It's Being Dealt With

It's now all over the San Francisco Bay Area that Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums and his wife have some problems with the IRS.  The IRS has slapped a tax lien on some property they own, for $239,000 in back taxes covering 2005-2007, during most of which period Mr. Dellums has been Mayor of Oakland. 

The Mayor has recently told the Montclarion newspaper that "it's being dealt with."  I can't link this statement because, although some of the Montclarion is online, this article isn't; and a quick Google search for "Dellums tax" doesn't produce any online published response from the mayor.  But I have the paper in my hand.

There you go again:  the passive exonerative (sometimes called the passive evasive), so favored of politicians .  Heaven forbid that Hizzoner should say exactly who is doing what, or anything as direct as, "We're going to pay the money."  I've blogged about this practice before (Hiding behind the passive, March 2007).  What's really clear from the article is that Mr. Dellums doesn't want to talk about this:

"I told you that it's being dealt with," he said Monday night.  "We owe taxes.  It's now being dealt with, and it will be dealt with expeditiously.  Period ... P-E-R-I-O-D."

Well, I wouldn't want to talk about it either, but - I'm not the mayor.  This is unfortunately typical of Mr. Dellums' entire tenure as mayor - he doesn't want to tell people what he's doing, ever, about anything at all.  In this case, the situation he doesn't want to talk about could theoretically (if something goes wrong in those expeditious dealings) end up with the mayor of Oakland in tax court.

This is not the behavior that voters expect from the mayor of a large city.  I didn't vote for him, and I've only seen him do one thing in office that made me consider I might have been wrong - the negotiations over the garbage contract in his first year in office.  I recently read a speculation that he may be considering a run for a second term.  I think he should reconsider.  Based on the comments on his lifestyle in all the articles about this mess, I don't think he can afford this job.

Not Jerry Brown

So Gavin Newsom has withdrawn from the 2010 California governor's race.  I didn't plan to vote for him; I consider him a fast-talking flake (too fast talking sometimes).  But this election poses a major problem for me:  the Democrats, at this moment, have nobody in the race - except Jerry Brown, who isn't officially running, but is accumulating campaign funds like they were going to stop printing money tomorrow.

I will not vote for Jerry Brown again.  Ever.  For anything.  I sat through his first governorship, and listened to him oppose Proposition 13 until it passed, when he pretended it was his idea all along.  "Governor Moonbeam," pfah.  I endured his mayorship of Oakland, a town he did a lot to destroy.  He imposed his "strong mayor" government because he couldn't bear to have anyone disagree with him, ever; after he left, the clueless citizens of Oakland elected Ron Dellums, who can't make a decision to save his soul and doesn't really like running a city, anyway.  (I never have figured out why he agreed to run.  Maybe he felt flattered to be asked.)  Lately Mr. Brown has been making a fool of himself in the Attorney General's office - although at least he had the sense to put his wire-tapping assistant on administrative leave.  I wonder how long it'll take for the guy to be reinstated.  The mere fact that he thought it was OK to record conversations secretly, in the AG's office, says volumes about the tone of that office - set by Mr. Brown.  The whirring sound you hear is Pat Brown, an honest and honorable politician, spinning in his grave.

So - no Democrats running.  Whom to vote for?  Well, there's someone I'd like to see win it:  Tom Campbell, the moderate Republican.  Tom Campbell, who actually understands the state budget - he must be the only man other than the Comptroller who does.  And Tom Campbell, being a moderate Republican, hasn't the chance of a celluloid cat in Hell, although I'm delighted to see him hanging in there and will certainly vote for him if he gets the nomination.  The Republicans look like going for Meg Whitman, probably because she can pay for the campaign herself, even though her voting record is nearly nonexistent (great civic participation!) and she's on the record as donating to Democrats.

If the race turns into Jerry Brown versus Meg Whitman, I'm voting Green.  Or Libertarian.  I suppose I could register Republican so as to vote for Campbell in the primary, but it'd put me on the Republican mailing list, and I don't think I could stand it.  We have to have somebody in the governor's mansion who will tell the idiot citizens of California the honest truth about the corner they've painted themselves into; and whoever that person may be, it ain't Jerry Brown.

Learning to Read

I'm listening to an extended discussion on Talk of the Nation about the Baby Einstein videos, whether videos increase infant intelligence, and how best to teach children to read.  You know, I learned to read by the time I was 3 or 4.  My grandmother taught me; she'd sit with me on her lap, and read me the Sears, Roebuck catalog.  It doesn't take a video to teach a child to read, in fact, it's almost certainly counter-productive.  It takes a parent or other adult, some kind of reading material, and a small child.  You could probably teach a child to read from the sports section of the newspaper.

Maternal Mortality

I heard this on National Public Radio this morning, and I'm still shaking my head:

From the BBC World News:  

Health ministers from around the world have agreed that swift action must be taken to reduce the number of women dying during pregnancy and childbirth.

At the UN Population Fund meeting in Addis Ababa the ministers said the number of women dying in this way was actually increasing in some nations.

My basic response to this:  WHY DID IT TAKE YOU SO LONG TO NOTICE??  This has only been going on for, what?  A hundred thousand years?  A million?  How old is the human race?

Gee, women die when they try to have babies.  What a surprise!  Who ARE these yo-yos, anyway, and how many of them are female?  (Guess.)

Not that I disagree.  I think it would be a good thing to reduce maternal mortality; I even agree that family planning is the best way to go about it.  I definitely agree that the rich world is directing all its health aid dollars to "fashionable" diseases like AIDS (stuff that kills us; we don't die in childbed - mostly), and blowing off aid for primary health care which would actually do something about maternal mortality.

I'm just floored by the sheer effrontery of it all; we've just noticed, so it must be a real problem.  Men!

Executive Pay

How did we collectively let it come about that a small group of powerful men, corporate senior executives, is allowed to set its own pay scales?  These people decide among themselves how much they should be paid, and (subject to the vagaries of the tax code) how the pay should be structured (cash, stock, options, etc.).

It shouldn't surprise us that they've quietly agreed, over the last few decades, to wring every drop of blood they could out of the turnip.  If the corporations they run had done this, for the prices of the goods and services they sell, it would be an antitrust violation; but somehow it's OK if the executives are all on each other's boards (they are) and they all agree on what each other should be paid (they do).

Nobody else in this world is allowed to determine unilaterally how much money he makes.  Not you, not I, not the President of the United States.  Congress comes close, in that they can vote themselves a raise; but they're restrained by outrage among their constituents which could prevent them from being reelected.  Only corporate executives (and mainly American corporate executives, although the practice is starting to spread to Europe) can decide, the value of my job is, oh, $750,000 a year base, but it also deserves annual bonuses of (say) $15 million dollars.

Nobody is "worth" that much money, not even if he (it almost always is he) can spin gold from straw, like Rapunzel.  The practice is sheer, unadulterated greed.  In the middle ages, these men would have been vilified as mortal sinners for their greed.  Now they are "the masters of the universe."  Which is right?

So I'm not weeping that the Treasury Department is cracking down on senior executive pay at the banks that have taken TARP money.  Believe me, you'll never see any of these men standing on a street corner with a cardboard sign reading, "Hungry, please help."

Remembering the Loma Prieta Earthquake

Today is the 20th anniversary of the earthquake that leveled the Marina District, knocked a hole in the Bay Bridge, and destroyed the Cypress Structure, killing 42 people unlucky enough to be driving on it.  I looked for my diary for the period (yes, I keep a diary), only to find absolutely no entries between August 1989 and April 1990!  This is what happens when you use a diary to rant about things that bother you; when you're reasonably happy, you don't write in it!  So this entire account is from memory, and I won't swear to any of it.

At 5:04 PM on October 17, 1989, I was at work at the Bank of America's data center in Concord, California, in my window cube on the 2nd floor of Building C.  This wasn't a bad place to be - Building C is only 4 stories high and broader than it is tall, so it's pretty stable.  My friends in Building D (6 stories high and mounted on rollers because at that date it had production mainframes on the 5th floor) told me they had a pretty wild ride.  Still, you couldn't miss it when the place started to rock, and I immediately dived under the desk in my cube.  The quake lasted 15 seconds - when the floor is rocking under you, that's a long time.  I had time to look up at the tangle of electrical wires on the underside of my desk, wonder if I ought to be under there, look at the wall of windows right across the aisle, and conclude that yes, I should be under the desk.

Next, of course, BART shut down.  BART, for the non-local readers, is Bay Area Rapid Transit, the local light rail system, and much of it runs on elevated tracks.  It actually wasn't damaged; but management shut it down until they could inspect it.  Since I had ridden BART to work that morning, I now had no way to get home. 

I didn't really try to get home right away; those of us still in the office spent some time gibbering at each other and phoning people to see if they were all right. 

We also wanted to know the status of the mainframe computers - at that time I worked on the team that supported a secondary set of mainframes (VM, for the technically curious) that the Bank of America used for back-office work, including everybody's email.  (Remember, this is 1989.)  Those machines were in the San Francisco data center, and we were worried about them, because if they crashed, it could take hours to get them safely back up and running.  Fortunately the San Francisco data center (also on rollers) came through the earthquake in fine shape, and the automatic diesel backup generators kicked in when the power failed, just the way they should, and gave the operators time to shut the systems down orderly.  Just time.  The diesels ran out of fuel 10 minutes after the systems came down.  After that, the fuel gauges were checked more often.

Eventually I decided to see if I could cadge a ride home, since the Caldecott Tunnel seemed to be undamaged.  I rode home with a woman I didn't know very well, who lived a mile or so from me in the Oakland hills.  I still remember that ride.  I was in much more danger in that car that I had been from the earthquake, because my driver was out of control.  She kept taking her hands off the wheel to put her palms to her cheeks and shriek, every time the radio reported another development.  It didn't help that she tuned the radio to KPFA, which was broadcasting every disaster it could hear of, in a hysterical tone that I thought was rather irresponsible; they clearly gave the impression that all of downtown Berkeley was on fire, although I found later that it was only one building.  I remember wondering if I should tell her to pull over and let me drive, except that we were on a freeway, and it wasn't clear she wouldn't just stop in the lane.  I was profoundly grateful when she dropped me off.

That's about it.  Our house was undamaged.  My husband was fine - he was walking across a parking lot to his vanpool when the quake hit.  That was the beginning of the time when you couldn't drive directly from Oakland to San Francisco - you had to go down to San Mateo or up to Richmond.  I got out of the habit of going to San Francisco during that period, and I've never really gotten it back.  The destruction of the Cypress Structure bothered me more than the rest, because I have a collection of relatives who, when I was a child, lived in Alameda and San Leandro; and when we drove to visit them, we took the Cypress Structure.  We'd all moved on and I didn't drive that route any more, but that could easily have been my whole family on that lower deck.  Scary thoughts.

Rain, Rain...

They said this was going to be a helluva storm, and it is.  It's raining like the lead-in to that business with Noah and the Ark, only not for so long. Yet. 

I remember Bill Cosby's old routine about Noah and the Ark:  "Noah," said God in an ominous voice, "How long can you tread water?"

We haven't seen a storm like this in years.  Oakland usually gets around 23 inches of rain in a year.  I checked the Oakland North rain station (which is conveniently online) for the damages, and since 03:00 this morning we've gone from .38" of rain (which I think was the year to date since January) to 3.53" of rain.  That's 15% of our annual average, in less than 12 hours, and it's clearly prepared to go on doing this for some little time yet.

I'm wrong.  Oakland North just posted the results for 13:00 - 4.22" of rain, or 19% of the annual average.  Are we really getting half an inch an hour?

Fortunately, due to the previous drought, the ground was as dry as a Sahara dune, so all the water will (probably) soak right in and not even cause any hillsides to slide downward, taking houses with them.  This time.

I don't know who's right or wrong about "global warming," although it seems reasonable to me that there should be some consequences to all the heat-trapping gases we've been belching into the atmosphere for the last 2 centuries.  I read recently that the hottest year on record was 1998, and the more recent temperature changes are actually due to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and not to us at all.  I think what we're seeing here isn't necessarily warmer or cooler, but wider extremes.  The storms will be more frequent and stronger, the droughts will last longer before the rain comes; the rain when it comes will be heavier.

Welcome to the 21st century.