Aug 07
Post Office Sit-In Continues
Dave Welsh posted this via email:
Bulletin #3 – Day 12 of Tent City on steps of Berkeley’s Post Office
Tent City to privateers: Hands off the public commons! Halt the heist of the Post Office!
Berkeley, California, August 7, 2013 – The Tent City on the steps of Berkeley’s main post office is now in its 12th day. Two dozen campers have been sleeping there to rally opposition to the Grand Theft of the people’s Post Office being engineered by Postmaster General Donahoe and his right wing collaborators in Congress. “These post offices were paid for by our parents and grandparents,” said one camper. “Why should they be sold off to line the pockets of a handful of big corporations?”
Postal police and postal inspectors come by every day and all night, threatening to remove the camp and its banners, and arrest the protesters. But the Tent City, now calling itself Berkeley Post Office Defense (BPOD), is standing firm.
The action has attracted broad support in the city, and some great media coverage including daily live reports from all TV channels. Every day hundreds of old and new supporters stop by the information table, volunteering to join the campaign to halt the sale of the building and defend the people’s Post Office. Their strong support for the occupation is heartening. It seems that virtually the entire city of Berkeley wants to preserve the P.O. as a public institution, prevent it from being privatized, and defend the public commons.
Participants in the encampment include a retired postal letter carrier, a minister, two graphic artists, a computer programmer, a builder, musicians, a gardener, a livestreamer and a former mail handler. An active support group provides food, flyers, supplies and and sound system.
Protesters denounce the Postmaster General’s decision to sell historic post offices in Berkeley, the Bronx (NY) and LaJolla (CA), close thousands of post offices and mail processing plants, and lay off 100,000-plus unionized postal workers making a living wage, in what they say is a “systematic plan to dismantle and privatize the postal service.”
“Young people today are being robbed of future employment,” said one passerby, “What jobs will be left for my young son and my daughter?” The Postal Service is one of a rapidly diminishing number of employers offering a living wage job, and is the largest unionized workplace in the nation with 550,000 workers. That makes it a prize target for the privateers who hope to bust up the Post Office and transfer the work to private companies paying Walmart wages.
Destruction of the public Post Office would have “a disproportionate effect on workers and communities of color,” according toTent City occupant Dave Welsh, a retired postal worker. “Today people of color make up 40% of the postal workforce (20% for African Americans). For many workers of all nationalities, it is one of the few places where living-wage jobs are still available in our low-pay, ‘post-industrial’ economy. The campaign to privatize and de-unionize the USPS is a threat to the livelihood of every affected worker and neighborhood. But it stands to hit hardest in those communities of color that are already suffering unemployment at Great Depression levels.
“We need a movement that puts in the forefront those most impacted by the postal crisis – Black, brown and rural communities; elderly, disabled and low-income people,” Welsh added.
Every evening at the Tent City features a delicious, freshly cooked dinner; music by local and traveling musicians; a daily meeting to decide on strategy and tactics; and “movie night.” Opening night featured the acclaimed Italian-language film, Il Postino (the Postman), followed up by The Postman, a Hollywood blockbuster; Matewan, about the coal wars and union organizing in Appalachia; and a film about the 1970 Postal Strike that shut down the country’s mail service for most of a week.
The Post Office Defense action is the latest in a year-long campaign. The entire City Council came out against selling the Post Office, as did both houses of the California state legislature. Many hundreds came out to demonstrate and pack the hearings, or gathered at the steps and in the lobby to sing songs celebrating the Post Office, including “Please Mr. Postman” with new lyrics.
Legal action to stop the sale is under way, as well as a plan to rezone the P.O. as part of a historic district of public buildings, so it can’t be sold to private investors.
Organizations supporting the struggle in Berkeley include Save the Berkeley Post Office committee, Berkeley Post Office Defense (BPOD) and Strike Debt Bay Area. For more information, go to www.savethebpo.com or www.bpod.us or http://strike-debt-bay-area.
To see photos and article on Tent City, and samples of TV coverage: http://www.dailykos.com/story/
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/
Save the Berkeley Post Office Protesters Set up Camp | NBC Bay Area*
Aug 01
Save the Post Office – Media coverage
Occupella’s Hali Hammer sends this roundup of links to videos and media coverage of the Post Office issue:
YouTube video of the the demonstration at the Berkeley Post Office July 27:
Another video of the second day of demonstrations:
NBC coverage video of July 28 event, click here. (Link may work only in Firefox)
Contra Costa Times print article click here.
And a follow-up article here.
Jul 29
Kid makes good
Hey, listen up! Y’all go out and pre-order this record, and get the t-shirt with the two wristwatches, OK? Click here! I mean, click here! Have you clicked yet?
OK, why the heavy promo? Could it have anything to do with the coincidence of the artist’s last name being the same as mine? Busted! Yep, it’s my eldest, Fred Nicolaus, living his dream of writing and performing songs. And he’s GOOD! I mean, zillions of kids bash out chords in garages, but how many of them get their stuff published by real record labels, and go on tour, and get top ratings from pitchfork.com and the New York Times? And get their music used in a video that’s in the permanent collection of the NY MOMA? Yep, MY KID!
Much as I’d love to claim heredity, he sure didn’t get his musical talent from either of his parents. Possibly it skipped a generation; my own dad reputedly was good with guitar and violin, but died too young to do anything with it. Fred got his music mainly by working. I can testify that Fred has been working on this stuff since he was knee-high to a piano bench. He started working on the keyboard when he was nine. All by himself. You can tell he’s into it by the spacey, annoyed look when interrupted (second photo). He was not made to take lessons, he WANTED to play.
Fred at keyboard at age 9, Oakland CA
Fred, interrupted
After the keyboard he got a drumset and took lessons. Then guitar. Already at Berkeley High School he and a buddy put together a cassette tape of their stuff and sold like 300 copies. Then at NYU he fell in with a talented roommate and they teamed up to form Department of Eagles. They have two albums to their credit, and Fred wrote some of the hottest material on them, including No One Does It Like You, which rang a lot of bells ranging from No. 1 ringtone on Gossip Girl to a Japanese commercial to a powerful and stirring video about war that’s in the MOMA collection. OK, here it is that one; Fred wrote the song:
The new album with the two watches, Golden Suits, is Fred’s solo breakout item. As he’s explained, it’s a chronicle of a rough year in his life. The two watches represent the bookends of that year, and the title is from a story by John Cheever (Fred is also a short story writer). You can read the details about the album on his label’s website (that’s Yep Roc records), here. Go buy one, OK? Hell, buy a bunch and give them for presents! (I just did, LOL).
Signed,
Proud Dad
Jul 28
Vacation highlights
Here’s a few pics from our recent visit to the North Coast of Oregon. We stayed in a rented house (through Airbnb) near Sunset Beach in Warrenton, and took side trips to Cannon Beach, Astoria, Cape Disappointment (in WA) and other points.
The photo album is on Google+, click here to see it (17 pix). Most of it is obvious except possibly the picture of a bluish-brownish surface that looks a bit like a sponge, below left. This is a close-up of the steel hull of the wreck of the Peter Iredale (below) on the beach at Ft. Stevens in the northwestern corner of the state, showing the effects of 107 years of salt water and wind
. She was one of the many hundreds of vessels shipwrecked while trying to enter the mouth of the Columbia River a few miles to the north. The Columbia River Bar — the place where the outflow of the river collides with the onrush of the ocean wind and waves — was long called the graveyard of the Pacific. The native Americans who fished and hunted here knew it intimately and built boats as long as 50 feet to navigate it. There’s a museum in Astoria that has
lots of historical background.
This area is infatuated with Lewis and Clark; their name and likeness and souvenirs are everywhere. After reading their journals I wasn’t so charmed with them. True, they were resourceful and persistent, but they did a whole lot of lying to the native Americans along the way, without whose assistance on several occasions they would have been dead and lost forever, and they repaid that assistance in a most shabby way. They not only failed to acknowledge their debt, their trip initiated a brutal wholesale reduction and removal of the Native American civilizations in the territories they passed through. We didn’t get a chance to explore this chapter in detail but I’ll wager that L&C aren’t viewed much more fondly than Christopher Columbus in history books written by First Nation scholars.
Jul 27
Save the Post Office
While the Administration remains silent, the management of the U.S. Post Office continues to kowtow to the Republican right wing and its drive to hand over choice Post Office real estate and its most profitable services to private corporations. As in numerous other cities, the historic Post Office building in Berkeley is slated to be sold, and a new bill in Congress aims to break the Post Office unions, contract the profitable first class mail service out to the best-connected bidder, while keeping a lid on the prices charged to bulk advertising mailers, a service on which the Post Office steadily loses money.
All this and more was up for protest at the Berkeley Main Post Office on Allston Street this afternoon. A wide range of speakers exposed the Post Office management’s machinations and the schemes of real estate moguls and their Congressional accomplices in both parties (see photo, above left). I’ve written about this earlier here, which see. Occupella sang, with me providing backup.
Among the pieces of literature distributed at the event was a well thought-out short paper by Dave Welsh, a retired letter carrier and, incidentally, a musician and songwriter of note. I’ve attached a scan of his paper here.
Jul 27
An Endangered Species
Elder Zef Amen speaking about the future of African-American boys
Had the privilege of an invitation yesterday to a meeting of concern about the Trayvon Martin injustice. Titled “Turning Tragedy into Triumph,” the event was hosted by the Oakland Brotherhood of Elders Network at Geoffrey’s Club on 14th Street in downtown Oakland, a traditional civil rights venue just around the corner from my old law office and the current LifeRing Service Center (www.lifering.org).
The Brotherhood Network is a group of African-American men 18 years or older, devoted to, among other things, protecting and upraising an endangered segment of the human species, the young African-American male.
A common theme among the presenters, which brought universal nods of agreement from the audience, was that the murder of Martin was not an isolated instance, it just happened to draw a lot of media attention. Speakers and short film clips recited a long string of similar victims, many of them slain by their peers. That took me back to Khadafy Washington, who was a client of mine in the Acorn Tenants’ litigation in the 90s. A star football player and a good scholar at McClymonds High School, he had potential for a bright future. He was killed while riding his bicycle on the school yard. Many hundreds attended his funeral.
The meeting took up an action agenda presented by David Muhammad, a leading speaker and activist on criminal justice issues. Muhammad cited a list of bills currently pending in the California legislature that deserved support, and provided links to organizations active on the issue. Copy attached here.
It’s beyond me to analyze in detail why this epidemic of murders against young black men continues, but certain points suggest themselves. One, that the justice system along with just about every other institution from housing to education to health to jobs is stacked against this demographic. Two, that the main routes for advancement, namely professional sports and commercial music, provide real advancement for only a tiny fraction, and do so at the expense of promoting an image of the black man that differs only in degree from the romanticized vision of the plantation slave: “him strong, him got rhythm.” Three, that the hopelessness and self-hatred that this situation breeds among its victims can only be broken, in the short term, by organized resistance in many forms such as we saw in the civil rights movement and its sequels, and in the long run, by a vast economic and political revival that creates meaningful, well-paying jobs for everyone, replaces the oppressive institutions with fair and vital ones, and thus drains the hopelessness and dead-end feeling out of the community’s marrow.
It was a privilege to attend the meeting. It felt a little bit like the civil rights days of the sixties. Possibly, hopefully, the Martin murder will trigger a new edition of this movement.
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