FIRMS WITH BAILOUT AID

--The New York Times

The government has moved to intervene

To make the pay scale slightly less obscene.

The Wall Street types consider this unfair.

Tney say they earned their money fair and square,

And 20 million, say, is only middling

For someone who's so good at money fiddling.

Of course, if things again go not as planned,

They're back to Washington with hat in hand.

These fiddlers do deserve some admiration:

They've found themselves a win-win situation. B3

Editorial: San Francisco's new police chief wants more authority to discipline problem officers. He's been talking about it since the day he arrived, and he's getting some political traction. Sup. David Chiu has called for a hearing in the next few weeks, and it's likely that the chief will seek a Charter Amendment next year to redefine how the top cop and Police Commission handle personnel issues.

We have no problem giving the chief the right to fire a bad cop. In fact, if George Gascón wants to quickly rid the force of the small number of violent and unprofessional officers who are responsible for most of the serious discipline problems, more power to him.

But Gascón isn't stopping there — he wants to reduce the power of the commission and possibly the Office of Citizen Complaints. And that's a very bad idea.

Police discipline is one of the biggest problems facing the force. The city has paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawsuit settlements in police abuse cases. Rogue cops have beaten, harassed, intimidated, and sometimes killed innocent people. And because so few officers ever face serious penalties, the bad behavior goes on unabated.

Gascón recognizes that. He told us in an interview in October that he thinks there are 10 cops on the force who ought to be fired, right now. That would send a powerful message: in the past 20 years, fewer than five police officers have ever been fired for misconduct.

Right now only the Police Commission can terminate an officer; the most the chief can issue on his own is a 10-day suspension. And there's a huge backlog of discipline cases. That's partly the result of the system itself — commissioners are part-time appointees and discipline hearings are time-consuming. It's also partly the fault of the department — previous chiefs have shown little interest in expediting discipline cases and have worked to thwart the ability of the Office of Citizen Complaints to complete investigations.

(Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV
Newsroom, has covered labor, politics and other matters for a half century.)

It's Nov. 19, 1915, in a courtyard of the Utah State Penitentiary in Salt
Lake City. Five riflemen take careful aim at a condemned organizer for the
Industrial Workers of the World, Joe Hill, who stands before them straight
and stiff and proud.

"Fire!" he shouts defiantly.

The firing squad didn't miss. But Joe Hill, as the folk ballad says, "ain't
never died." He lives on as one of the most enduring and influential of
American symbols.

Joe Hill's story is that of a labor martyr framed for murder by viciously
anti-labor employer and government forces, a man who never faltered in
fighting for the rights of the oppressed, who never faltered in his attempts
to bring them together for the collective action essential if they were to
overcome their wealthy and powerful oppressors.

His is the story of a man and an organization destroyed by government
opposition yet immensely successful. As historian Joyce Kornbluh noted, the
IWW made "an indelible mark on the American labor movement and American
society," laying the groundwork for mass unionization, inspiring the
formation of groups to protect the civil liberties of dissidents, prompting
prison and farm labor reforms, and leaving behind "a genuine heritage ...
industrial democracy."

Joe Hill's story is the story of perhaps the greatest of all folk poets,
whose simple, satirical rhymes set to simple, familiar melodies did so much
to focus working people on the common body of ideals needed to forge them
into a collective force.

Remember? "You will eat, bye and bye/In that glorious land above the
sky/Work and Pray, live on hay/You'll get pie in the sky when you die."

Ralph Chaplain, the IWW bard who wrote "Solidarity Forever," found Hill's
songs "as coarse as homespun and as fine as silk; full of laughter and
keen-edged satire; full of fine rage and finer tenderness; songs of and for
the worker, written in the only language he can understand."

Joe Hill's story is the story of a man who saw with unusual clarity the
unjust effects of the political, social and economic system on working
people and whose own widely publicized trial and execution alerted people
worldwide to the injustices and spurred them into corrective action.

It's the story of a man who told his IWW comrades, just before stepping in
front of the firing squad: "Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize!"

Hill's comrades aimed at nothing less than organizing all workers into One
Big Union regardless of their race, nationality, craft or work skills,
calling a general strike and wresting control of the economy from its
capitalist masters. The revolutionary message was presented in the simple
language of the workplace, in the songs of Hill, Chaplain and others, in the
streetcorner oratory and in a tremendous outpouring of publications,
including a dozen foreign-language newspapers which were distributed among
the many unskilled immigrants from European nations where unions had similar
goals.

Workers were told again and again that they all had the same problems, the
same needs and faced the same enemy. It was they who did the work, while
others got the profit; they were members, all of them, of the working class.
To aspire to middle-class status, as the established labor movement
advocated, would mean competing against their fellow workers and chaining
themselves to a system that enslaved them.

Organized religion also was a tool of enslavement, to keep the worker's eye
on that "pie in the sky" while he was being exploited in this world.
Patriotism was a ruse to set the workers of one nation against those of
another for the profit of capitalist manipulators.

IWW organizers carried the message to factories, mines, mills and lumber
camps throughout the country, and to farms in the Midwest and California.

The cause of radical unionism to which Joe Hill devoted his life was lost a
long time ago. The call to revolution is scarcely heard in today's
clamorously capitalist society. Labor organizations seek not to seize
control of the means of production but rather to share in the fruits of an
economic system controlled by others. Yet Joe Hill's fiery words and fiery
deeds, his courage and his sacrifices continue to inspire political, labor,
civil rights and civil liberties activists.

They still sing his songs, striking workers, dissident students and others,
on picket lines, in demonstrations, at rallies, on the streets and in
auditoriums. They echo his spirit of protest and militancy, his demand for
true equality, share his fervent belief in solidarity, even use tactics
first employed by Hill and his comrades.

Hill emigrated to the United States from his native Sweden in 1902, changing
his name from Joel Haaglund, working as a seaman and as an itinerant wheat
harvester, pipe layer, copper miner and at other jobs as he made his way
across the country to San Diego, translating into compelling lyrics the
hopes and desires, the frustrations and discontents of his fellow workers.

In San Diego, Hill joined in one of the first of the many "free speech
fights" waged by the Industrial Workers of the World against attempts by
municipal authorities around the country to silence the streetcorner oratory
that was a key part of the IWW's organizing strategy.

Not long afterward Hill hopped a freight for Salt Lake City, where he helped
lead a successful construction workers' strike and began helping organize
another free speech fight. But within a month, he was arrested on charges of
shooting to death a grocer and his son and was immediately branded guilty by
the local newspapers and authorities alike. Ultimately, Hill was convicted
on only the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence.

Hill had staggered into a doctor's office within an hour after the
shootings, bleeding from a chest wound that he said had stemmed from a
quarrel over a woman. The prosecutor argued that the wound was inflicted by
the grocer in response to an attack by Hill, although he did not introduce
into evidence either the grocer's gun or the bullet that allegedly was fired
from it. He did not introduce the gun that Hill allegedly used and did not
call a single witness who could positively identify Hill as the killer. But
he easily convinced the jury that the murders were an example of IWW
terrorism and that since Hill was an IWW leader and had been arrested and
charged with the crime, he was guilty.

As Hill's futile appeals made their way through the courts, Gov. William
Spry of Utah was swamped with thousands of petitions and letters from all
over the world asking for a pardon or commutation. But he would not even be
swayed by the pleas for mercy from the Swedish ambassador. Not even by the
pleas of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson.

The governor paid much greater attention to the views of Utah's powerful
Mormon Church leaders and powerful employer interests, particularly those
who controlled the state's dominant copper mining industry. They insisted
that the man they considered one of the most dangerous radicals in the
country be put to death.

Joe Hill's body was shipped to Chicago, where it was cremated after a hero's
funeral, the ashes divided up and sent to IWW locals for scattering on the
winds in every state except Utah. Hill, with typical grim humor, had
declared that "I don't want to be caught dead in Utah."

Even in death, Hill was not safe from the government. One packet of his
ashes, sent belatedly to an IWW organizer in 1917 for scattering in Chicago,
was seized by postal inspectors. They acted under the Espionage Act, passed
after the United States entered World War I that year, which made it illegal
to mail any material that advocated "treason, insurrection. or forcible
resistance to any law of the United States."

The envelope, containing about a tablespoon of Hill's ashes, was sent to the
National Archives in Washington, D.C. It remained hidden there until 1988,
when it was discovered and turned over in Chicago to the men who presided
over what little remained of the Industrial Workers of the World, shrunken
to only a few hundred members.

The Post Office apparently had objected to the caption beneath a photo of
Hill on the front of the envelope. "Joe Hill," it said -- "murdered by the
capitalist class, Nov. 19, 1915."

Dick Meister, formerly labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV
Newsroom, has covered labor, politics and other matters for a half century.
You can contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com
, which includes more than 250 of his recent
columns.

By Norman Solomon

(Norman Solomon is co-chair of the national Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign, launched by Progressive Democrats of America. He is the author of a dozen books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”)

There's a significant new straw in the political wind for President Obama to consider. The California Democratic Party has just sent him a formal and clear message: Stop making war in Afghanistan.

Overwhelmingly approved on Sunday (Nov. 15) by the California Democratic Party’s 300-member statewide executive board, the resolution is titled “End the U.S. Occupation and Air War in Afghanistan.”

The resolution supports “a timetable for withdrawal of our military personnel” and calls for “an end to the use of mercenary contractors as well as an end to air strikes that cause heavy civilian casualties.” Advocating multiparty talks inside Afghanistan, the resolution also urges Obama “to oversee a redirection of our funding and resources to include an increase in humanitarian and developmental aid.”

While Obama weighs Afghanistan policy options, the California Democratic Party’s adoption of the resolution is the most tangible indicator yet that escalation of the U.S. war effort can only fuel opposition within the president’s own party -- opposition that has already begun to erode his political base.

Participating in a long-haul struggle for progressive principles inside the party, I co-authored the resolution with savvy longtime activists Karen Bernal of Sacramento and Marcy Winograd of Los Angeles.

Bernal, the chair of the state party’s Progressive Caucus, said on Sunday night: “Today’s vote formalized and amplified what had been, up to now, an unspoken but profoundly understood reality -- that there is no military solution in Afghanistan. What’s more, the vote signified an acceptance of what is sure to be a continued and growing culture of resistance to current administration policies on the matter within the party. This is absolutely huge. Now, there can be no disputing the fact that the overwhelming majority of California Democrats are not only saying no to escalation, but no to our continued military presence in Afghanistan, period. The California Democratic Party has spoken, and we want the rest of the country to know.”

Winograd, who is running hard as a grassroots candidate in a primary race against pro-war incumbent Rep. Jane Harman, had this to say: “We need progressives in every state Democratic Party to pass a similar resolution calling for an end to the U.S. occupation and air war in Afghanistan. Bring the veterans to the table, bring our young into the room, and demand an end to this occupation that only destabilizes the region. There is no military solution, only a diplomatic one that requires we cease our role as occupiers if we want our voices to be heard. Yes, this is about Afghanistan -- but it’s also about our role in the world at large. Do we want to be global occupiers seizing scarce resources or global partners in shared prosperity? I would argue a partnership is not only the humane choice, but also the choice that grants us the greatest security.”

Speaking to the resolutions committee of the state party on Saturday, former Marine Corporal Rick Reyes movingly described his experiences as a warrior in Afghanistan that led him to question and then oppose what he now considers to be an illegitimate U.S. occupation of that country.

Another voice of disillusionment reached party delegates when Bernal distributed a copy of the recent resignation letter from senior U.S. diplomat Matthew Hoh, sent after five months of work on the ground in Afghanistan. “I find specious the reasons we ask for bloodshed and sacrifice from our young men and women in Afghanistan,” he wrote. “If honest, our stated strategy of securing Afghanistan to prevent al-Qaeda resurgence or regrouping would require us to additionally invade and occupy western Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, etc. Our presence in Afghanistan has only increased destabilization and insurgency in Pakistan where we rightly fear a toppled or weakened Pakistani government may lose control of its nuclear weapons.”

Hoh’s letter added that “I do not believe any military force has ever been tasked with such a complex, opaque and Sisyphean mission as the U.S. military has received in Afghanistan.” And he wrote: “Thousands of our men and women have returned home with physical and mental wounds, some that will never heal or will only worsen with time. The dead return only in bodily form to be received by families who must be reassured their dead have sacrificed for a purpose worthy of futures lost, love vanished, and promised dreams unkept. I have lost confidence such assurances can anymore be made.”

From their own vantage points, many of the California Democratic Party leaders who voted to approve the out-of-Afghanistan resolution on Nov. 15 have gone through a similar process. They’ve come to see the touted reasons for the U.S. war effort as specious, the mission as Sisyphean and the consequences as profoundly unacceptable.

President Obama is likely to learn that the California Democratic Party has approved an official resolution titled “End the U.S. Occupation and Air War in Afghanistan.” But will he really get the message?

_________________________

Norman Solomon is co-chair of the national Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign, launched by Progressive Democrats of America. He is the author of a dozen books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” For more information, go to: www.normansolomon.com

By Dick Meister

It’s a time of celebration in Prague this month. A time to mark the November day 20 years ago when the “Velvet Revolution” erupted. A time to mark the beginning of the end of the Soviet rule that had crushed democratic reform movements in Czechoslovakia and its eastern and central European neighbors.

For two decades, Soviet troops and Soviet-controlled political leaders had been in charge. But then, on that November day in 1989, hundreds of protesting university students marched through downtown Prague. Riot police moved in to club and beat the peaceful marchers, prompting widespread outrage and a month of peaceful demonstrations -- the “Velvet Revolution” – that would soon lead to the end of Soviet domination.

It was a realization, at last, of the high hopes for liberation raised 20 years earlier. I was there in the hopeful summer of 1968, one of the journalists who had rushed over to record the miracle that was occurring throughout central and eastern Europe during what was known worldwide as ”The Prague Spring.”

By Mikhail Gorbachev

MOSCOW – The German people, and the whole world alongside them, are celebrating a landmark date in history, the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Not many events remain in the collective memory as a watershed that divides two distinct periods. The dismantling of the Berlin Wall – that stark, concrete symbol of a world divided into hostile camps – is such a defining moment.

The fall of the Berlin Wall brought hope and opportunity to people everywhere, and provided the 1980’s with a truly jubilant finale. That is something to think about as this decade draws to a close – and as the chance for humanity to take another momentous leap forward appears to be slipping away.

EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom, reeling from criticism of his disappearing act last week and his failure to quickly reengage with San Francisco, has an opportunity to repair some of his tattered image, particularly among progressives, and mend fences with the majority of the Board of Supervisors. It wouldn't even require a dramatic or groundbreaking step — all he has to do is agree to sign legislation by Sup. John Avalos extending eviction protections to roughly 20,000 vulnerable San Francisco renters.

The Avalos legislation clears up a lingering loophole in the city's rent-control ordinance, a leftover piece of a bad deal that tenants were forced to accept when the city first moved to limit rent hikes 20 years ago. Back in 1978, with greedy landlords taking advantage of a housing shortage to jack up rents by astronomical rates, the supervisors and then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein were under immense pressure to pass some kind of control. But the landlord-friendly mayor and at-large elected board were unwilling to do what Berkeley had done across the bay by setting permanent limits on how much landlords could raise prices. Instead, they approved a watered-down measure aimed largely at fending off a tenant initiative that would have gone further.

By Dick Meister

Nothing is more basic to our democratic society than the principle of majority rule. But what if the eligible voters who fail to cast ballots were automatically recorded as voting “no”?

Ridiculous as it sounds, that’s exactly what the country’s airline and railroad workers face when they vote on whether they want union representation.

Imagine if every election had such a rule. President Obama wouldn’t be president, since less than half the eligible voters turned out for last year’s presidential election. Most, if not all, congressional candidates would also have lost last year -- or in any other election year -- since voter turnout for congressional elections has typically been less than 40 percent.

Failing the Midterms: Press overplays election results

Republican candidates won gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia on Tuesday; meanwhile, Democratic candidates won two special elections for the U.S. House of Representatives in New York and California. But it was very clear which set of elections corporate media wanted to portray as sending an important message about national politics--that voters were discontented with the White House and wanted Democrats to move to the right.

"By seizing gubernatorial seats in Virginia and New Jersey, Republicans on Tuesday dispelled any notion of President Obama's electoral invincibility," declared the Los Angeles Times (11/4/09)--as if Obama had previously been confused with Superman. On NPR, Mara Liasson reported (11/4/09): "There's already a feisty argument going on about what the election results tell us, but there's no argument about the score. The Democrats got a slap in the face. The Republicans a much-needed victory."

By Norman Solomon
(Norman Solomon is co-chair of the national Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign, launched by Progressive Democrats of America.)

In Washington, “healthcare reform” has degenerated into a sick joke.

At this point, only spinners who’ve succumbed to their own vertigo could use the word “robust” to describe the public option in the healthcare bill that the House Democratic leadership has sent to the floor.

“A main argument was that a public plan would save people money,” the New York Times has noted. But the insurance industry -- claiming to want a level playing field -- has gotten the Obama administration to bulldoze the plan. “After House Democratic leaders unveiled their health care bill [on October 29], the Congressional Budget Office said the public plan would cost more than private plans and only 6 million people would sign up.”

EDITORIAL It's possible that Mayor Gavin Newsom took a long look at himself, his life, and his future last week and decided that politics — intense, 24/7/365 politics — wasn't what he wanted right now. It's possible (as Randy Shaw noted in Beyondchron.org) that Newsom "now joins longtime adversary Chris Daly in putting family relationships ahead of one's political career." It's possible that he never really wanted a future in electoral politics and was driven to run for governor less by personal ambition than by the desire of his advisors to see him in a higher political role.

In that case, Newsom has a responsibility to do the best job he can over the final two years of his term as mayor, then step away and find something else to do with his life.

Photo by Jim Block

By Bruce B. Brugmann

(Special note: read Barnett's scathing indictment of Examiner/Chronicle/JOA news coverage in the San Francisco Bay Guardian (9/31/1970)

Steve Barnett would have been highly amused with the way the Associated Press and the San Francisco Chronicle handled the obituary of his death on Oct. 13 of cardiac arrest. He was 73.

The AP and the Chronicle ran respectful obituaries of his illustrious career as a UC Berkeley law professor, prominent First Amendment advocate, critic of the California Supreme Court, a director of the California First Amendment Coalition, and widely published legal scholar on media, antitrust, and First Amendment law.

The Chronicle even tossed in a couple of paragraphs pointing out that Barnett was "a frequent commentator on the Newspaper Preservation Act, the 1970 federal law that allowed papers in the same market to cut costs by merging some of their operations."

By Dick Meister

It was 20 years ago this month that the Berlin Wall finally fell, one of the last vestiges of the Cold War. But though it's long gone, I and I'm sure many others, have not forgotten that Soviet-erected barrier which had stood for 28 years as a nearly impenetrable divider between the Soviet East and the West.

I especially remember the first time I saw the wall, just after it went up in 1961. The atmosphere was incredibly tense, a tension I and other reporters had found almost too acute to describe.

West Berliners sat at sidewalk cafes downtown, chatting amiably but without gaiety. Genuine relaxation seemed impossible because of the newly-constructed wall that stood just a few miles away. Out there the crowds were greater, but almost no one was talking.

Let A Hundred Theories Bloom

By George Akerlof and Joseph Stiglitz

BUDAPEST – The economic and financial crisis has been a telling moment for the economics profession, for it has put many long-standing ideas to the test. If science is defined by its ability to forecast the future, the failure of much of the economics profession to see the crisis coming should be a cause of great concern.

But there is, in fact, a much greater diversity of ideas within the economics profession than is often realized. This year’s Nobel laureates in economics are two scholars whose life work explored alternative approaches. Economics has generated a wealth of ideas, many of which argue that markets are not necessarily either efficient or stable, or that the economy, and our society, is not well described by the standard models of competitive equilibrium used by a majority of economists.

By Bruce B. Brugmann

As I was preparing to update my annual Halloween blog, I checked the Guardian politics blog to see what the action looked like for tomorrow night on Halloween Eve.

Two years ago, Mayor Gavin Newsom shut down the Halloween celebration in the Castro, killing off one of San Francisco's most famous party events. But this year, as Melanie Ruiz reports, a local flash mob operator by the name of Amandeep "Deep" Jawa is organizing an unauthorized "Take Back Halloween" party in front of the Ferry building.He has arranged for at least two mobile DJs to spin and more than 300 people have signed up on Facebook.
But he says that he has no permits and the police may shut down the event.

Well, back where I come from in the Halloweens of my youth, we didn't get permits, didn't have authorization, and the police tried and failed to shut us down our events. This was in my hometown of Rock Rapids, a small farming community nestled along the Rock River in northwest Iowa. But we did have some fast times and created some almost famous urban legends on Halloween. I can speak for a generation or two back in the early 1950s when Halloween was the one night of the year when we could raise a little hell and and hope to stay one step ahead of the cops.