Fwd: Berkeley is alive and well

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Fri Nov 9 12:56:36 PST 2001


[sent to me rather than list]

From: "Stroshane, Timothy" <TStroshane at ci.berkeley.ca.us> Subject: Berkeley is alive and well Date: Fri, 9 Nov 2001 12:28:54 -0800

======================= Date: Fri, 9 Nov 2001 14:43:06 +0200 From: "Hakki Alacakaptan" <nucleus at superonline.com> Subject: Hello!: Popular backlash against Berkeley

BBC News Online: World: Americas

Friday, 2 November, 2001, 14:25 GMT Berkeley boycotted for anti-war stance

http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/world/americas/newsid_1634000/1634103.stm

The city of Berkeley in northern California has been branded unpatriotic, and businesses there are being boycotted, after the council became the first in the nation to oppose the bombing of Afghanistan.

The city's Mayor, Shirley Dean has been inundated with e-mails and letters ever since the controversial 5-4 vote calling on the government to "bring the bombing of Afghanistan to a conclusion as soon as possible". The mayor, who abstained in the voting, says the message landing on her desk from businesses and individuals has generally been uniform.

"We've had thousands, literally thousands of e-mails that they are not going to come to Berkeley and spend money. And generally they all mention the word boycott. And we have been hearing from specific businesses in Berkeley that they have been hurt," she said.

(...) - ------------------------------------------- As an ignorant foreigner, I am puzzled at why the above piece of news has been ignored by the list. Chauvinist vigilantes, singly or in groups, are hounding a dissident municipality and have contributed greatly all over the US to silencing the media. Some of it may be organized by right-wing organizations but it appears to be largely spontaneous (as much as anything can be in the media-blitzed land of the free). Doesn't this worry anyone over there?

I mean, items like this are obviously far less important than the earth-shaking issue of what may or may not have happened to Nancy Oden, which the learned list members continue to thoroughly dissect, may Allah increase their great wisdom. But as a clueless out-of-towner I'm nervous that the steady creep of right-wing bigotry that began with the Reagan restoration - which in my ignorance I call fascism - is now reaching a frenzied climax; the clouds are gathering very rapidly and it looks like it's going to rain hard for a very long time. To the untrained eye, it looks as if you guys haven't noticed the weather; in fact I'd swear that it looks like you're in the middle of a chatty picnic.

Would anyone care to explain this optical illusion? Is the _real_ discussion taking place elsewhere, perhaps? Is this just a front for the FBI's Carnivore?

Hakki

==================== Greetings to LBO from Berkeley. While our Mayor and some City Council members received several thousand largely angry and insulting emails in the wake of the resolution they passed, there has been more recent press in the San Francisco Chronicle that kinda sums things up out here.

Also, the flag issue that made national headlines has blown over. Our fire engines and police vehicles have small flags and flag decals on them. The Chron article also summarizes the points of the Council's resolution, including calling for reducing America's dependence on foreign sources of oil.

Thanks for caring; we're okay out here. The alleged threats against our vital bridges has not really frightened anybody that much either. As I arrived downtown on my bike, I noticed a poster on the traffic signal utility box near my office advertising two anti-WTO rallies in San Francisco, one today 11/9, and the other tomorrow.

Berkeley boycott all bark, little bite Not much evidence of economic impact Charles Burress, Chronicle Staff Writer <mailto:cburress at sfchronicle.com> Tuesday, October 30, 2001 ©2001 San Francisco Chronicle </chronicle/info/copyright> URL: <http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/10/3 0/MN61669.DTL> Feathers are still flying over the campaign to choke Berkeley businesses as punishment for a City Council vote against the bombing of Afghanistan, but evidence of net losses to the city is hard to find. Under the glare of national TV and newspaper attention -- and the weight of nearly 900 passionate e-mails and letters that have swelled tonight's City Council information packet -- the struggle seems to have turned more political than economic as opposing sides vie to deflect blame for an outpouring of anger from around the country. Many people vowed, as one Southern California man put it, "never to spend another damn dime in Berkeley!" But reports of several contracts and meetings said to have been canceled because of the narrow council vote turned out to be false, and the many individuals who pledged to withhold business were partially canceled out by some people who said they'd give the city more business. As reported by The Chronicle, for example, an employee of Tsunami Visual Technologies in Fremont sent an e-mail to Mayor Shirley Dean saying the firm was canceling a contract with a Berkeley company, but Tsunami's vice president said that no such contract existed and that the young employee who sent the e- mail "allowed his patriotic emotions to get the best of him." And random checks by The Chronicle found some cases of customers' vowing to stay away from Berkeley restaurants but very little or no change in actual business since the council resolution was passed on Oct. 16. To hear Councilwoman Dona Spring tell it, the two people who raised the boycott alarm -- Mayor Dean and Rachel Rupert of the Chamber of Commerce -- sound like a cross between Machiavelli and Chicken Little. Spring, who sponsored the anti-bombing resolution and who is painted as Osama bin Laden's soul mate by many of her anonymous e-mail critics, said Dean's and Rupert's early boycott warnings helped promote the boycott and turn it into a political weapon against Spring and the four other leftist City Council members who approved the resolution. Dean, a liberal Democrat, belongs to the minority centrist faction on the nine-member council. "I feel that the boycott-Berkeley campaign was publicized by the mayor and by Rachel Rupert in an effort to help the mayor's re-election campaign, to the detriment of Berkeley businesses," Spring said. Dean, who said she had a stack of 2,000 letters and e-mails about the issue on her desk Friday, called Spring's charge "just ludicrous. . . . Ms. Spring really needs to wake up to reality." Reid Edwards, chairman of the board of the Chamber of Commerce, said, "The Berkeley chamber is not involved in electoral politics." He said the chamber had received more than 1,000 e-mails, the large majority of which vowed not to buy Berkeley. But actual losses were hard to confirm. Edwards said he preferred not to name examples of lost revenue, explaining that businesses were reluctant to talk "because they're concerned about it snowballing, and they're concerned also about retribution by members of the council." The most frequently cited example is Ashby Lumber, which reported losing a $60,000 contract, but it declined to name the contractor. The cancellation of a large banquet at Spenger's Restaurant and sharp reduction of another did occur but were falsely attributed to the council vote, said Spenger's spokesman Tom Walton. Calls and e-mail to two people reported to have canceled plans to buy Berkeley real estate were not returned. FUTURE BOOKINGS The Marina Radisson Hotel said a 250-person banquet on Nov. 30 for the ROTC program at the University of California at Berkeley had been canceled because of the council vote, but the ROTC commanding officer, Navy Capt. Lee Rosenberg, said the reasons were the expense and a schedule conflict. Radisson general manager Brij Misra said the "real impact" was not loss of existing bookings but future decisions not to book at all. Ace Hardware co-owner Bill Carpenter said half a dozen e-mails and some people who came into the store vowed to boycott, but he also said he hadn't yet seen a decline in sales. And at Alko Office Supply, manager Claudia Blandon said, "All I know is, a man came down from Marin to buy files because he heard about the boycott and wanted to support Berkeley." Spring said that e-mails she had received from the Bay Area had been evenly divided between positive and negative, and that she had received a hundred postcards from a counter-boycott "Buy Berkeley" campaign. Dean's office said her e-mails, from both near and far, had overwhelmingly opposed the council vote and favored a boycott. One boycotter who wrote to Dean, Piedmont commodity broker Ed Pacult, said in an interview that Berkeley would no longer receive the roughly $1,000 he spends there each month on dining, shopping and Volvo repairs. Asked about the charge that the boycott unfairly punishes Berkeley merchants, many of whom do not agree with the council majority, he said, "I'm not going to do it a long time." The man who vowed not to spend "another damn dime" in Berkeley, Phil Scott of Ridgecrest, next to the Mojave desert, said in an interview that he usually visited Berkeley three or four times a year and that the boycott "is the only way I know of that can make any kind of impression." He did allow that he might make an exception for Bette's Oceanview Diner.

COMPLETE TEXT OF BERKELEY RESOLUTION Here is the full text of the five-part resolution passed by the Berkeley City Council majority on Oct. 16 in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States and the subsequent U.S.-led bombing of Afghanistan. Voting in favor of all five parts were council members Margaret Breland, Linda Maio, Maudelle Shirek, Dona Spring and Kriss Worthington. Mayor Shirley Dean voted for Parts 1 and 5 and abstained on the rest. Abstaining on all parts were council members Polly Armstrong, Mim Hawley and Betty Olds. -- Condemn the mass murder of thousands of people on Sept. 11, 2001, and express our profound grief at the atrocities last month that killed thousands of innocent people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, and acknowledge, honor and support the heroic rescue efforts on the part of dedicated police and fire departments, and the city, state and federal governments. -- Ask our representatives to help break the cycle of violence, bringing the bombing to a conclusion as soon as possible, avoiding actions that can endanger the lives of innocent people in Afghanistan, and minimizing the risk to American military personnel. -- Urge our representatives to concentrate all available resources on bringing to justice all of those who were complicit in last month's violent attack, and work with international organizations toward the same end. -- Urge our representatives to devote our government's best efforts in collaboration with governments throughout the world, to addressing and overcoming those conditions such as poverty, malnutrition, disease, oppression and subjugation that tend to drive some people to acts of terrorism. -- Request that we engage in a national campaign to lessen our dependence on oil from the Middle East and to commit to a nationwide conversion to renewable energy sources such as solar and fuel cells within five years. E-mail Charles Burress at cburress at sfchronicle.com <mailto:cburress at sfchronicle.com> ©2001 San Francisco Chronicle </chronicle/info/copyright> Page A - 13

Tim Stroshane Senior Planner City of Berkeley Housing Department 2180 Milvia Street, 2nd Floor Berkeley, CA 94704 510/981-5422 ph 510/981-5450 fax mailto:tstroshane at ci.berkeley.ca.us



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