Jan 18

The Counter-Revolution of 1776

The Counter-Revolution of 1776:  Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. By Gerald Horne (New York University Press, 2014) ISBN 978-1-4798-9340-9

Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow debunked the happy babble about a contemporary post-racial America. Gerald Horne’s The Counter-Revolution of 1776 broadens the focus to look at the historical roots of this self-proclaimed liberal democracy.  He shows, in great detail, that the drive for American political independence was at bottom a slaveowners revolt against the winds of emancipation sweeping the old colonial powers, including Great Britain.  

James Somerset — his given name — was born in Africa and dragged to Virginia on a slave ship. There he was bought by a merchant, Charles Steuart, who took Somerset with him on a business trip to London.  Since Somerset had tried several times to escape, Steuart chained Somerset aboard a ship anchored in the Thames, intending to sell him to plantation owners in Jamaica.  London abolitionists got wind of Somerset’s bondage and filed a writ of habeas corpus.  Somerset was brought before the court, and arguments proceeded, with wide publicity on both sides of the Atlantic. In June 1772 Lord Mansfield, the trial judge, ruled for Somerset and ordered that he be freed.  Although the court attempted to limit it to this particular case, the decision was generally understood as a declaration that slavery was unlawful in Great Britain … and by extension, in the territories Britain ruled. Numerous succeeding court decisions and acts of parliament confirmed this conclusion.  

The Somerset case had broad repercussions.  American slaveowners agonized that they and their livelihood were now threatened with extinction.  Slaves, on the other hand, felt boldly encouraged, and the already lengthy history of slave rebellions in the colonies took an upswing.  Lord Dunsmore, the colonial governor of Virginia, both channeled and further inflamed the passions in May 1775 by announcing his intent to arm all the Negroes who came to him, unless the settlers calmed their agitation for independence. Opinion on both sides of the water castigated the illogic of the colonists who yelped for liberty while tightening the chains of slavery; the framers of the Declaration of Independence were seen as hypocritical gasbags.  As the author depicts in detail, African-American opinion (and in many cases, armed action) tended strongly to side with London, and the menace of a London-sponsored general rising of the slaves was the colonists’ principal nightmare.  

It was not only England that was moving toward emancipation of slaves.  Decades earlier, Spain had made its colony in Florida a magnet for slaves escaping from the Carolinas, and had on numerous occasions terrified the authorities in Charleston by sending naval raiding parties from St. Augustine, the ships manned in part by armed and uniformed Africans.  The Spanish crown in 1733 issued a proclamation of liberty and protection to all slaves who deserted to its realm.   In St. Augustine, Africans made up the majority of the militia, including the officer corps, and received the same salary and uniforms as the Spanish, to the utter horror of the American slaveowners. Spanish Florida became such a threat to the Carolinas that the slaveholders created the state of Georgia and attempted to populate it with whites, as a buffer zone.  The French similarly recognized Africans as merchants and free people, unsettling and threatening the American colonists.  In the sugar colonies of Hispaniola, Jamaica, and Cuba, among others, the slaves had rebelled so persistently and successfully that many of their masters ran away to the American mainland, where, however, the slaves proved hardly more docile.  Every white settler, it was said, knew personally someone whose throat had been cut or who had been poisoned by one of their slaves. The colonial press was filled with dread that the rapidly growing slave population would rise up en masse, with encouragement from Spain, France, and then London. Native Americans also played a significant role, such as in the Yamasee wars in 1715, usually in in alliance with slave revolts. In 1739 in South Carolina, near the Stono River, hundreds of Angolan slaves rose up and slaughtered 29 settlers in a revolt probably triggered by Spanish promises of freedom in St. Augustine. Many of the Angolans spoke Portuguese and communicated easily with the Spanish. The colonists’ sedated their apprehension of mass murder with the fabulous profits made from slave labor.

Rivalries between the colonial powers were endless, leading to several wars that are today little remembered.  It was in such pursuits that Spain and France, and gradually England, seized on the utility of emancipating and arming slaves, particularly the slaves of their rivals.  Emancipated slaves often fought with greater passion and discipline than conscripted European soldiers, since the consequences of defeat were so much more drastic for them.  The sight of armed and uniformed Africans on shipboard or land stunned slave owners like an apparition from hell. It was the military advantage of slave emancipation, more than abstract humanitarian sentiment, that drove each of the colonial powers toward abolitionist positions. Lincoln’s Emancipation Declaration in the midst of the Civil War a century later arose from a similar calculation.

An important and only partly hidden dynamic was the American colonialists’ friction with the Royal Africa Company.  In the late 1600s, the RAC had built up a string of forts and castles along the West African coast to collect and transport slaves, promote the slave trade for British interests, and keep competing colonial powers at bay.  Private traders had to pay fees to the RAC for the service and protection it provided.  American slavers ran up huge debts to the RAC, but when royal agents sued in the American courts to collect, the local judges were uncooperative.  More than one commentator at the time, including the literary giant Samuel Johnson, opined that the American rebellion had as a prime motive the default on these debts.  The rebels’ victory crushed the RAC economically and left the American slave traders atop the most lucrative core of the dirty business, greatly boosting the shipbuilding industry, among others, and fattening the financiers of the slave trade in New York, Rhode Island, and other Northern cities, where prominent institutions bear their names to this day.  

The settler victory in the war of 1776 brought about a reassertion of slaver control over the black population in the new republic, with fearsome consequences.  Many slaves had fought on the side of the redcoats, and the whole slave people suffered terrible retribution because of it. The condition of slaves worsened, and their masters (all while spouting the phrases of the Declaration of Independence) went on to crush (or attempt to crush) indigenous rebellions not only on the American mainland, but also in Hawaii, Cuba, and the Philippines, and in the 20th-century interventions too numerous to mention, and ongoing as we speak.  

It is much too generous, says the author, to view the new republic as suffering from a tragic flaw, such as Jefferson’s ownership of slaves, and the like.  The “flaw,” he writes, was in the design.  It did not merely “forget” to include the black population in its bounty.  Their exclusion was a central object of their rebellion and a bedrock feature of the new state.     

Today, the author writes, “the descendants of enslaved Africans continue to suffer astronomical rates of incarceration, are disproportionately accorded the death penalty, and endure all manner of ills — with few scrutinizing the origins of the republic in search of a reason why.”   

Prof. Horne’s book is richly detailed, often from sources that other scholars have not troubled to dig up, and contains material that might inspire a dozen movies more gripping than the handful of “slavery” films launched in recent years.  It forces the reader to rethink fundamental historical matters, to confront the racism at the root of this state, and to rid ourselves of the illusion that the American revolution was a legitimate child of the great French Enlightenment.  It borrowed from the Enlightenment little more than the rhetoric. Both in motive and in effect, it was a counter-revolution, and it kept the new American republic insulated in its slave-owning backwardness for nearly a century while most of the rest of the world embraced abolition.  It took the Civil War to bring America into modernity, but that’s another story.

 

Nov 24

Vacancy in the High Castle

highcastleAmazon’s The Man in the High Castle is built on an ambitious fiction.  The Nazis and the Japanese fascists have won World War II and now (1962) divide the territory of the United States, or most of it, between them.  There is a resistance based in the so-called Neutral Zone, a strip roughly along the crest of the Rocky Mountains from Canada to Mexico, where neither occupying power rules.

As the series opens, we meet Joe, a young man from New York, who wants to join the resistance, and is given the assignment of driving a truck to the Neutral Zone.  Joe, however, is a Nazi agent, and his truck mission is actually set up by the Nazis.  The truck’s cargo, he discovers, is a 16-mm film consisting of short WWII newsreel clips showing the Allied victory, contrary to the film’s scenario.

The scene then shifts to San Francisco, in the Japanese occupation zone, where we meet Juliana and her live-in boyfriend Frank.  Juliana, a quiet clerical sort, turns out to be a black belt in aikido who regularly trashes opponents twice her size in the dojo where she practices.  She sees her half-sister Trudy shot by the Japanese secret police, but before she dies, Trudy passes another can of film to Juliana and tells her to take it to a small town in the Neutral Zone — the same destination as Joe coming from the East.  So Joe and Trudy meet and in the course of various adventures, an attraction forms between them, but without carnal consummation.

Gradually we learn that the strategy of this so-called resistance is to pass these newsreel movies — origin unknown — to the chief of the resistance in the Neutral Zone, the “man in the high castle.”  What this unseen man does with the movies and how this helps the resistance is never explained.

Meanwhile, to distract us from the obtuseness of this central plot line, there are various subplots centering around the Nazis’ plan to attack Japan and take over the whole of North America as soon as Hitler dies. Hitler is the pacifist, got that?

The Japanese Trade Minister turns out to be a sentimental fool who gives Juliana a confidential inside job in his office even though she is wanted by the Japanese secret police. There is a subplot involving the attempted assassination of the Japanese crown prince, in which Frank is a key suspect.  Yet another subplot involves a Nazi officer who passes the secret of the German atom bomb to the Japanese, then tries to assassinate Hitler but ends up committing suicide.  In the process we see, at the end, that the man in the high castle is Hitler himself at a Schloss in Austria, who spends his time watching the movies (origin unknown) that the so-called resistance in the US delivers to an unseen resistance chief in the Rockies.

At the end, the lovable Japanese trade minister, clutching a little brass heart necklace belonging to Juliana, goes to sleep on a park bench and then wakes up in the “real” universe as we know it in 1962 on the eve of the Cuban missile crisis.  This ending suggests that the whole Nazi-Japanese occupation scenario was only the trade minister’s dream.  It is a weak and arbitrary ending, a Hollywood cop-out.

Philip K. Dick, whose book is the basis of the story, is a science fiction writer, and he’s of course entitled to create fantastical universes.  But the suspension of disbelief to which writers of fiction are entitled has its limits. The map of the United States that leaves a huge north-south strip of territory unoccupied — from Montana to Colorado to Arizona — violates the characteristic behavior of both of these occupying powers.  No such strip was left in the division of Europe, and no reason appears in the plot why it was left here.  Naturally, this unoccupied or free territory would be the base of a resistance.

But what kind of resistance is this, whose main activity appears to be smuggling movies into the Rocky Mountains — movies that apparently end up in Hitler’s castle in Austria? If the movies came from a clandestine studio in the Neutral Zone and the work of the resistance were to distribute and show them in underground theatres in the occupied cities, it would make sense.  But neither in the plot nor in the development of the main characters is there the kind of logic, drive and passion that would make one love them.  Juliana starts strong but in the end her crush on Nazi agent Joe leads her to betray the resistance and save Joe’s life, at the peril of her own and Frank’s.  Frank stumbles from one disaster to another without ever rising above confusion.  There are minor characters in the resistance who show heroism, but they remain marginal to the story.  The characters who get the most lines and whose internal conflicts — the stuff that makes fictitious characters three-dimensional and worthy of our empathy — are Nazis and Japanese bureaucrats.

The basic conceit here, namely what America would look like if the fascists had won World War II, makes for poignant anecdotes.  Thus Joe in his truck is stopped by a kind-hearted country sheriff wearing the swastika.  Later Joe is a guest at his Obergruppenführer John Smith’s house on the occasion of VA day (get it?) and we meet his lovely family looking just like Ozzie and Harriet greeting neighbors with Sieg Heil. There’s a moving scene of Jewish survivors saying secret prayers, Mostly, everyday life in occupied America in 1962 seems pretty much the same as it was without the foreign symbolism.  The series might be suggesting that an America occupied by Nazi powers in 1962 would be little different than it actually was.  That’s a point that’s been made more or less explicitly by others in view of the country’s experience in the McCarthy years, but The Man in the High Castle hints at no such topical reference.  Ultimately, the whole historical fiction is vacant, an idle conceit exploited for its superficial shock value.  Watching it was a waste of time.

Nov 16

A War of Cowards

IMG_0481 (Small)In the turmoil of the moment, French President Francois Hollande probably should be forgiven for calling the terrorist attacks of last Friday in Paris “an act of war.”  It’s the kind of grandiose nonsense politicians say.  Really, calling these massacres “war” is like referring to shooting fish in a barrel as “sport.”

Is he a “warrior” who turns his Kalashnikovs on a concert hall full of unarmed teenagers?  How is this person any different than the sociopath who machine-gunned movie viewers in Colorado, or the pervert who calmly murdered 77 students in Norway, or the numerous shooters who are taking young lives in American schools?  The claim that these crimes deserve esteem because they are done in the name of an ideology or a religion is laughable. The bullets and bombs in Paris sprayed death at random.  No target of military significance was touched.  No perceived symbol of religious insult like Charlie Hebdo was in the cross-hairs.  The attacks hit no architectural icon of imperial domination, like the World Trade Center or the Pentagon. The only ideology that these acts expressed, if they expressed any, was anarchism and nihilism.

It does not dignify the cowards who carried out these killings that they took their own lives by triggering their suicide vests.  If suicide made heroes or martyrs then Hitler was one.  Almost all the school shooters in the U.S. also killed themselves. Their self-destruction was not heroism or martyrdom.  It was an evasion of responsibility. If they had to stand before a tribunal, they would ultimately be overcome with shame.

But perhaps, in the larger picture, Hollande is not so far off, after all, to call this kind of encounter “war.”  We have people sitting at computer screens in air-conditioned offices in Nevada committing mass murder of wedding parties by drone on the other side of the earth, and we call that “war.”  We have pilots whose main fear is fuel shortage or mechanical failure flying bombing runs to obliterate unarmed villages and clearly marked hospitals.  Our close allies and arms customers the Saudis, who behead more people each year than Daesh, drop an enormous tonnage of explosives on civilian targets in Yemen every week.  Others have done and are doing the same.  And all of that, and more, our press calls “war,” even though most of the time no one is shooting back.

Perhaps Hollande is right.  The deliberate military massacre of civilians has been an integral part of war for as long as I’ve been alive.  The Nazi bombardment of Rotterdam and of Guernica, the V-2 attacks on London were early examples. After overcoming initial scruples, the Allies answered with massive bombing of civilian populations in Hamburg, Essen, Dresden, and other cities.  And what was the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki except an extreme act of terrorism against the civilian population?

So this is what war has come down to.  Cowards with AK47s v. cowards with drones.  There will be no quick end to this kind of conflict because it is all too easy for both sides.  We can always build more drones.  Daesh can easily recruit another eight or ten small-time criminals and misfits willing to end their meaningless lives in a media spotlight to the applause of the Salafist cheering squads.

Where is this going?  France and the US and possibly others will retaliate with further and heavier air strikes, as they have begun to do with attacks on Raqqa. The pressure will grow to expand these strikes, to reduce the whole town to rubble, much as Hafez al-Assad did to crush the Islamist rebellion in Hama in 1982. But it’s probably too late for that.  Daesh is far more deeply rooted and better organized.  It is a devil’s medley of Salafist jihadism with Iraqi Baath party professionalism. It draws popular support from a Sunni minority ousted by the U.S. invasion and victimized by the Shia-based Baghdad regime that the U.S. installed and supports.

Of all the strategic stupidities committed by the U.S. in the Mideast, the invasion of Iraq stands as the poster child.  Joe Biden is the author of an infamous paper advocating as war goal the breakup of Iraq into three countries: Shia, Sunni, and Kurd.  Well, that has largely occurred.  But the Shia section, which still controls Baghdad, is now virtually a satellite of neighboring Iran. The Sunni section has evolved into Daesh. Only the Kurds are still allies if not agents of U.S. policy, but at the price of renewed war with neighboring Turkey.  Washington has spent trillions and killed hundred of thousands strengthening its old enemies and manufacturing new ones.

While the ideological message of the 11/13 Paris attacks is null and void, the provocative political intent is clear enough. Petty criminals and cowards are pawns in big and bold ambitions.  Daesh reads French and probably also American politics as the ongoing slide of a fake liberalism and a hypocritical democracy into bankruptcy.  It seeks to accelerate what it sees as the inevitable takeover of state power by the right wing.  In this regard, Daesh is a kin of certain ultra-leftist fractions in the old Leninist movements who believed that “worse is better.”  With the xenophobic and quasi-fascist right wing in power (so goes the reasoning) the substantial Islamist minority in France will become radicalized and will massively support Daesh.  But much more important, Daesh calculates that the right-wing regime will muster the political will to do what neither Hollande nor Obama intend, namely to send large numbers of ground troops (back) into the Mideast theatre.

Neither side can win the current war of cowards. The 11/13 terrorist acts were inconsolable tragedies for the families and friends of the victims, but they are trivial scratches for France as a whole.  France lost more than 25 times as many lives in traffic collisions in 2013.  Neither this act nor its expected sequels will bring France to its knees.  Similarly, as U.S. military experts have admitted, Daesh cannot be defeated by air power alone.  Hence the political vortex toward returning “boots on the ground.”

That would be a real war, not an exchange of massacres as at present.  It would bring opposing troops within mortar and rifle range of one another.  There would be fighting from house to house, the setting of booby traps and the throwing of grenades.  It would be Fallujah and Vietnam all over again. And that is precisely the kind of confrontation that Daesh is confident it can win.  The 11/13 attacks were a piece of bloody bait to draw the Western powers into a Mideast ground war.

It looks like both Paris and Washington get this, at the moment.  That’s why we hear the new emphasis on motivating “allies”  and “local forces.”  They understand that they need to win on the ground, but they want others to donate the necessary blood and treasure.  The candidates are three: Iran and its Shia militias in Iraq, the Kurds, and a hypothetical Sunni force loyal to the Iraqi regime.  But there are problems.  There is not and will not be a meaningful Sunni force loyal to the Iraqi regime until there is regime change in Baghdad.  Does the U.S. have the will and the power to make that happen?  Secondly, the Kurds are being bombarded and hamstrung by the Turks.  The U.S. has to lean on the Turkish regime to back off the Kurds and fight Daesh instead.  Does the U.S. have the will and the power to lean hard on Turkey?  Finally, there is the Shia militia allied with and largely controlled by Iran — by all accounts the only fighting force in the area with the capacity and scale to match Daesh.  Does the U.S. have the will to throw its support to Iran and its allies (including Syria and Hezbollah) and to push back against the chief state sponsor of Salafist terror, Saudi Arabia?  The answer to all three questions would have to be yes, before the strategy of relying on “local boots” to defeat Daesh has a chance.

If the U.S. will not or cannot bring about regime change in Baghdad, lean hard on the Turks and the Saudis, and make a wartime alliance with Iran and Iran’s allies, then this war of cowards will probably continue.  The chances are good that a similar provocation will take place in the U.S. some time before the 2016 presidential election.  It’s not unthinkable that such an event will bring into the White House a candidate pledged to send American ground troops back into Iraq. If that happens, Daesh will have won its greatest victory.

 

 

 

 

Nov 10

A Modest Proposal: The Idle Profits Excise Tax

cashMajor banks are so glutted with cash that some of them are now charging corporate depositors fees to park their money.  So says the Wall Street Journal in an article titled “Big Banks to America’s Firms: We Don’t Want Your Cash.”

For example, State Street Bank in Boston, which specializes in large institutional investors, has been charging fees for large dollar deposits, and J.P. Morgan Chase, the country’s biggest bank by assets, has actually driven away more than $150 billion, partly by charging fees, partly by refusing to accept the deposits.

The underlying problem, as the Journal puts it, is that “many businesses have large sums on hand and opportunities to profitably invest it appear scarce.”  The banks have no better opportunities to profitably invest the corporate profit glut than their depositors. They’re “struggling to generate returns for investors.” And much of this cash is “hot money,” such as hedge fund deposits that move in and out instantly, potentially destabilizing bank balance sheets and drawing the attention of bank regulators.  In bank lingo, these are “non-operational” deposits; in other words, idle money, money that doesn’t have anything to do.

How much are we talking about?  Says the Journal, “the globe is awash in cash.” The article doesn’t try to estimate the global cash pool.  Just the U.S. section of it, domestic deposits at U.S. banks, hit 10.59 trillion — that’s with a ‘tr’ — in the second quarter of 2015, and rising.

A Wall Street Journal wit, Joe Queenan, offered his assistance in this quandary.  Just put your excess trillions into my savings account, he wrote.  Even at 0.75 per cent interest, a few trillion would be very helpful to his household budget.  Note that Queenan is astute to get 0.75 per cent on his savings.  Wells Fargo and Chase pay 0.05 per cent and below.

I have a better proposal: Tax the idle money away.  The basic model is the excise tax.  The excise tax traditionally is society’s tool for disincentivizing sins such as tobacco, alcohol, narcotics, gambling, and prostitution (where legal).

It’s easy to show that idle profits are a far greater evil. Idle profits produce idle workers.  Profits not reinvested in productive activities such as industry or services are an abortion of jobs, and lack of jobs destroys families and corrodes the social fabric as surely as alcoholism and other drug addictions. Profits not reinvested also pronounce a death sentence by suffocation on the country’s infrastructure:  bridges and highways not repaired, parks not maintained, railroads that are slow and unsafe, air and water not cleaned up, garbage not recycled, sewers and water supplies not maintained, an electric grid not modernized, a housing stock badly skewed toward the high end and dilapidated on the low end, and much else. Profits not reinvested devalue the country’s human capital: school districts outside the affluent suburbs starved for funding, higher education increasingly shut to lower-income students, students graduating with life-long debt burdens, misallocations of training to job openings, college teaching staffs reduced to adjuncts and part-timers, health care unaffordable, child care unavailable, and much else.  And I haven’t even touched on the corrosive influence of idle profits on the political process (Citizens United), the incentive idle profits give to mega-mergers and monopolization, and the disruption of whole nations’ currencies and budgets by violent cross-border capital flows.  Idle profits are the crack and methamphetamine of the political economy.

As a modest beginning, the idle profits excise tax should confiscate 100 per cent of cash assets not  invested productively within one year.  There is no lack of socially productive uses for surplus cash, and ten trillion dollars is a life-changing amount.  Income taxes on the wages and salaries of 90 per cent of the population could be cut to zero.  We would have full employment at a living wage for everyone.  Our infrastructure would be repaired and upgraded, our educational, housing, and health care systems raised to world-leading standards, our politics demonetized and the world economy stabilized.  Or at least a good head start in that direction.

And, last but not least, the idle profits tax would save the big banks the embarrassment of having to turn away or charge parking fees for huge cash deposits. There’s no worse PR for the financial system than banks complaining that they have too much cash already.  It all rings of Pete Seeger’s Depression-era song about the bank vaults stuffed with silver:

I’ve traveled round this country
From shore to shining shore.
It really made me wonder
The things I heard and saw.

I saw the weary farmer,
Plowing sod and loam;
I heard the auction hammer
A knocking down his home.

[Chorus:]
But the banks are made of marble,
With a guard at every door,
And the vaults are stuffed with silver,
That the farmer sweated for.

Oh, and the Wall Street Journal also reported that 55 per cent of Americans think that under capitalism, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.  Sixty-five per cent think that most big businesses have dodged taxes, bought favors, or polluted.

The idle profits tax would go a long way toward correcting that leftward drift of opinion.  So, what do you say, Washington?

 

Nov 03

New Book: What it took to create a park

CESP Front Cover smallUpdate:  Author Norman La Force Receives Environmental Stewardship Award.

They say it takes a village to raise a child.  Well, it took several villages and more to create this park — the Eastshore State Park.  Now the park stretches along the east side of San Francisco Bay from Richmond to Emeryville.  Thirty years ago it was only an idea.  The land was part garbage dumps, part toxic landfill, and most of it was privately owned by the Santa Fe Railroad. The railroad and allied private interests had very different ideas than a public park.  They wanted to fill the bay almost out to Alcatraz, to build shopping centers, an airport, navy base, hotels, luxury condos. Author Norman La Force, whose history of the struggle to build the park appears in book form today, compares it to the Thirty Years War.  He writes:

This was a political Thirty Years War for the shoreline. Indeed, the analogy to the Thirty Years War is apt for as with that conflict, it was fought for a time in one place, then stopped, to be fought again later or in a different location. It also represented a conflict between two different belief systems that would determine the fate of the communities involved. In the case of the East Bay Shoreline, the difference was between the belief, on the one hand, that the waterfront should be used for private development that would enrich the private owner and provide tax revenues to the cities along the shoreline, and the belief, on the other hand, that the shoreline should be held for the public with three objectives in mind. One was that the waterfront should be for public use and enjoyment. The second objective was to protect and preserve precious environmental and ecological resources that faced destruction from various development plans if they were not saved. The third objective was to retain the beauty of the open waterfront of the Bay.

La Force was uniquely positioned to write this history.  Beginning in the early 1980s he was a leading member of the local Sierra Club chapter, one of the key organizations in the ever-shifting coalition of groups that advocated for the park.  His is, without apology, an activist’s history. It is meticulously researched, it exposes weaknesses as well as strengths, but it burns with the fire of passion to get this park made.

The story of this prolonged war — it actually took closer to 40 years than 30 — is too complex to summarize here.  Read the book.  Suffice it to say that at one time or another it convulsed Emeryville, Berkeley, and Albany, and played out on a statewide level in Sacramento.  La Force’s book names dozens of organizations and many dozens of individuals who played a role; they’re listed in the book’s seventeen-page Index.

As La Force says in his conclusion, this effort

demonstrated what individual citizens could accomplish with perseverance and by organizing and using membership organizations to accomplish their goals. …. If the citizens’ effort to create the Eastshore State Park teaches anything, it is to show that individuals can make a difference and to demolish the shibboleth that an individual’s voice in public affairs does not count. The history of this effort also shows how important it was to build and create organizations and coalitions of groups and individuals to achieve the goal of creating the Park. Alone or singly one person could not have accomplished much, if anything, but organized with others and with people willing to take on leadership roles, much could be accomplished….  Success in creating the park also required a diversity of character traits and leadership methods. Each leader brought a different set of leadership skills to the effort, all of which were important when put together in a collective effort to achieve the common goal. No one method would have made success possible by itself…. Another important element in the success of this campaign was perseverance. At any one point, people could have just given up. Had that happened, no park would have been created.

La Force wrote this text in 2001-2002 as a manuscript that circulated among a few.  Now, on the thirtieth anniversary of the Committee for the Eastshore State Park (CESP), it is being published as a paperback and also as a Kindle e-book.  It’s a well-written account, filled with concrete detail and with names and places.  It will resonate with everyone who played a part in these decades of effort, and it will educate many who today enjoy the benefits of the park without knowing the passion and sometimes heartbreak that went into it.

I happened across La Force’s manuscript while researching the history of Cesar Chavez Park.  Some pirate book sellers were offering purloined copies of the manuscript online at prices like $99.  With the author’s agreement, I formatted the pages as a book, cleaned up typos, added the index and cover, and published the result.

Creating the Eastshore State Park by Norman La Force is available as a paperback online at CreateSpace.com  or amazon.com or as a Kindle e-book .  If you attend the 30th anniversary brunch of CESP on Saturday Nov. 7 (2015), you can pick up a copy at a discount, but supplies are limited.

Nov 03

Time for new approaches in addiction treatment

imagesAddiction and its consequences have driven up the death rate among middle aged working-class white people to unprecedented levels, a study published yesterday by the National Academy of Sciences reported.

While death rates among nonwhites and among all other age brackets have been falling, mortality among whites in the 45 to 54 year age group who have no more than a high school education have been rising substantially.  The leading causes of death are not the traditional ones such as heart disease and diabetes, but afflictions stemming from substance use: alcoholic liver disease, overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids, and suicides.

The trend reversed a previous long-term mortality decline in this demographic.  If the previous decline had continued, study authors Anne Case and Angus Deaton of Princeton wrote, half a million deaths would have been avoided.  This figure is comparable to losses in the AIDS epidemic, they write.

The researchers’ report, together with commentaries in The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, speculates that lowered economic opportunities led to the everyday stresses that drove victims to seek relief in alcohol and other drugs, or to end their lives.

While these inferences are certainly plausible, the rising death rate also throws a spotlight on the shortcomings of our addiction treatment system.  By and large, this is dominated by a religious and moralistic approach that has no scientific grounding. As studies have shown, even when this kind of treatment is available, most people don’t want it.  Referral to twelve-step groups remains the knee-jerk reaction among treatment providers, despite clear evidence that these groups retain less than five per cent of those who try them.  Reliance on this paradigm alone is costing thousands of lives.  It is high time for the medical profession and others concerned with addiction to recognize and promote additional approaches that supplement the legacy paradigm with secular and non-moralistic approaches.  We need more roads out of addiction so that more people may live.

References:

The research study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:  Abstract   Full text PDF.

New York Times report

My book, Empowering Your Sober Self.  

Aug 29

My park photo book now available on Kindle

CC-Park-BookFront-Cover-Only-240hFrom Trash to Treasure, my photo book celebrating the beauties of Cesar Chavez Park, is now available as an e-book for Kindle.

Hats off to amazon.com customer support, who walked me through the process of getting this photo book into the proper format.  You can feed Kindle a PDF file for a book that consists mostly of text, but it gags on a book that’s 99 per cent photos, like From Trash to Treasure.  However there’s a solution.  The Kindle Kids Book Creator is a utility tailormade for gobbling up graphic-intensive PDF files and turning them into books readable on the Kindle platform, on whatever device you run it on — Android, Apple, PC, Fire, or Paperwhite  — but only in black and white on the Paperwhite.  So now you can enjoy the splendors of this park on your hand-held electronic device, in addition to your handheld paper device a/k/a book.