[lbo-talk] Re: Activism

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Tue Feb 10 17:28:04 PST 2004


``..And while there have been a few encouraging signs in the years since, the most notable being the Gonzalez campaign in San Francisco, it does not appear that my serving functioned as a brick in the wall, as I had hoped. It was this recognition which led me not to run for re-election in November...''

``I continue to learn a great deal from this list as to why we are where we are.''

John Halle

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Why didn't you run again? That needs to be explained in more detail. As for learning, maybe, maybe not...

(what follows is local history.)

In the mid-60s the Berkeley City government was dominated by exactly the same kind of Democratic local machine with a couple of Republican Chamber of Commerce types. Their main concerns were law and order, downtown business, landlords, keeping real estate values high (de facto segregation), and go-slow integration of public schools.

In the wake of the anti-war demos, many locals and former students got together and put in progressive, white and black candidates in local government. The most famous of these was Ron Dellums. Public schools were integrated completely, real estate values remained through the roof, rent control was established, and downtown business began a decline---endemic of the general collapse of small retail businesses across the country---which was followed by the boom in national franchises.

Meanwhile under local progressive city councils and mayors the city planning dept re-did the city master plan to favor local retail business, control franchises, and enforce various planning, zoning, traffic, environmental, and labor regulations---and maintain rents that were marginally livable for students and seniors. They also kept local property taxes high on those who could afford it, and low for the low income black neighborhoods that couldn't.

In addition to all that, the disabled civil rights movement became essentially an extension of city government through local grants and ad hoc positions in city government agencies. By the mid-70s Brown was governor, and many of the local progressive community groups leaders and city bureaucrats became part of the state government through political appointments. Some like Dellums managed to get into federal public office. Locally they were replaced with pretty much the same kind of people, but with less imagination, drive, spirit, etc. The local scene turned into a self-congratulating and self-serving machine of its own---but still managed to maintain much slowed down progress.

Berkeley wasn't the only city involved in this process. In LA, Santa Monica did a very upscale version with lots more money and lots more people.

When the Carter-Reagan revolution hit---dismantling just about every federal program that helped support these local developments, Berkeley took a face plant. The downtown retail economy collapsed and the remaining small industry, along with two semi-large industrial plants closed. Oakland industry which was more or less contiguous with the Berkeley, Emeryville decaying line around the Bay, disappeared with a huge impact. Its downtown turned into a wasteland. Crime of course went through the roof, local schools and the state's education system went from second in the country, just below New York, to second to the bottom, just above Mississippi.

After more than a decade of state and federal Republican depredations, finally the neoliberal Clinton era solution came along. Most of the local progressives in government were gone, most of their political community support and organization had disappeared. Still the old lines were there, and were filled with a new generation fired up with the neoliberal, business is good, we can all get rich and some of the poor too, etc, etc. The Oakland-Berkeley downtowns did pick up, but mostly with upscale commercial development, national franchises, and the ubiquitous `new economy' sweat shop cubicals in remodeled factories and warehouses, etc, etc.

Finally after two long and terrible Republican state administrations, some sixteen years of give to the rich, steal from the poor, the state school systems and the tax base picked up.

Berkeley High School is in the last stages of its first major re-modeling since the late 1950s. The first, repeat first new school in Oakland was just finished. The city of Oakland had not had one new school built in forty years. And then along came Arnold...

What's the message? It's complicated and ambiguous. While local in depth participation is essential, it can not work in isolation. But even if it is isolated from above, it can make daily living at the local level just a little better. However, it needs a constant radical street level base to work.

Because US political institutions are build in a tier system, you have to command each tier working from the bottom up. If things go bad on the national and state level, you are partly insulated from the effects, since via the tier system, the top can not enforce its policies on the bottom, unless they also command all the tiers in between. Communities with no progressive street level base are essentially a wasteland---completely uninhabitable. The poorest of these turn into rubble ridden free-fire, crime and drug zones. The middle class versions become cultural and spiritual wastelands inhabited by only by zombies and automatons (the majority of the US).

At the moment the middle political tiers are the battle ground here, while the top tier commanded by the broken Arnold machine attempt to starve out the middle and bottom. Governor Arnold has no other choice. Either float bonds, raise taxes, starve local government and schools, or go broke. Most likely Arnold will accomplish all four.

As far as I can tell the biggest political threat to progressive agendas across the board is the removable and dismantling of political institutions through out source contracting and privatization. This neoliberal move (made famous by the IMF, WB etc) removes any means to street level access and involvement in the lowest tier of political institutions.

For example, because disabled public services had collapsed and disappeared, remanents of the old movement petitioned the city council to put a local measure on the ballot to fund a community emergency transportation and attendant care proposal. In others words the city would pay some non-profit to do the job. It passed and now there is small, beleaguered non-profit that does provide the services.


>From a political strategy point of view, this non-profit acts as
buffer against institutional change in the city. It is a bandaid that can be peeled off at any time. In effect the city has side-stepped the problem and can claim it is doing something, while it has no intention of changing many local conditions.

IMHO, the proper way to have gone about this emergency system would have been within city manager's office, with a city department created along with city hired staffing and payroll jobs. This way, if services went down, the city council could be directly petitioned to pressure the city bureaucracy to do better. Of course the city manager and council didn't want to do this. Naturally they gained their positions through the local patronage system of appointments and promotions, exactly through such a process years ago.

The way it is now, if you advocate to city government, they pass the buck to the contractor. Meanwhile the contractor can pass its problems off on the city funding and regulatory system and the public gets nowhere. Political accountability is effectively neutralized---which was of course the basic idea in the first place. At the moment the semi-privatized non-profit contractor has an oversight community board that oversees its operations, so direct political access is maintained in a provisional and ad hoc way.

So from my point of view, the biggest ground level threat are these neoliberal privatizing government schemes.

You can more or less see a crude form of this same process writ large in Iraq. There is no local access and the lack of access (for good or ill) will become institutionalized under the provisional authority. Unfortunately, the only way to stop this is civil chaos, but the likely winners will be the religious reactionaries...

Chuck Grimes



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