One word missing in the immigration reform debate:

Exploitation.

Exploitation is the missing word because exploitation is not what our two party system is talking about. 

We had a client named Andrews.  His business was contracting.  His complaint about today’s immigrant standing outside the hardware store hoping to pick up day labor was that they want to much and that the do not come “hat in hand” like they used to.  I did not hit him because I do not do things like that, so we quietly got rid of him and his business. 

He could not be more wrong.  The undocumented live day to day and in a state of insecurity and are very “hat-in-hand” all the time.  That is the whole deal.  A major segment of American employers want to have labor that is below legal costs, without benefits and unable to demand legal treatment under our employment laws or join a union.  Yes this kind of immigration is illegal, and so is the employment offered.  It is not just the fact that they have hired someone illegally, but these employers continue to act illegally in how they treat these workers.  The illegality is part of how this group of people are exploited all across our economy, but especially as farmworkers. 

All US workers are exploited by this mistreatment of the undocumented.  Employers are not held to account for breaking these laws or any other labor laws in any significant way.  Thirteen million people have dissolved into the US society as the bottom rung of our labor force.  We all suffer the dangerous conditions, the unpaid extra work hours, the insecurity and lack of recourses when wages and benefits are never paid.  The same lobbyists who have made sure that the immigration side of employment law has become unenforceable in the fine print have done the same job to the rest of employment law.  Many US workers live under the threat of being replaced by an undocumented worker and thus accept basically the same conditions.  Unemployment and the treat of even deeper poverty is another wall of the prison that so many workers are trapped into. 

Politically many working people are exploited by those responsible for our national problems but blaming our issues on the Spanish speaking undocumented.  Somehow the biggest banks in the world can lose more money than ever existed in history on speculative investments and the biggest military in the world can have a fleet of floating airports with atomic power plants in the hold, but the costs involved are never mentioned as a reason our nation lacks funds for the needs of the common people.  Instead our lobbyist shills that pass themselves off for elected officials blame our nation’s problems on milk credits for the nanny’s kids.  Blaming your problems on an ethnic minority is an ugly old game. 

The whole discourse of who deserves to be here and if “illegals” should have a “path to citizenship” is ugly.  It speaks to a lot of racism of course, and it is a symptom of the insecurity of the situation of working class whites.  Are they really willing or even able to do the work offered these 13 million?  And why do they feel so threatened?  Are Americans so reduced by the post Regan economy that one of the few things they have to boost their self-image is their citizenship?   

As long as a serious number of working class Americans are so seriously exploited by this anti-Latino rhetoric we are all going to continue to be exploited in bigger ways than who picks the strawberries. 

Exploitation extends to the nations of the world who educate their youth only to lose them to the 21^st century brain drain.  These high tech immigrants find themselves hat-in-hand working in Silicon Valley.  At the same time our schools are hat-in-hand and not providing the kind of education needed for that Silicon Valley job.  One should notice that at the same time Silicon Valley has voiced the “need” for more H1 immigration visas for tech work and have that provision in the Senate Immigration Reform bill, Apple Corp has been caught laundering their profits in Ireland.  Would it be too much of a stretch to say that on the one hand these US companies avoid taxes to the point of impoverishing our schools while at the other hand get free access to education paid for by other nations and at the same time have those H1 Visa workers in a beholden “hat-in-hand” position where they are dependent on their employer just to be here? 

We have a system drawn up by the lobbyists.  The farm lobby, the building lobby, the high tech lobby all have more influence in Washington than any of people doing this farm work, building work or programing work no matter what the worker’s citizenship or status.  We have the system that the economic interests have turfed out between each other and the politicians they own. 

And our democracy is being exploited by the narrowness of the issue as described inside the beltway and in our media.  For all the talk of the “partisan divide” on this issue and how many Latinos will vote for a Democrat after Obama, our two party system is silent on the word “exploitation”. 

All the focus is on the boarder and the people crossing it is combined with silence on the exploitation at work here in our country.  Another boondoggle is offered the crony capitalists who will build this multi-billion dollar electronic fence and another with an on-line verification system.  Obviously thirteen million people did not cross the Arizona desert, especially the millions of them who are not from Mexico and Central America.  What about all the others? 

Our relations with Mexico have a lot more on the table.  There is some serious question to how independent Mexico really is from the US corporations and government.  It seems that US capitalism is addicted to Mexican drugs, Mexican petroleum and Mexican cheap labor on both side of the border.  The two party silence on the nature of the relationship between the US and Mexico is stunning.  How is it that we are having this “Great Debate” on immigration and the Mexican border and never discuss the two nation’s bilateral relations? 

What the on-line employment eligibility check does for employers who are INTENTIONALLY hiring undocumented workers is not discussed by our press either.  The fact that most employers who hire the undocumented do it knowingly and intentionally because they are seeking out that lower price and exploitive conditions, is glossed over if even mentioned. 

Working people are not treated as people, we are treated as a labor market in this surreal public debate.  Totally unacceptable things are being done to our workers, yet there is not a single word about labor protection in the proposed Senate bill. 

How could there be when the discussion is missing the word exploitation? 

 

Oakland law enforcement that answers the question, or not

Recently I had the pleasure of watching Chief Whent describe how the Oakland Police will comply with the terms and conditions required after the Riders rogue cop scandal of over a decade ago.  After many turns, a lawsuit and a few failures to meet the standards set for our Oakland Police, we have come to be under the supervision of “compliance director” with a clear plan to end police abuse in our city. 

The talk is that Whent is our interim chief because that is who our compliance director Frazier wanted.  Whatever the truth is behind the quick departure of Chief Jordan, the unexplained two day tenure of Interim Chief Torribio and then Chief Whent’s appointment, the one thing we know for sure is that the official stories are a half truth, at best.  Some questions do not get answers. 

The last time I had been in the room where Chief Whent was speaking it was to see the top leadership in law enforcement in our area.  We had not less than the then Chief of Oakland Police Jordan along with our District Attorney, the head of County Probation, the supervising judge of the local Superior Court, and the County Public Defender.  Quite a crew of powerful top officials. 

Each of them gave less than inspired descriptions of how they are all coordinating to stop youth violence and crime.  There was talk of this program and that for our youth.  A lot of talk was about prevention and restorative justice.  Then it was time for questions. 

I had a question.  I always do don’t I?  All I wanted to know was the total number of people caught up in the system?  Like how many Oaklanders are in jail and prison?  How many are on probation and parole?  And what is the flow rate?  How many people on average are being released to our community from incarceration, say per week?  And on the other end, how many people are being prosecuted, judged and sentenced to jail or prison on average, say per week? 

What I got was our DA O’Malley telling us that there is no way she can answer such a question.  (she does not know how many people are successfully prosecuted on average?) She gave us some talk about how little the State Prisons and the State Parole system tells us about who they are releasing, when and under what conditions.    She followed that with a painfully pedantic description of the step by step of a prison release.  None of the other 4 illustrious panelists said a word, or a number. 

They did not answer the question.  It was a simple one and given who they were, these were numbers they should know off hand without having to look them up. 

I was stunned.  What I was expecting was a number that dwarfed all the programs.  I was not expecting no answer at all.  I asked my friend if I had not been clear.   He told me that I had been perfectly clear and they had avoided answering.  A couple other people seemed to feel the same way. 

So our council member Libby Schaaf stood up and asked a more direct and pointed question:

“If all these programs are so good then why are things still so bad?” 

There was more evasive answers, and given who had asked the question, they at least used more words not to answer her question than they had used to answer mine. 

Finally the public defender said something about the restorative justice program they had been talking up only having room for one offender per week when the need was more like two hundred a month.

THAT was an answer at least. 

Chief Whent is a good communicator.  He is affable, and he speaks with clarity.  One of the things that I appreciated about his presentation was that he made no bones about the police officers who had crossed the line.  There was none of the cagey language or treating abuse by police officers as some kind of hypothetical.  No, he talked about the problem as we know it is from the public record. 

One thing he said impressed me, and that was using statistics to intervene on a police officer before trouble escalated.  One of the stats they look at is if the officer stops more people of a certain race, or gender than others in the same squads.  He said that often a problem starts in the attitude of an officer and if stopped then, we do not get to the part where they are roughing people up, planning evidence (I think he said gun) and other abuse.  As he put it, the idea was to protect the public’s civil rights and intervene with an officer early enough to put them on track and have a chance to save their career. 

He said a lot more, and was pretty frank about what part of the compliance director’s requirements would be easy to comply with and where we are probably in trouble.  Where we are most in trouble is in the ratio of sergeants to patrol officers. 

At the end we were given the floor for our questions.  Most of the questions were about the relationship between the police and the public and the lack of trust that exists.   Good questions and he addressed them pretty squarely.  Some of what he had to say I agreed with, other ideas sounded too much along the lock-em-up paradigm for me. 

Since others had asked the question of trust I asked another question:

“What do you say to the people of Oakland who do not believe anything will change?”

He said that he did not blame them and he did not think that the police will gain credibility unless they did two things in a way that the public would know it. 

1) Come into full compliance with the court order and get police abuse under control. 

2) Make a dent in crime. 

I call that an answer. 

I am still looking for some well sourced statistics on how many of our fellow residents are caught up in the criminal justice system one way or another. 

 

 

 

East Bay Hills forestation plan comments

This is what I wrote to the program at http://ebheis.cdmims.com/Public-Participation.aspx

To Whom It May Concern,

My name is Don Macleay.  I live in Oakland. 

I work as a computer consultant now, but at an earlier time I directed a reforestation program to protect a watershed for a small scale hydro electric project.  My role was not forestry; it was management.  Supervising the construction, soil stabilization reforestation and general water retention and run-off control reforestation mixed with residential and agricultural lands allowed me a to see the whole process and work with many experts in the different fields.  These considerations come from someone who once ran such a project as you now propose. 

Looking over the project I have some quick thoughts. 
I did not have time to study the project in detail, so some of the issues may have been better discussed than I saw. 

First, I like the basic idea. 
Some of my friends were burned out in the Oakland Fire and I have been aware of the role of invasive species in the fire ecology area in our current fire danger ever since.  My gut feeling is that this project is on the right track.  I hope that it will be done gradually in small patches never leaving any large area deforested for any long period of time.  That way the soils will stay stable.  The overall condition of the hills is badly deforested so I think we need the stability and water retention that the current non-native trees provide as we gradually replace them with native fire-ecology species.  It would also be a good idea to start by expanding native forest into the open grass lands and other denuded areas first as a way to increase the over all coverage before starting to remove healthy non-native trees. 

I wonder about the fire ecology aspect and if we have addressed it in full. 
I am not sure how we get back to the light burns that are natural to our foothills. 
There is a lot of fuel built up, especially in these non-native trees, so fuel removal comes before controlled burns. 
It seems to me that the long range plans should include scheduled controlled burns at the right times for natural re-seeding.

What I saw of the plan talks much about trees, not so much about the other plants. 
What about the normal association of shrubs, other plants and fauna that make up this fire ecology biome?
Are there plans to repopulate those species too? 
They have also been impacted by agriculture, invasive species and other land use practices.
If we want self sustaining wildlands with stable soils, we will need all of the original ecology. 

My only negative comment is on the herbicides. 
If we were talking about a tree farm, there would be much less concern.
But if we are trying to reforest restoring the original species then herbicide is problematic. 
There are too many plant and animal species involved in wildland soils for the herbicides not to cause secondary effects.
The complementary plant life to the trees would be seriously impacted by the effects of stump spaying. 

It seems like there will be some modification to the plan after the public reaction seen so far. 
In that process I would suggest just pulling the stumps in coordination with the controlled burns.
The non-native, non-fire ecology plants will be pushed out naturally, with a bit more work and some more time. 

-- 

Don Macleay
dmacleay@earthlink.net

A small step in the right direction for disadvantaged schools.

 

Today in our new California budget a long needed change has been brought into our school funding formula.  When running for office one of the ways you can lose the media’s attention is to discuss school funding formulas but it is the way-it-works when it comes to money for our Oakland Schools. 

Of course if you are not a member of either of the two official political advertising conglomerates, your message, not to mention your name, does not get into the official media at all. 

Our schools and schools like our schools suffer because of a thing called the “daily attendance formula” where our schools are allocated funds based on how many students actually attended each and every day of school.  In Oakland our high truancy rate does not merit extra funds to deal with it.  Instead our funding allotment is cut for each day a kid cuts school. 

What the new budget has added is extra funds for schools with extra needs.  The main focus in the press is the 55% low income and high percentage of English learning students’ needs that are cause for extra funding. 

This is great and long overdue. Of course the amount of money in the offering is still to little to undo the damage of the years of cutbacks (American English for “austerity measures”).  Of course the priorities of the state still spend way too much on the corrections industry with its failed parole system and its prisons devoid of any serious rehabilitations programs.  And of course our state does not raise taxes on the wealthy who had their federal taxes slashed so much that all of our states have lost big chunks of federal funding and are fighting over the scraps.  That and much more can be said and is being said by Laura Wells and other activists inside and outside the Green Party. 

But this much we can say:  finally there is at least some law that funds our schools based on NEED.  This should continue!  The attendance based funding should be switched to enrollment based funding putting an end to the expensive daily reporting obsession that is required by law.  Some more serious funding should be sent to all the school districts that have high truancy and high dropout rates. For districts like ours that do not graduate a high percentage of our 18 year olds every year, there should be more resources than a DA’s office with a high conviction rate.

Oakland probably graduates less than half of those who would be of the right age to be graduating from High School and you can rest assured that the youth most affected is of color. 

It is sad that the neglect of our public schools had to reach this kind of deep crisis before the state decided to act.   I attend a lot of political meetings and hear a lot of what our school board, city council and local members of state assembly have to say.  I never hear much about funding formulas, if anything and maybe that is why this has taken so long to get this little bit of progress. 

Are we ready for a successful consultation?

Are we ready for a successful consultation?  

Now that we have Chief stop-and-frisk Bratten on the Oakland payroll as a consultant, are we going to have a valuable consultation?  

I have no idea how our city leaders think our unity problem gets any better with Bratten on board.  In the real Oakland, not the consultant Oakland, we have big social issues between our police and our residents.  Our Civilian Police Review Board, of 1977, still does not have the authority it needs to guide, oversee and discipline our police officers akin to a real Police Commission.  The amount of money that our police officers are paid does not go down well with most of us and the fact that so very few of them live in Oakland does not go down well with any of us.  We have been in a decade of non compliance in the court case stemming from a group of police officers that got caught using illegal strong arm tactics.  More than one organization in town tracks police abuse.  Our City Attorney Office helps us pay out police abuse settlement cases to the tune of more dollars than San Francisco and San Jose combined. 

Into this mix our city decides to hire the poster boy for stop and frisk.  As if the Gang Injunctions did not cause enough division we had to do this too?  Do we really think that a 7 to 1 vote in council reflects a 7 to 1 consensus for this consultation subcontract with Bratten?  Council President Patricia Kernighan may want to call all those who do not agree with her some kind of radical fringe, but that fringe includes many of the same people who put together our official crime policy: Measure Y.  

This whole thing makes me feel that community consensus is not something Council values much.  

I do not know what kind of group-think our new council has gotten itself into in making this decision and I wonder what we will hear from them after we have paid Bratten’s bill and received his wisdom.  

The lone dissenting voice, Council Member Desley Brookes of District 6, made it very clear on KPFA that the prime contract, of which the Bratten sub contract is but a part, was already in trouble on its deliverables.  

Why do we need this consultation?  After all this time we still need to decide what our crime policy is?  What exactly is the wisdom we do not have that these enlightened beings will bestow upon us?  Our Police Chief Jordan, our Police Captain Torribio, our expensive City Administrator Sanatana do not know what their policies are?  They need the advice of this guy from New York to run the Oakland Police?  If that is the case, we should not be hiring consultants, we should be hiring replacements.  

This city went through a very big public process to end up with Measure Y.  We looked around for advice at the time.  And we have never implemented the program, just like we have never implemented a Citizen Police Review Board with any teeth.  Measure Y is our policy and a well thought out policy it is.  It is not particularly original, but it is based on solid research.  Our policy of enforcement, prevention and diversion is supported by the super majority required to pass a ballot measure.  

Maybe our consultant will tell us why we do not really implement our own plan?  Measure Y has become more of a funding source for non-profits than any policy that our City, Police and with cooperation from the county the DA follow.  We talk restorative justice.  We walk lock-em-up with a few programs on the side.  Every day we send young people to start a life of crime and every day we do not help people getting out of prison end their life of crime.  Every day.  

The State of California has consultants too.  For the longest time I have been telling folk about the Little Hoover Commission Report on Parole ( http://www.lhc.ca.gov/studies/172/report172.html ).  This 2003 report tells us what is wrong with our California Parole system and what a local community can do about it.  SUPPOSEDLY it is our policy to implement the recommendations of this report.  Maybe Mr. Bratten can take a look at that while he is on staff?  All the problems described in the report are still problems with some realignment to Alameda County.  The main issue of not having a place in the community remain a main issue.  The problem of sending folk back to jail on parole violations instead of dealing with any new crimes, is also still a problem.   The only update to this report was to say that we still have not done anything about it.  The first line of that report reads:  “California’s parole system is a billion-dollar failure.”  That failure delivers broken souls to the streets of Oakland, week in, week out. 

I am not sure what a consultant can do about political leadership that does not lead and does not act on the recommendations of its own state government.  

Maybe it is like the consultant that was hired to fix the bike path plan for the bike path that is supposed to run in front of my house.  First we spent some years on a plan.  Oooops, oh, we forgot to run this plan past the bus company who has stops running down the main drag.  Sooooo, we hire a consultant, more dollars, more years, and voila, we have a new plan.  Over a million dollars to paint a white stripe down our street and destroy our community garden in the traffic islands.  That was the new plan.  When released, that plan caused an uproar, mostly for the gardens and another plan is in the works.  I ride my bike on the side streets where it is safer, and probably a better spot for a bike lane, and do not bet my life that the drivers who do not stop for me crossing the street on foot will somehow not drive over the white stripe of a bike lane.  I do not know how many years this planning process, consultants and all, has been going on, but it is over a dozen.  Still no bike lane.  

As if reading my mind, I get an email telling me “Visit Oakland (Oakland's Convention & Visitor Bureau) is working to develop a strategic plan for Oakland as a travel destination.” And to get this great strategic plan in place:  “Visit Oakland has retained a top-flight research firm, Young Strategies Inc., to conduct a comprehensive destination analysis and lead a strategic planning process.”  

If I could make stories like this up, my fiction would sell.  

How many years has the Visitor’s Bureau existed?  Only now are we developing a plan?  And what is step one?  An on-line survey with Survey Monkey https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/OAKLAND-CITY .  The only two visitors I know of coming to Oakland are my brother in Oregon and Chief Bratten.  Both work related trips.  

Meanwhile on my street that still has no bike path, the mugging rate has spiked.  We held a meeting at the Mac and Cheese place and the Neighborhood Crime Prevention Council (NCPC) got good attendance this month.  My own neighborhood watch group had become dormant, so I invited some neighbors over to see if reviving it could help.  During the meeting there was a mugging at Shafter and 41^st.  After helping the victim, one more couple decided to come to the Neighborhood Watch meeting.  

All over Oakland there are lots of neighbors willing to do something.  We fill the NCPC’s and we volunteer at the myriad organizations that reach out to youth at risk.  

In Oakland most of the public agrees with the consensus that prevention, diversion and enforcement go together and many of us are willing to do something about it.  We do not need a consultant for that.  

Give NOW!

With the end of the year my email and postal mail boxes have been filled with the message:

GIVE NOW!

Greenpeace, the ACLU, and Amnesty International were the best known brands.  I think it was over two dozen other brands also writing me to tell me about what a great opportunity I have to do all kinds of things to change the world with my money.  Even the ones from groups that I do support and give money to, sound like cheap hucksterism. 

Frankly, I am stunned nowadays if I get an email from any group about anything without the word DONATE on a button. 

When you get a message that asks you to vote, protest or just be informed and is not a lead pitch for a donation, READ IT; it is from somebody real. 

We Americans are great employees.  We do lots of things, including immoral things, for those who give us a salary.  We are also able to put out a lot of self serving doubletalk in defense of those who pay us.  “Americans will do close to anything for money” is not news. 

I do donate to stuff.  But Non profit corporations and their “advocacy” is not the same as activism.  Doing what you are paid to do and saying what will make your sale is not the same as having a social conscious. 

Have we become so stupid that we think that only MONEY makes people work?  Were we paid to join Occupy?  Was Martin Luther King motivated by profits in the civil rights “industry”? Is there a Neighborhood Watch market?  We spend to much of our lives looking at advertizing produced by people who ARE only in it for the money. 

Let’s not drink the sociopathic money-is-the-only-motivator Cool-Aide. 

That is another blog I should write about the corporate side of non profit corporations.

Right now I want people to GIVE NOW. 

First, I want us to GIVE A DAMN. 

What our government does matters.  It is important.  It affects you, your families, and your communities.  We have a pretty bad government and a bad system of government.  Not caring or thinking that you can just deal with number one in your corner somewhere only makes it worse and makes you powerless when your turn comes. 

Then I suggest that we all TAKE.

We should TAKE THE TIME to know what the hell is going on around us.  City government is complicated and a lot of money goes in a circle without getting spent on us.  Take a few moments read the reviews, look at the numbers, talk to those you respect and trust.

And finally I ask that we all BE HERE NOW.

Look around and see who is doing what and ask yourself uncomfortable questions:
•    What do you think is right?
•    Who do you trust?
•    What can be done about it? 

Give a damn, take time to learn what the hell is going on and then do something real about it such as vote or go see something for yourself.  That is my New Years message.  That was my last year’s message and that is what I would suggest we do before we decide to open our wallets and spend any money to build a better world.  Otherwise, how do you know what you are buying?

The high price of Oakland Policing

We need to face the fact that the Oakland Police Department is a failure. 
We fail to stop crime. We fail to prevent crime. We fail to get our youth away from crime. 
And we fail to have the respect, trust and support of enough of the people. 

We also fail to deal with normal pubic events, such as Occupy and Raider’s games.  

Our police department has successfully resisted efforts to reform it, to hold it accountable and they have successfully resisted implementing public policy in community policing and restorative justice.  

Take a look at this 1974 video of our Oakland Police “reforming” themselves with the help of an early computer, a training program and an early congressman Ron Dellums and ask yourself if that reform effort reflects the Oakland Police that we know now a generation later. 
http://youtu.be/JAw-u_HGO_w

 

Before spending another dime on more police, let’s look at all the costs and do some housekeeping.

Top of the list is some kind of civilian oversight of the police with the power to terminate the employment of police officers who have abused members of the public. The idea that we do not have this should have us all upset, but we get used to a lot of disappointments in Oakland government and accept bad situations when we should not.  

Quickly following this, and totally related, we need to stop the millions in lawsuit payouts for police misconduct.  We seem to be paying out more than San Jose and San Francisco.  

The biggest lawsuit, the Riders Case, needs to be resolved.  We cannot put any resources towards our police only have them in danger of being controlled by a federal judge.  

My suggestion for these accountability problems is a Police Commission. 
Other cities have them and we should too. 

Not to have police accountability costs us in the most expensive way possible because we have lost community trust and support.  

There are also dollar costs that need to be brought down ASAP because a million dollars a year is too much to pay for 4-5 police officers.  

The cost of overtime needs to be stopped.  A freeze on overtime except for those who actually patrol and are at the bottom of the pay scale would be a good place to start.  High salary office staff should not be on overtime.  That is the most expensive overtime possible.  And that kind of overtime distorts the calculation of pension costs later.  

The costs of having 90 officers (out of 630?) out on workers comp needs to be dealt with.  Do we have a plague?  How do we cut that number down or get people who are not coming back to work on the roles? 

The cost of having an armed, badge wearing officer do paper work, take finger prints, visit the families of truant students is ridiculously high and their effectiveness is radically low.  The civilian side of the police department is too small and not allowed to do enough.  

The cost of the pension program needs to be brought into something manageable.  It is not now.  We are building up a bill for pensions and retiree health care that could bankrupt the city.  

The cost of having officers ramp up their last years on the job so that they can collect the highest pension possible is a big part of why pension costs are so unmanageable.  

The cost of the top paid officers needs to be capped.  The whole wage scale needs to be reviewed.  

The cost of the “academy’ system to train new officers needs an audit.  3 million to train 40 cops? 

Today I read that they want to outsource police services and rent police from other areas? 
What will that cost? 

And the cost of employing people who will not live in our city should be brought into account. That costs us in trust, in support and in flat dollars.  Why are we hiring people who do not want to live here?  

Do some of this housekeeping and then the cost of hiring more officers would not be the multimillion dollar hamster wheel that it is now and we could expand staff with the support of the public and enough funds to hire them.  

But first, the public needs to feel that our police are held up to a high ethical standard and that they work for us and not the other way around.  If we do not feel that the police serve us, why pay the cost?