flood waters and build the structures and artificial wetlands needed to clean up water and allow it to soak back into the aquifers. We need more and larger flood channels than ever before. We need to plant trees all over and create more forest buffer zones.  We will need to be telling people what to do on big farms in a way we never have before.  The government will have to tell, not ask, but at the same time it can work with established landowners to make the changes understood and done in a way that people can live with. 

We have to give up on the old American practice of making a big plan and then sticking only certain people with the bill. We need to share the costs, and nobody should be treated as “undeserving”.

If we rise to the occasion, we can adapt and mitigate the global crisis.  The trail to doing so leads back to everyone doing their share to pay for it.  That includes the wealthy paying a fair share.