America’s economy may be so hollowed out, its industrial base so eroded by twenty years of job exports to China and other low-wage sanctuaries, that a bailout may not turn the tide. Then the Republicans will have their told-you-so’s primed and ready to go in the mid-term elections.
But Obama can scarcely be blamed for putting up his $819 billion pump primer. It was a given, from the moment he got elected, and indeed probably owes, both in its good and bad components, more to Rep. Charlie Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, than to Geithner or Summers.
Obama’s timid folly comes with the impending two to four trillion dollar bailout package for the banks, signaled by Treasury Secretary Geithner. If anything can make Wall Street smile bravely through the hail of public ridicule for the way it’s been handing out the previous wad of bailout money in the form of bonuses, it’s the prospect of getting further truckloads of greenbacks to lend out to Americans already crippled by debt. So Wall Street can feel satisfaction that its investment in Obama seems to be paying off.
February 12
I walk into a local plumbing store, a large place used by building contractors. There’s one other man in the store, buying a $5 plastic fitting. One of the owners says there’s zero new construction in the area. “We fix a few toilets. The only people actually building are the marijuana growers down in southern Humboldt.”
Take out Humboldt’s good fortune in being in the Emerald Triangle and multiply by every plumbing store in America. Throw in the idled lumber yards, construction stores, paint suppliers, and building crews. Count in the car lots that are going out of business because the banks won’t finance car loans. Go to the lost auto assembly jobs. It tots up to a job loss across America, just in December and January, of 1,175,000. And that’s an underestimate. Every President since Reagan, particularly Clinton, has jimmied the unemployment criteria to produce an undercount. The actual number for the two months is nearer one and three quarter million. The actual total unemployment rate by pre-Reagan criteria, according to statistician John Williams, rose to 18 percent in January, from 17.5 percent in December.
These are numbers out of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and it’s going to get worse as businesses put up their shutters. The air is whistling out of the American economy. My own state of California—often touted as the eighth largest economy in the world—can’t pay its bills. There’s a shortfall in revenues and it can’t sell enough bonds.
On January 26 the California State Controller John Chiang announced that the state is going to print its own money. If the state owes us money we’ll get this scrip as IOUs. Who knows, in happier times maybe we can hawk them on eBay. Student aid and payments to the disabled and needy will also come in the form of IOUs. Governor Schwarzenegger and his aides are negotiating with the banks to get them to accept the IOUs as deposits.
March 13
In town after town across America these days one can physically see the economic mantras of an entire generation turning to boarded-up wasteland before one’s eyes. Shopping malls, which changed the American landscape within the course of a generation, are dying week by week.
Take the Bayshore Mall in my own town of Eureka, northern California—a covered, pedestrian arcade opened in the 1980s, owned by the Utah-based General Growth company. Located on the edge of Humboldt Bay, though facing the opposite direction towards Highway 101, our mall was an optimistic place in the early days. People dressed up to go there. A friend of mine who opened a coffee stall wore a tie—purchasing it from Ralph Lauren which opened an outlet. Every pretty girl in Humboldt County wanted to work there, to see and to be seen. People drove for three hours through the Yolly Bolly Wilderness all the way from Redding in the Central Valley to savor its glories. There were stylish concerts in its ample food court.
Today the Bayshore Mall molders, embodying the misfortunes of General Growth—the second largest mall owner in the US—whose stock trades now for 55 cents, down from $44 last May. General Growth has now ousted its CEO, John Bucksbaum.
Some major retailers, like Ralph Lauren’s Polo, have long since fled from Bayshore Mall. Walk east along one of the arcades and you come to a wall of plywood, behind which lies the desolation that was Mervyn’s, a clothing chain which has now filed for bankruptcy. The little stores nearby have a somber mien, like people compelled to live in the chill shadow of a funeral home. The food court, serviced by six or seven fast-food businesses, is becoming a sanctuary for the poor who sit in the warmth with modest snacks and while away the hours.
Across the past forty years some 200 cities built pedestrian malls. Today, only thirty remain. Drive around any town and one can see strip malls in similar decline, their parking lots nearly empty, boarded stores in the retail frontage like a mouth losing its teeth, as the lights of Circuit City go out and Linens n Things, Zales, Ann Taylor, and Sharper Image retrench or collapse entirely.
Out of crisis comes opportunity, one that’s been discussed for some years by movements such as the New Urbanists and crusaders for the refashioning of the American urban landscape such as James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere. A mall can be razed to the ground, like the Belle Promenade, on the west bank of the Mississippi in New Orleans. Eureka’s too poor a town to do that. But a mall can be refashioned into a more congenial quartier, one blessed with easier parking.
In the same way that coastal cities like Boston finally realized the asset of nineteenth-century quaysides with their warehouses and customs depots, today’s failed or failing malls can be reconfigured, converted to mixed use, with residential housing, public spaces and constructive social uses. In the Bayshore even now I see groups of the mentally ill being brought along for an outing in a place that’s sheltered, still physically safe, equipped with bathrooms, and has plenty of space with chairs or benches where they can relax.
In many towns one can imagine that energetic councils and resourceful financing could offer the reeling mall operators terms and take the properties off their hands, reconfiguring the malls as social assets. Opportunity is there, to be seized from the jaws of capitalism’s shattering reverses. From the malls to the commanding heights of the economy, let the Reconquest begin.
April 20
On March 18 Bill Richardson, governor of New Mexico, had his opportunity to raise the dead and bring them back to life. This was the day he signed a law, already ratified by the state Senate and House, formally ending New Mexico’s death penalty. Did Richardson ennoble this solemn occasion by endorsing the idea that all human life has value, and even those who have fallen into the lowest moral abyss are capable of redemption? Did he cite Holy Scripture as buttress for such thoughts? He did not.
Richardson festooned the signing with language about this being the “most difficult decision” of his political life, arrived at only after he had toured the maximum-security unit where offenders sentenced to life without parole would be held. “My conclusion was those cells are something that may be worse than death,” he said. “I believe this is a just punishment.”
Lest anyone be under the misapprehension that he was endorsing some quaint notion of the value of a life, the governor was at pains to emphasize that since the new law comes into force only on July 1, the two condemned men currently residing on death row in New Mexico still face execution.
For Richardson the flaw with the death penalty lies in its imperfection. “Faced with the reality that our system for imposing the death penalty can never be perfect, my conscience compels me to replace the death penalty with a solution that keeps society safe.” Embalmed in this self-serving verbiage are many pointers to how seriously the whole cause of death-penalty abolition has gone off the rails, fleeing the arduous moral battleground where Revenge tilts against Redemption for the low-lying pastures of Efficiency.
New Mexico’s lawmakers were bolstered by this rationale of cost-effectiveness. A cost assessment report pointed to the fact that in one case, State v. Young, the public defender’s office pu
t up $1.7 million to defend Young. Add in costs for the prosecutors and the courts and the bill soared to nearly $6 million. In that instance, the state Supreme Court barred the state from pursuing the death penalty further because insufficient resources were being provided for the defense.
Bill Clinton did his best to speed up the conveyor belt by signing the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. But it’s still a hugely expensive hassle to line things up so lethal injection can proceed. Against all this, what’s brisker than the offer of LWOP as part of a plea bargain? Sign on the dotted line. Pack the prisoner off to a concrete box and throw away the key. As the Dallas Morning News editorialized in support of LWOP for Texas, which is considering whether to abandon the costly death penalty in favor of confinement unto death: “It’s harsh. It’s just. And it’s final without being irreversible. Call it a living death.”
The pendulum is swinging against the death penalty, however. DNA evidence—posthumously exonerating some, clearing others waiting to die—has been a big factor in waning enthusiasm for the ultimate sanction. The current total of defendants on state and federal death rows is 3,307. Fifteen states don’t have the death penalty, New Mexico being the most recent.
Nothing much is going to change in New Mexico, except for the worse. The state has only formally executed one man since 1960: Terry Clark, a child-killer, had his appointment with the lethal needle in 2001 after abandoning further appeals. This number may soon swell to three because of the two men whose situation I noted above. Presumably their chances of commutation have diminished, since no one wants to be accused of giving killers anything resembling a lucky break.
When I drive south to the Bay Area, I pass San Quentin, where 667 prisoners sit on death row. In the very unlikely event they get executed, they will have waited an average of 17.5 years from the moment they were condemned. Thirteen people have been executed in California since the US Supreme Court allowed capital punishment to resume in 1976. When I drive from Crescent City, at the northwest corner of California, with its terrifying supermax Pelican Bay prison, down Highway 101, jog over to Redding and head south on Interstate 5 to Los Angeles, I traverse a Gulag Archipelago in which thousands of prisoners are serving decade upon decade of hard time, with hundreds of them in solitary confinement, often for years on end.
How many prisoners nationally are under sentence of “living death”? The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, DC, says there were 33,633 people serving life sentences without parole in the United States in 2003, which is 26.3 percent of the total number of people serving life sentences. The analyst at the Sentencing Project discloses that they have tried to determine how many people are effectively serving life sentences without parole (i.e., life plus extra years), but that it’s been a nightmare to do so. They don’t even have a ballpark estimate. There are at least seventy-three US inmates—most of them from minorities—who were sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in prison for crimes committed when they were thirteen or fourteen.
It was de Tocqueville who lauded American penology, in the book he wrote with Gustave de Beaumont, On the Penitentiary System, and who wrote in a letter in 1836: “Isolate the detainees in prison by means of solitary cells, subject them to absolute silence … prohibit every communication between souls and minds as between their bodies; that is what I would consider the first principle of the science [of prisons].” As Professor Sheldon Wolin writes in his Tocqueville Between Two Worlds, this was a theory of “total control … ‘pure’ power and wholly opposite to the unlimited space, frenzied time and near anarchical subjects of Democracy.” The prison that de Tocqueville and Beaumont particularly admired was Auburn, with its system of penitential solitary confinement developed by the Quakers, partly advanced as a substitute for the death penalty, which they opposed on principle.
May 8
Shades of Gogol, who was born 200 years ago this year. The motor of his great novel is the economic use of “dead souls”—deceased serfs listed by the state as assets of the landlords. The novel’s central character, Chichikov, goes around buying them up. New York State could take Gogol’s hint and start auctioning its “living dead” as income generators to other states in need. Looking at our criminal justice system here, Gogol would surely use the line carved on his gravestone: “And I shall laugh my bitter laugh.”
May 15
You could say the ’60s began, at least in part, in 1884, when Stiles Hall was founded in Berkeley by some high-minded do-good Christian Protestants. This private, nonprofit institution—a YMCA for much of its existence, though no longer—was never formally part of UC Berkeley, but its premises, which shifted about over the decades as the university expanded unrelentingly, have always been right next to the campus. In the ’50s, Stiles Hall was where it is today, at Bancroft and Dana.
On March 14, Stiles Hall celebrated its 125th anniversary. The university chancellor was there. So was the mayor of Berkeley. So were a good many veterans of the ’50s and ’60s, among them Joe Paff, my friend and neighbor here in Petrolia.
In the ’40s, returning GIs had changed the UC Berkeley campus dramatically in terms of dress, style, and new kinds of students. Clearly, fraternity draft-dodgers were not about to haze returning soldiers. By the mid-’50s, they were regaining their “piss and vinegar” (to use the words of UC Vice-Chancellor Alex Sheriff) and reached their zenith in the notorious panty raid of 1956.
By 1957, Middle America was resurging with khaki buckle-in-the-back pants and button-down collar and Oxford cloth. It was, Joe recalls, pretty much a uniform. Compulsory ROTC required males to drill in uniform once a week; fraternity boys at the entrance to campus enforced conformity; the student body elections were considered jokes (“if elected, I will launch Sather Gate into space to compete with sputnik”). Faculty who had opposed the loyalty oath had been purged.
In this climate of conformism, conservatism, and William Whyte’s “Organization Man,” the campus had decided that students should not talk about “off campus issues” and should be protected from “outside agitators.” Hence, Stiles Hall provided a meeting space for a wide variety of groups—socialists, libertarians, single-issue groups, farm workers, African studies, ACLU, SNCC support, student CORE, and so forth.
Stiles Hall had been greatly shaped by the long-term influence of Harry Kingman—who had first worked there in 1916, leaving to fight in World War I, and in its aftermath spending six years in China. In China, Harry was a friend and teacher of some of the students arrested in the famous demonstrations at the international settlement over foreign companies exploiting (and shooting) workers. He wrote a letter defending the students that was translated and published throughout China, leading to his transfer from Shanghai to Tienstin.
While a pariah to the Westerners in China, he was quite famous with the Chinese. His “China Newsletter” of 1925 and 1926 was circulated worldwide, and letters of praise and requests for more information came from Senator Borah (the Idaho Republican and Senate chair of the Foreign Relations Committee), Mahatma Gandhi, Ramsay MacDonald, H. G. Wells, Lloyd George, and Bertrand Russell. At Tienstin, he met and became friend of then Lt. Col George Marshall.
Kingman finally returned to Stiles Hall in 1928. In the early 1930s, he made it his business to extend a welcoming and helpful hand to the 2,000 new students, many of them poor. All of them were invited to dinner by Stiles people, with Harry’s wife, Ruth, cooking dinners for 500. Then Kingman looked around the area for jobs for them, and found just twenty-five available.
A student came to him and said his father had been able to give him $3 for the entire semester, and after six weeks he’d already spent $1.50. This is when Harry organized the housing co-ops, where the students could live and cook. Clark Kerr and Robert McNamara were among those students. Stiles also provided a meeting place for the Social Problems Club—accused by the campus administration of being a haunt of New Yorkers and Communists. Kingman also was active in creating a stud
ent minimum wage for employment.
These commitments to the First Amendment, equal housing, and fair and equal wages became permanent principles. During the war, Stiles and Harry Kingman were active and strong opponents of the internment of Japanese—not a common posture on the left, alas—and raised money to help the internees, make legal challenges, and help to relocate released people. Older Japanese men in Joe’s era in the late 1950s used to come in and hail Kingman—who retired in 1957—as a great man.
Kingman had to stand up to the Un-American Activities Committee, who were witch-hunting leftists. He fought back triumphantly. In 1946, when Harry was director of the Western Region of the Fair Employment Practices Committee, Ed Rutledge, whom he’d hired, had been called before one of the McCarthy committees. Kingman flew to Washington, stiffened Rutledge’s resolve, and turned the tide. “We’re going to fight this,” he said, and they did.
Kingman retired from Stiles Hall in 1957 and went to Washington to form the Citizens Lobby for Freedom and Fair Play. He and his wife lobbied for thirteen years—never raising more than $5,000 dollars to support this effort—living in one room and entertaining guests with food on paper plates.
An interesting Harry anecdote: when Joe McCarthy died, the flags were flying at half-staff. As Harry walked the streets of Washington, DC, he reached the Supreme Court and saw that above the Court there was no half-staff flag. Harry found Earl Warren to go to lunch and asked about it. A sly smile was the response.
Joe Paff went to Berkeley in 1957, then took eighteen months off to avoid ROTC, came back to Berkeley from Europe and got an apartment in Stiles Hall, with duties that included opening and shutting the building and setting out chairs for meetings, a duty that often required nice judgment. One would not, for example, embarrass the score or so turning up for the Berkeley-Bulgaria Friendship Society by setting out 200 chairs. Sometimes, no one would show up. Norman Thomas drew ten people, and Joe took him out and bought him a piece of pie by way of consolation.
A Colossal Wreck Page 47
