The New York Times Magazine’s recent feature on Oakland — “the last refuge of radical America”— seemed to have one overriding purpose: to convince the rest of the nation that Oakland’s uniquely strong social movements are a quirk with no relevance to the rest of America.

What the New York Times Missed

Oakland: Incubator for Meaningful Local Politics

by DARWIN BOND-GRAHAM

Oakland, California.

The New York Times Magazine’s recent feature on Oakland — “the last refuge of radical America”— seemed to have one overriding purpose: to convince the rest of the nation that Oakland’s uniquely strong social movements are a quirk with no relevance to the rest of America. Don’t try this at home. Reporter Jonathan Mahler and his editor seemed to be operating under a directive to undermine any notion that the Occupy Movement’s specific trajectory in this West Coast city can provide models for politics elsewhere.

Instead, Mahler and the Times depict a city paralyzed by dysfunctional politicians and activists, a sort of zoo in which the loony remainders of a broken American Left are allowed to play amidst the wreckage of a post-industrial economy. The Occupy Movement is caricatured as a brawling child interested only in irrational running street battles with the police. Gentrification, the further impoverishment of the city’s working class, and displacement of its Black, Latino, and Asian communities is inevitable, we are told. Get used to it.

Locally Mahler’s article has been given the birdcage treatment. It’s such an obviously sloppy and uninformed rant to most of us who live in Oakland or who have carefully studied the region’s politics. The downside is that because it was printed in the Times’ Magazine, the glossy paper doesn’t work well even for cleaning up pet waste. The other downside, the serious one, is that the Times’ coverage may have been somewhat effective in its political purpose on the national level. Many readers unfamiliar with Oakland or the Bay Area have probably accepted the narrative about kooky radicals and the city they’re tearing apart from the inside even as capital radically transforms parts of it into a bobo paradise.

Davey D, an Oakland-based journalist and deeply informed commentator on the city’s political scene penned an excellent response to Mahler’s article just days after its publication. According to Davey D, the New York Times article, “in no way describes what people are all about here in Oakland. It diminishes the true grind that organizers put in day-in and day-out to improve their community and better this city. Those who take direct action in the face of oppression do so because they have little or no choice. It’s not something to be romanticized, it’s not a game, even if this writer came across a few individuals who thought it was.”

Davey D goes on to describe the big omission from Mahler’s piece, the lack of any information or analysis about the major preexisting social movement in Oakland through which Occupy and any current political mobilizations must be understood: the Oscar Grant Rebellion. It’s an almost criminal omission from the Times’ feature coverage of Oakland because without understanding the conflict between Oakland’s flatland communities and the police department, and how the Oakland Police Department is at the center of virtually every problem the city confronts, from debt to economic under-development, one simply can’t make sense of the what’s going on here.

So Mahler and the Times, in their laziness, their cynicism, or perhaps it was a malevolent desire to slander genuinely radical political struggles, took the easy route, and wrote a fantasy story designed to lead readers to one conclusion: Oakland is a place where crazy people with quaint 20th Century ideologies do things that have no meaning or application to politics elsewhere. Neoliberal urban transformation is unstoppable.

Another informed and responsible writer based in the East Bay, Alex Schafran, responded to Mahler’s article by calling it a “hit piece,” as in an assassination attempt. “Mahler is profoundly uninterested in understanding Oakland, or even in truly understanding his surface goal, which is to explain the vitality of Occupy and various forms of ‘radical’ street protest in Oakland,” writes Schafran. “Mahler, like far too many people who write about cities, is simply using Oakland to make a broader argument about politics and society.” “Mahler sees those who would dream of a more equal city as fools,” concludes Schafran about the Times’ coverage.

Back in October of last year my impression of Occupy Oakland was that while it was certainly a local manifestation of the Occupy Wall Street movement and was running with some of its slogans and energy, Oaklanders had dispensed with distant targets like Wall Street and Washington from the very start, focusing instead on the problems it could actually address. As I reported for CounterPunch then: “from the very beginning Occupy Oakland took a radical stance and localized the terms of struggle. At the first rally cries of ‘fuck the police’ peppered comments equally critical of local government and powerful Bay Area corporations which have pressed harmful budget cuts upon Oaklanders”.

Occupy Oakland was never about the boring liberal politics of advocating for change from the federal government or other distant forces that could only be appealed to with signs and slogans and moral suasion. For those who have taken part in it, Oakland’s most recent wave of protests was always about taking direct action to confront the immediate and real problems Oaklanders are facing, not just because of the financial crisis, but because of decades of disinvestment, police militarization, and austerity measures imposed by local politicians. Oaklanders were contesting the shut down schools, shuttered libraries, derelict parks, and the policies that have left much of the city in a state of disrepair.

This week a group of activist reopened a former library in a flatlands neighborhood off International Boulevard in Oakland’s sprawling east, in just another local direct action that will otherwise escape national attention. Naming it the “Victor Martinez People’s Library,” the building’s new tenants quickly cleaned graffiti from the walls and removed piles of garbage that had accumulated on the site after years of illegal dumping on the derelict city property. The activists, who didn’t say they were part of Occupy Oakland, although some familiar faces were peppered amongst the group, released a statement:

“If you live in this community, we only ask that you think about how you can use this building. Name it anything you like. Purpose it to any goal that benefits the community—library, social or political neighborhood center. The grounds can even be used for a community garden, where we can grow healthy food in a food desert neighborhood. All we ask is that you keep it out of the hands of a city which will only seal the fence and doors again, turning the space back into an aggregator of the city’s trash and a dark hole in the middle of an embattled community. The doors here are opened. And there are many other simply waiting to be.”

By 5pm the new Victor Martinez Library was bustling with dozens of people, many of them young activists, the sorts derided by the New York Times for their idealism and dreams of a more equitable city. Handfuls of neighbors trickled in and out of the building curiously looking over the scene, chatting with the library’s liberators who were busying themselves with sweeping and other chores. Children from nearby houses ran in and out of the library and its yard. A mother and her two daughters who lived in a house nearby shyly told me they’d like to see the reopened library become a place for children to safely gather and play. There is no park or playground close by; the neighborhood around Miller Avenue and International instead is dotted with auto shops, industrial supply warehouses, apartment buildings, and dangerously busy streets.

A man standing out front is busy giving an impromptu lecture about the building’s history. “During the Chicano movement in the early 1970s this was closed as a library, so the community took it over and turned it into a school,” said Jose Rivera, a Richmond resident who grew up in the neighborhood. “Between roughly 1973 and 1988 or 89 this was one of the community schools, Emiliano Zapata Street Acadamy, that was created by the movement to educate our youth. People know all about the history of the Black Panthers and the anti-war movement in Oakland, but there was also a powerful Chicano movement that made changes here.”

Rivera, a scholar of the Chicano movement in Oakland, is carrying copies of articles, maps, and other documents he’s researched that provide some insights into the neighborhood’s past, and specifically the old library’s role in previous social movements. A San Francisco Examiner article from May 12, 1982 he hands me describes the Street Academy as “an experimental school,” and the direct product of the Chicano movement’s direct action-oriented politics. Classes discussed current events affecting their communities and made studies relevant to the troubles confronting youth.

“In a basement one recent day civics teacher Bernard Stringer led a spirited discussion on the Immigration and Naturalization Service,” reads the Examiner piece.

“‘What did the INS do this week?’ Stringer asked, his voice booming out at his nine eager students.”

“‘They were swooping down,’ said one of his students referring to the recent INS roundup of [undocumented immigrants].’”

“‘What were they swooping down for?’ asked Stringer.”

“‘Because people had jobs but they didn’t have their green cards,’ the students replied.”

Countering recent ICE raids against workers in Berkeley, and raids targeting the Mexican and Central American communities of East Oakland has been a major focus of activists in the Bay Area, just another important part of Oakland’s current politics that was omitted from the recent Times’ coverage.

When the Emiliano Zapata Street Acadamy moved away to its current location, the building at 1449 Miller Street was more or less abandoned by the city. It had successfully incubated a community school that still exists, but the 1990s and 2000s was a decade in which the old Carnegie Library sat mostly empty, its façade falling apart, and the grounds around it accumulating trash.

To an outsider unfamiliar with Oakland’s history the building’s newest incarnation as the Victor Martinez People’s Library could seem like just another direct action carried out by Occupy Movement activists, but couched in Oakland’s long and productive history of social movements it’s obviously something more. There’s continuity in the struggle to save and reopen libraries as a means of improving neighborhoods and empowering communities.

Upon leaving the library last night I approached three young men standing on the corner across from the scene who were passing a blunt around and surveying the scene. “How long do you think this will last?” I asked the.

“I hope it last forever,” said one of them with an earnestness that surprised me. “We need a library in this neighborhood. The closest one is way out in Fruitvale, the Cesar Chavez branch, or else you have to go all the way downtown.”

Another one of the youngsters said with equal seriousness, “a book can save a life.”

“So you guys think this can succeed, the community will use it?”

They nodded their heads affirmatively and pointed at a little boy rolling past the new library on his scooter.

“The city spends all their money on cops and they don’t have any left over to run things like this,” one of them said.

It was an observation also noted by one of the activists earlier in the day. “Larry Reid, chair of the council said he’d rather have cut libraries and other services two years ago, rather than lay off police officers,” said the organizer in front of the new library.

Indeed, Reid told the San Francisco Chronicle recently that he and his fellow city councilors “could have made cuts in other areas without laying off 80 police officers,” but concluded that “the political will was not there”.

Just before midnight last evening the Oakland police swooped in. Evicting the activists the cops boarded up the Victor Martinez People’s Library. In less than 24 hours this place has been transformed from an abandoned Carnegie library into a busy community center, and back into a “dark hole in the middle of an embattled community.”

But in taking it over, even if it was a brief occupation, the building has been transformed into a potent symbol of political conflict and priorities, stemming back to the Chicano movement’s efforts to create a more just and equitable city, revived by a current crop of activists.

Darwin Bond-Graham is a sociologist and author who lives and works in Oakland, CA. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from AK Press.

As transnational capitalism gains momentum, the chieftains of major U.S. international corporations feel less, and less, empathy towards their homeland and more akin to a world-state wherein the entire planet is their haunt. Their quest for profits dictates a worldly view that brushes aside nation-state regulations that interfere with profits, and their disdain for the peoples of any given nation-state leads to statist political leanings, meaning a concentration of economic controls and planning in the hands of a centralized government for control of individual nation-states whilst worldwide trade is subjected to free market capitalism.

The Agents of Financial Calamity

The New Transnational Elite

by ROBERT HUNZIKER

The world’s epicenter of capitalism is the United States, and its reach/power/influence circumnavigates the globe. The elites of the capitalist class are no longer tied to territoriality or driven by national competition. “U.S. capitalism has expanded its reach by morphing into a Transnational Capitalist Class.” according to William Robinson (Univ. of Calif.) Global Capitalism and 21^st Century Fascism, Aljazeera, May 2011. The driving force that binds together this elite cadre is free market capitalism; it is the heartbeat of a worldwide network of capitalists that thrive off profits and wealth creation. Their nonpareil world order is driven by money which equates to success, power, collegiality, and increasingly, as this new world order coalesces into the most formidable political entity in the history of humankind, democratic nation-states lose the legacy of the Age of Enlightenment, which played such a major role in the French Revolution (1789-99) and the American Revolution (1775-83), contributing to the Declaration of Independence (1776), and the U.S. Bill of Rights (1791)… stripping away national identities.

The notion that a company or corporate executive or wealthy entrepreneur is bound by an allegiance to their country of origin is passé. The elite capitalists of today are bound to one another, not to countries. They meet at the same conferences, like the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, or the The Bilderberg Group annual geopolitic forum, or in Asia it is the Boao Forum on China’s Hainan Island each spring, or the Aspen Institute’s Ideas Festival, or Herb Allen’s Sun Valley gathering for media moguls, or the Google Zeitgeist conference, all defining the characteristics of today’s plutocrats; they are forming a global community, and their ties to one another are increasingly closer than their ties to the multitudes back home.

They attend the same operas and polo matches, stay at the same 5-star hotels, lease the same private jets, dine at the same 5-star restaurants, meet Bono, and ceaselessly travel the globe together, with homes on every continent, residing wherever the weather is seasonally most favourable. Their allegiances extend well beyond the borders of their nation-states of origin, and they could care less about the various underling classes of society in any particular country where they do business.

This new global elite, according to Chrystia Freeland (Global Editor at Large, Reuters, who traveled with, and mingles with, the elites), The Rise of the New Global Elite, Atlantic Magazine, Jan./Feb. 2011: “Perhaps most noteworthy, they are becoming a transglobal community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home. Whether they maintain primary residences in New York or Hong Kong, Moscow or Mumbai, today’s super-rich are increasingly a nation unto themselves.”

This federation of convenience by the global elite is a lingering problem for the lower classes in America. The U.S.-based CEO of one of the world’s largest hedge funds told Chrystia Freeland that his firm’s investment committee often discusses the question of who wins and who loses in today’s economy. In a recent internal debate, he said, one of his senior colleagues argued that the hollowing-out of the American middle class didn’t really matter. “His point was that if the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and into the middle class, and meanwhile means one American drops out of the middle class, that’s not such a bad trade.” Notice the CEO’s reference to  “not such a bad trade” as representative of free market lingo, i.e., “trade.” Everything is measured in trade terms, like statistics… if you look in the mirror, you’ll see the reflection of a commodity.

This viewpoint is typical of how the global ruling class thinks, and proof positive of it is reflected in today’s politics in America. The right wing embodies this same viewpoint by striving to strip the federal government of public welfare services, privatizing governmental assets, and undercutting benefits to society at large, especially via manipulation of the federal tax code. This same occurrence is happening in real time right now in Greece, Spain, and Portugal as the cadre of elite technocrats out of Brussels, de facto capital of the EU, dictate nation-state policies to those three forlorn countries. The world’s elites love hard times/recessions because of the set up. It makes it easier for them to strip away government largess via austerity programs that they force upon governments, and it allows for undercutting the wages of average citizens as well as dismantling of governmental regulations. This, in turn, prompts protestors to congregate in the streets of capital cities, but over time, the capitalist class waits them out, temporarily residing in one of their homes elsewhere, away from danger, and with time on their side, the capitalists win.

Upon reading Chrystia Freeland’s article in Atlantic Magazine, one comes away with the impression the elite capitalists look down with disdain upon the masses of people, expressing a contempt for those in society who do not have the personal merit to rise to the occasion of wealth and power. Meritocracy is their biblical source, not equality and fraternity. These are hackneyed terms from ‘America of old’ and no longer applicable in the new technologically enhanced world, which itself is the major source of many of the new self-made wealthy.

This global ruling class controls the levers of an emergent trans-national state apparatus of global decision-making and orders emanate from the IMF, World Bank, the EU, and the WTO. The ruling bloc of this world order consists of chieftains of global corporations and financial conglomerates, major players in the dominant political parties of the world, media conglomerates, and technocratic elites.

Several thousand people, who all play in the same sandbox, control the world of finance and politics, similar to the faceless/nameless/shameless fictional elites in the TV series The X-Files. In that series, the ‘Smoking Man’ is the only personality from amongst the elite cadre that is recognized on an on-going basis; he is C.G.B.Spender, the public face of the “Syndicate,” which is a shadow government and highly secretive organization. As the Smoking Man says, “If people were to know of the things that I know… it would all fall apart.” Similarly, one wonders what those ‘things’ are in today’s world, and there are definitely cracks in the veneer of this new capitalistic world order.

For example, “Market capitalism has proven to be a remarkable engine of wealth creation, but if it continues to function in the next 25 years as it has in the past 25, we are in for a violent ride or, worse, a serious breakdown in the system itself. That sounds dire, and it is,” Global Capitalism at Risk. What are you Doing About it?  by Joseph L. Bower, Herman B. Leonard, and Lynn S. Paine, Harvard Business Review, Sept. 2011. This article co-written by three professors at Harvard University pinpoints a festering problem that may be impossible to address because, as the article goes on to relate: “The leaders we talked to identified various forces that could severely disrupt the global market system in the decades ahead… these forces arise from multiple sources. Some are fueled by negative consequences of the market system and feedback into it in disruptive ways. Others arise from sources external to the system. Still others relate to….” Frankly, the multiplicity of the financial problem is the problem! The world of finance is a mind-boggling complexity of derivatives overlying derivatives superimposed upon CMOs interlocking with CDSs and residing within the depths of major brokerages and banks, deep in their vaults for nobody to see in full living color. The legendary investor Sir John Templeton summed up the financial monster in two words, writing a memorandum to close friends and family before his death, as he anticipated the future, “Financial Chaos.” World banking/finance is a multi-headed hydra monster of global proportions that may bring the world of capitalism down to its knees, prompting police state intervention to maintain social order. The early stages of this phenomenon have already appeared, and historians may one day earmark the summer of 2007 as the start of the Age of Financial Calamity!

According to William Robinson: Transnational capital has been able to break free of nation-state constraints to shift the correlation of class and social forces worldwide sharply in its favour and to undercut the strength of popular and working class movements around the world. One new structural dimension of 21st century global capitalism is a dramatic expansion of the global superfluous population or that portion marginalized and locked out of productive participation … constituting some one-third of humanity. The need to assure the social control of this mass of humanity living in slums gives a powerful impetus to neo-fascist projects and facilitates the transition from social welfare to social control, otherwise known as police states. Over time, this system becomes ever more violent and the ability of economic power to determine electoral outcomes opens the door for 21st century fascism to emerge without a rupture in electoral cycles and/or a constitutional change.

The door for 21^st century fascism has more than opened. It has been blown off the hinges starting with the U.S. Patriot Act, which act violates the U.S. Constitution and which act was rammed down the throats of the U.S. Congress, whose members did not even read the document, by the Bush Administration, implying that any members who voted against the hurried-bill would be blamed for any further attacks at a time when the nation was braced for a second attack.

Another example of impending fascism occurred when President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act, which act negates the writ of habeas corpus, the most powerful cornerstone of civil rights since the Magna Carta. Subsequently, May 2012, U.S. District Judge Katherine B. Forrest overruled the domestic military detention provisions of the act, an act that was roundly supported by Democrats and Republicans.

This is a clear, and extremely troubling, clarion call for how far legislators will go to strip U.S. citizens of their rights. According to Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, “American individual liberties are being stripped away.”  The elites contend the negation of individual rights is foisted upon the government in order to maintain civil order, and their lackeys in Congress take bait with open-arms.

As transnational capitalism gains momentum, the chieftains of major U.S. international corporations feel less, and less, empathy towards their homeland and more akin to a world-state wherein the entire planet is their haunt. Their quest for profits dictates a worldly view that brushes aside nation-state regulations that interfere with profits, and their disdain for the peoples of any given nation-state leads to statist political leanings, meaning a concentration of economic controls and planning in the hands of a centralized government for control of individual nation-states whilst worldwide trade is subjected to free market capitalism. This course of action is already evident in Europe where nation-states like Portugal are being dictated to by a centralized body of technocrats, the EU. Likewise, this is happening in America where the Central Bank has become dictator of the markets whilst the global corporations on the Dow Jones Industrial Average carry on in their own markets around the world, splashing strong profits, in part, because of neoliberal tendencies that discriminate between which nation-states offer the cheapest labor and the weakest regulations. The common denominator of global corporations is cheap labor; they hover like bees around the queen wherever cheap labor is to be found.

As a result of an assortment of extremely powerful economic and political forces intertwined within transnational capitalism, it is reasonable to assume the various classes in American society will continue to experience a significant downgrade of lifestyle as the transnational capitalists comb the world for the cheapest labor and the loosest regulations.

In time, America itself will become a target for transnational capitalists’ manufacturing plants & facilities as American wages and benefits continue to stagnate and as right-wingers attack governmental regulations and privatize government assets.

Robert Hunziker earned an MA in economic history at

 DePaul University. He lives in Los Angeles.1

While local and state groups are facing cuts in their programs, the CEOs and top staff of large foundations and environmental NGOs – referred to by some as “Gang Green” or “Big Green” – are raking in huge salaries, up to $1,196,037.00 per year.

Foundation and NGO Executives Rake in the ‘Green’

Cashing in While the Earth Burns

by DAN BACHER

Grassroots environmental organizations including the Friends of the River, the American River Conservancy and California Native Plant Society, have reported dwindling income in recent years, the result of declining foundation funds and membership donations available due to the current economic disaster.

Many organizations are having to lay off key staff, close offices and curtail their programs. Environmental justice, river advocacy and grassroots groups working to restore salmon and other fish populations have been particularly hard hit.

While local and state groups are facing cuts in their programs, the CEOs and top staff of large foundations and environmental NGOs – referred to by some as “Gang Green” or “Big Green” – are raking in huge salaries, up to $1,196,037.00 per year.

At the same time that it is increasingly difficult for grassroots environmental organizations to keep their doors open, Californians are faced with some of their greatest environmental challenges ever, including Governor Jerry Brown’s plan, announced on July 25, 2012, to build twin peripheral tunnels around the Delta toexport more northern California water to corporate agribusiness and southern California.

The same Governor has continued many of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s other abysmal environmental polices, including forging ahead with the privately funded Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Initiative to create so-called marine protected areas on the California coast, killing record numbers of Sacramento splittail, a native fish in 2011 and exporting record levels of water out of the California Delta last year.

As the same time, the Obama administration is supporting the construction of a peripheral canal or tunnel, the controversial catch shares program that privatizes ocean public trust resources, and the FDA’s approval of genetically engineered salmon.

While big bucks continue to flow to foundation and NGO CEOs, hundreds of thousands of people throughout the US, Mexico and Europe, inspired by the “Occupy Wall Street” protests in New York City that began last fall, have protested the disparity of wealth between the 1 percent on Wall Street and the 99 percent of people that are struggling to get by.

They are also challenging the increasing influence that Wall Street corporations, who contribute heavily to the campaigns of the Democratic and Republican parties, exert over foreign and domestic policies, including promoting the stripping of environmental protections.

Nils Stolpe of FishNet-USA has uncovered some great financial information in his ongoing exposure of the big money behind corporate environmental NGOs and foundations that fund them. In this time of severe economic crisis, the “compensation” for CEOs and selected staff of the large ENGOs and foundations is very alarming.

Please note that the compensation listed is only from the organization – not necessarily the total compensation that person received from all sources – in the most recent year for which a Form 990 was available.

At the top of the compensation list is the Chief Investment Officer of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, who received $1,196,037.00 from the organization.

David Packard (1912–1996), the co-founder of Hewlitt-Packard, and his wife Lucile founded the David and Lucile Packard Foundation in 1964. While styling himself as an “environmentalist” in his later years, it is noteworthy that he served as Deputy Secretary of Defense under President Richard Nixon. “Packard served in this high-echelon position during Nixon’s secretive carpet bombing campaign against Cambodia and Laos during the Vietnam War,” noted independent journalist David Gurney. (http://noyonews.net/?p=219)

Not far behind, the President & CEO of The Pew Charitable Trusts received $1,071,525.00, while the President/CEO of the David and Lucille Packard Foundation received $696,687.00

The Sunoco oil company, headed by J. Howard Pew and Joseph N. Pew, Jr., set up the original endowment for the Pew Foundation, now called the Pew Charitable Trusts. Sunoco currently refines bitumen in Ohio and is planning to do so soon in Philadelphia. Sunoco has, through either Pew family members or current board members and CEO’s of Sunoco, held a majority of the board of trustees of the Pew Charitable Trusts to this very day.

The Packard Foundation and Pew Charitable Trusts are paying these huge compensation packages while millions are out of work or struggling to make ends with minimum wage jobs.

These foundations fund efforts to promote controversial programs such as the federal “catch shares” program, an effort to privatize public trust fisheries, and California’s Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Initiative.

The MLPA Initiative, overseen by oil industry, real estate, marina development and other corporate operatives, created “marine protected areas” that fail to protect the ocean from pollution, oil spills and drillling, corporate aquaculture, military testing and all human impacts on the ocean other than fishing and gathering.

The David and Lucillle Packard Foundation contributed $8.2 million to the Resources Legacy Fund Foundation to fund MLPA hearings. Both foundations have also dumped millions into the NGOs promoting the MLPA Initiative, as revealed in their 990 form statements.

Catherine Reheis-Boyd, the president of the Western States Petroleum Association, chaired the MLPA Blue Ribbon Task Force for the South Coast, as well as serving on the Central Coast, North Central Coast and North Coast task forces. Reheis-Boyd is a strange kind of “marine guardian,” since she has been lobbying for new offshore oil drilling off the West Coast, the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline, the expansion of the environmentally destructive practice of hydraulic fracturing (hydro fracking) and the evisceration of California’s landmark environmental laws.

The Packard Foundation, along with the Resources Legacy Fund Foundation and Stephen D. Bechtel Foundation, is notorious for funding studies promoting the construction of the peripheral canal.

A coalition of Delta residents, family farmers, Indian Tribes, grassroots conservationists and environmental justice advocates opposes the construction of the peripheral canal because it would likely lead to the extinction of Central Valley steelhead, Sacramento River chinook salmon, Delta smelt, longfin smelt, Sacramento splittail, green sturgeon and other imperiled species.

The top staff of other NGOs also received huge salaries. The President of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) received $432,742.00, while the President of the Environmental Defense Fund received $423,359.00.

The Managing Director of the Pew Environment Group received $400,487.00, while the Executive Director of Environmental Defense Fund received $347,963.00.

The Environmental Defense Fund, funded by millions from the Walton Family Foundation every year, is under fire from fishermen, environmentalists and consumer advocates, for promoting “catch shares” programs.

According to Food and Water Watch, “Catch shares, often called individual fishing quotas (IFQs), are a means of fisheries management that is spreading rapidly throughout the coastal regions of the United States. Rather than solving our nation’s fishery management problems, however, these programs only create a host of new ones.”

“Catch shares divide the total amount of fish that can be caught in a year — called a total allowable catch, or TAC — into smaller portions, called shares or quota. These have been given away for free, and often practically forever, to individual fishermen and fishing companies, who are able to lease and sell them. This creates a small elite group that has access to and control over fish — a public resource. Effectively, this amounts to privatization and hurts consumers, fishermen and our oceans,” the group explained.

Regarding the high salaries of NGO executives promoting catch shares and other privatization programs, Stolpe commented, “And with salaries (and perks) ranging up into seven figures, is it any wonder that these people exhibit such a lack of empathy for people with real jobs – you know, the kind of jobs that depend on actually producing something tangible to justify a paycheck? And no, putting people out of work isn’t producing something tangible.”

“Anyone who has built a successful career – that is, successful as far as the size of their paycheck and their ability to climb the (ENGO) corporate ladder is concerned – by spending money earned by someone else isn’t likely to have much of an idea of what it would be like to be out of work or, it appears, to be particularly concerned when their actions have that consequence on others,” said Stolpe.

So while grassroots environmental organizations are struggling to pay for staff salaries, office expenses and campaign costs, top officials of foundations and environmental NGOs are raking in the “green,” just like the CEOs of Wall Street corporations. It is no surprise that the perspectives, interests and “environmental” programs of these NGO CEOs are aligned with the Wall Street 1 percent – not the 99 percent devastated by the 1 percent’s political, economic and environmental policies.

As Robert Fritchey, author of Wetland Riders, so eloquently stated, “Some of the hottest journalistic action is still in following the money. But don’t look to your local newspaper, newsmagazine or public radio station for enlightenment, because the money trails today often radiate from a handful of the nation’s wealthiest ‘charitable’ foundations, and end with those media outlets themselves.”

Below is the list of the positions, organizations and total compensation from the organizations:

Chief Investment Officer, David and Lucille Packard Foundation: $1,196,037.00
President & CEO, The Pew Charitable Trusts: $1,071,525.00
President/CEO, David and Lucille Packard Foundation: $696,687.00
President, Natural Resources Defense Council: $432,742.00
President, Environmental Defense: $423,359.00
Managing Director, Pew Environment Group: $400,487.00
Executive Director, Environmental Defense: $347,963.00
VP West Coast, VP Land, Water and Wildlife, Environmental Defense: $304,626.00
Executive Director, Natural Resources Defense Council: $277,846.00
Development Director, Natural Resources Defense Council: $265,001.00
President and CEO, Ocean Conservancy: $261,111.00
Finance Director, Natural Resources Defense Council: $259,460.00
Chief Executive Officer, Oceana: $247,164.00
VP Marketing and Communication, Environmental Defense: $242,947.00
Executive Vice President, Oceana: $237,589.00
EVP/COO, Ocean Conservancy: $217,911.00
Communications Director, Natural Resources Defense Council: $213,737.00
Executive Director of Oceana in Europe, Oceana: $205,868.00
Senior Vice President for North America, Chief Scientist, Oceana: $203,272.00
VP Legal Affairs, Ocean Conservancy: $180,426.00
President, Ecotrust: $178,527.00
VP Resource Development, Ocean Conservancy: $172,381.00
VP Communications, Ocean Conservancy: $172,161.00
Jim Ayers Oceana Regional Director in North Pacific, Oceana: $170,114.00
Shark Conservation Program Director, Ocean Conservancy: $152,754.00
Managing Director, Ecotrust: $151,050.00
VP State Advocacy Center Director, Conservation Law Foundation: $141,141.00

Dan Bacher can be reached at: Danielbacher@fishsniffer.com

Though, for most, the London Inter-Bank Offer Rate (Libor) interest rate fixing scandal appears to be distant and far too complex to understand, its potential consequences may be as economically devastating as a world war.

Their Profit is Our Loss

The Dark Heart of the Libor Scandal

by MARK VORPAHL

Though, for most, the London Inter-Bank Offer Rate (Libor) interest rate fixing scandal appears to be distant and far too complex to understand, its potential consequences may be as economically devastating as a world war.

The Libor is used to set payments on $800 trillion worth of financial instruments. It sets the prices that people and corporations pay for loans and receive for savings. Given that the fraud impacted $10 trillion in consumer loans, the Libor scandal will likely leave a long list of previous financial scandals that contributed to the Great Recession look like child’s play.

It also pulls back the curtain on the mechanisms behind the world economy, its anti-social priorities, its willingness to gamble away the future of billions of people, and the government’s collusion in these operations. The Libor scandal reveals that the “invisible hand” Adam Smith spoke of in explaining how a capitalist economy regulates itself has been transformed into the trained hand of a swindler.

The Libor and Its Problems

The Libor sets interest rates that banks charge one another to borrow on a daily basis. Sixteen (now eighteen) large banks submit their assessment of what they anticipate credit would cost them. The four lowest and four highest calculations are thrown out, and the interest rate is determined as the middle figure among the remaining assessments.

While the method that the banks use to determine the figure they report to Libor is largely arbitrary, it is, nevertheless, assumed that they won’t take advantage of the process to game the system. This is a rather remarkable leap of faith since there are billions of dollars of profit if the banks can find a clever way to sidestep the rules. In contrast to popular knowledge, the Libor expects honor among thieves.

Clearly, this is naive in the extreme. It has recently been revealed that for years the banks worked with one another to submit interest rates to the Libor lower than their actual borrowing costs, thereby covering up the shaky condition they were in. Of even greater consequence, it is now acknowledged that the banks were rigging the Libor since 2005 to make the most profit from their bets on derivatives, and regulators knew it was happening.

So far, London-based Barclays Bank has been fined $455 million by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the U.S. Department of Justice and the UK Financial Services Authority. This is likely a fraction of the money they made from their fraud. Its chief executive, Bob Diamond, was forced to resign, no doubt, with a handsome severance package even if he does have to give up some on the advice of the bank’s board.

Barclays Bank is just the tip of the iceberg. In several countries, 20 big banks are under investigation, including such behemoths as Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, RBS and UBS.

Current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Chairman Ben Bernanke have had to defend the Fed’s response when it first became aware of the fraud in 2008. While Geithner said he was “aggressive” in expressing his concerns, this on-going scandal did not come to light until four years later.

Why the Regulators Failed to Regulate

The explanation for this contradiction is that the fraud the banks were committing was producing outcomes in line with the Federal Reserves own policies, though they were concerned about how flagrantly it was being done. In “The Meaning of Libor-gate” Paul Craig Roberts explains:

It is the prospect of ever-lower interest rates that causes investors to purchase bonds that do not pay a real rate of interest. Bond purchasers make up for the negative interest rate by the rise in price in the bonds caused by the next round of low interest rates. As the Federal Reserve and the banks drive down the interest rate, the issued bonds rise in value, and their purchasers enjoy capital gains.

As the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England are themselves fixing interest rates at historic lows in order to mask the insolvency of their respective banking systems, they naturally do not object that the banks themselves contribute to the success of this policy by fixing the Libor rate and by selling massive amounts of interest rate swaps, a way of shorting interest rates and driving them down or preventing them from rising.

The lower Libor is, the higher is the price or evaluations of floating-rate debt instruments, such as CDOs [Collateralized Debt Obligation], and thus the stronger the banks’ balance sheets appear.

Does this mean that the U.S. and UK financial systems can only be kept afloat by fraud that harms purchasers of interest rate swaps, which include municipalities advised by sellers of interest rate swaps, and those with savings accounts?

The answer is yes, but the Libor scandal is only a small part of the interest rate rigging scandal. The Federal Reserve itself has been rigging interest rates. How else could debt issued in profusion be bearing negative interest rates?

Later in the article Roberts succinctly points out:

Imagine the Federal reserve called before Congress or the Department of Justice to answer why it did not report on the fraud perpetrated by private banks, fraud that was supporting the Federal Reserve’s own rigging of interest rates (and the same in the UK.)

The Federal Reserve will reply: “So, you want us to let interest rates go up? Are you prepared to come up with the money to bail out the FDIC-insured depositors of JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, etc.? Are you prepared for U.S. Treasury prices to collapse, wiping out bond funds and the remaining wealth in the U.S. and driving up interest rates, making the interest rate on new federal debt necessary to finance the huge budget deficits impossible to pay, and finishing off what is left of the real estate market? Are you prepared to take responsibility, you who deregulated the financial system, for this economic Armageddon?

Obviously, the politicians will say NO and continue with the fraud. The harm to people from a collapse far exceeds the harm in lost interest from fixing the low interest rates in order to forestall collapse. The Federal Reserve will say that we are doing our best to create profits for the banks that will permit us eventually to unwind the fraud and return to normal. Congress will see no better alternative to this.

In short, the Federal Reserve and other political structures have been left to act as subordinate partners in the big banks’ schemes — the tail is wagging the dog.

The Magnitude of the Problem

The level of gambling that is being tolerated without a care by the wheeler and dealers of Wall Street is almost beyond comprehension. For instance, it has been estimated that the world’s annual gross domestic product is valued between $50 trillion and $60 trillion. This is peanuts compared to the exposure of the worlds financial markets to such speculation tools as derivatives. Paul Wilmott has estimated the total amount of derivatives being played in the markets is $1.2 quad-trillion. That is 20 times the amount of money currently in the global economy. As noted earlier, the amount of financial instruments pegged to the Libor alone is $800 trillion.

Despite the obscuring complexity and mathematical models used to justify such inflated figures, the fact of the matter is that they are still inevitably tied to the real economy of production and consumption. The farther they stretch into the stratosphere from this ground level, the more violently they snap back to earth with catastrophic consequences for working people. The Libor scandal combined with the government sanctioned gambling help to create greater economic crises around the bend.

There is no accountability for this mad lust for short-term, even if illusionary, profit at the expense of the economy’s long-term health. Those responsible are sheltered from the devastation they wreak with the hand out line of “too big to fail” and workers’ tax dollars.

This should be no surprise because these crooks own both the Republican and Democratic parties. What better evidence for this than, after being bailed out, the banksters are again continuing their speculative orgy and scandals while workers continue to suffer from the effects of the Great Depression. If the U.S.’s political parties had the least amount of independence from the financial elite, they would have jailed those responsible for the economic crisis, confiscated their funds, sharply raised taxes on the rich, and used this increased revenue for job creation, fully funded education, Medicare for all, and rebuilding our decaying infrastructure.

In addition to denying workers of revenue for these fundamental needs, those behind the Libor scandal have also used their interest rigging to rob already cash strapped municipalities and other local governments. While there are many examples of this that are dealt with in Pam Marten’s “Wall Street’s Biggest Heist Yet? How the High Wizards of Finance Gutted Our Schools and Cities,” one is enough to get the picture of how it worked:

According to the June 30, 2011 auditor’s report for the City of Oakland, California, the city entered into a swap with Goldman Sachs Mitsui Marine Derivatives Products in connection with $187.5 million of muni bonds for Oakland Joint Powers Financing Authority. Under the swap terms, the city would pay Goldman a fixed rate of 5.6775 percent through 2021 and receive a variable rate based on the Bond Market Association index (that was the predecessor name to the SIFMA index). In 2003, the variable rate was changed from being indexed to the Bond Market Association index to being indexed at 65 percent of the one-month Libor rate.

The city is still paying the high fixed rate but it’s receiving a miniscule rate of less than one percent. According to local officials, the city has paid Goldman roughly $32 million more than it has received and could be out another $20 million if it has to hold the swap until 2021. A group called the Oakland Coalition to Stop Goldman Sachs succeeded in getting the City Council to vote on July 3 of this year to stop doing business with Goldman Sachs if it doesn’t allow Oakland to terminate the swap without penalty. It called the vote “a huge victory for both the city of Oakland and for the people throughout the world living under the boot of interest rate swaps.”

Thanks to grass roots pressure, Oakland was fortunate enough to get out of paying the termination fees on the abusive interest rates swaps. This is not normally how it works. According to a March 2010 Service Employees International Union (SEIU) report, from 2006 -2008 the banks have been paid $28 billion in termination fees so state and local governments could get out of similar arrangements. Clearly the requirement to pay such termination fees to get out of abusive interest rate swaps should be voided on a federal level.

The Way Forward

In addition, many, in response to the Libor scandal have called for the re-instatement of the Glass-Steagall Act, which was repealed under President Clinton. This Act did help to prevent some of the worst current excesses. However, the situation with fraud has reached such monstrous proportions today that such a measure seems to be entirely inadequate. The shattered system of bank regulation cannot be put together by relying on the political players who are holding the hammers and profiting from deregulation. Starting out, any reform movement as a lobbying exercise is a complete dead end.

It will take an independent mass social movement to exercise the necessary force to abolish this kind of financial fraud. When the streets are regularly filled with millions united in protest accompanied by strike action aimed at helping the vast majority of working people, the roadblocks to reform are pulverized.

The Libor scandal points out the need for fundamental change in the banking system. While there will be some fines imposed and tweaks made, they will not even begin to clean the rot. The problem is that the interests of the bank owners are the polar opposite from the interests of workers and society in general. Their profit is our loss. You can’t control a system you do not own. The banks need to be placed under public ownership and their current private owners locked out.

Mark Vorpahl is an union steward, social justice activist, and writer for Workers’ Action - www.workerscompass.org. He can be reached at Portland@workerscompass.org

In nations that slash tax rates on high incomes, the rich significantly increase their share of national income.

New Research Shows That We Shouldn't Swallow 

Conservative Claims About Taxes

How the Rich Are Grabbing Bigger 

and Bigger Slices of Pie

by SAM PIZZIGATI

What happens when nations cut taxes for their richest citizens?

Economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, two of the world’s most respected authorities on the incomes of rich people, have a straightforward answer: In nations that slash tax rates on high incomes, the rich significantly increase their share of national income.

Here in the United States, for instance, the tax rate on income over $400,000 has dropped by half, from 70 to 35 percent, since the 1970s. Over that same span, the households that comprise the “1 percent” have over doubled their share of the national income, to 20 percent.

In many European nations and Japan, by contrast, tax rates on the rich didn’t fall as fast or as far. And rich people’s slice of the income pie increased “only modestly,” note Piketty and Saez in a new analysis they co-authored with researcher Stefanie Stantcheva.

This phenomenon doesn’t trouble conservatives. High taxes on rich people, they claim, do terrible economic damage by discouraging the entrepreneurship that makes economies strong. Lower taxes on the rich, this argument continues, encourage entrepreneurs, who invest and create jobs when lower taxes let them keep more of the income they take in.

Yes, conservatives freely admit, the rich can and do amass plenty of money in a low-tax environment. They’ll even increase their share of national income. But the rest of us shouldn’t worry. Thanks to the rich, right-wingers argue,

we all benefit from a bigger and better economy.

Piketty and his colleagues put these claims to the test. If the conservative argument reflected reality, they point out, nations that sharply cut tax rates on the rich should experience much higher economic growth rates than nations that don’t.

In fact, the three economists note, reality tells no such story. Nations that have “made large cuts in top tax rates, such as the United Kingdom or the United States,” they explain, “have not grown significantly faster than countries that did not, such as Germany or Denmark.”

So what’s going on in countries where the rich all of sudden face substantially smaller tax bills?

In countries that go soft on taxing the rich, top business executives don’t suddenly — and magically — become more entrepreneurial, more “productive.” Instead, they suddenly find themselves with a huge incentive to game the system, to squeeze out of their enterprises every bit of personal profit their power enables.

The more these executives can squeeze, the more they can keep. The result? The 1 percent in nations that cut taxes on high incomes proceed, as Piketty and his fellow authors put it, to “grab at the expense of the remaining 99 percent.”

Millions of us know this grabbing first-hand. We’ve seen corporate execs routinely outsource and downsize, slash wages and attack pensions, cheat consumers and fix prices.

How can we start discouraging these sorts of behaviors? Piketty and his fellow analysts have a suggestion: raise taxes on America’s highest-income bracket. Raise them as high as 83 percent.

This suggestion, the three scholars acknowledge, may right now seem politically “unthinkable.” But back between the 1940s and the 1970s, they remind us, the notion that we ought to raise taxes on the rich to reduce the incentive for outrageous behavior rated as our conventional wisdom.

In those years, policymakers — and the public at large — felt strongly that pay increases for the wealthiest Americans reflected “mostly greed or other socially wasteful activities rather than productive work effort.”

Is this mid-20^th century perception about pay at the top now about to make a comeback? Piketty and friends certainly think so. Let’s hope they have that one right, too.

Sam Pizzigati is an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC, editor of the journal Too Much and author of The Rich Don’t Always Win, Seven Stories Press, New York, forthcoming 2012.

This column is distributed by OtherWords.

Unlike the retail outlets that defined themselves as “collectives,” the Vapor Room was organized as a Co-operative Corporation under California law and met all the formal requirements. Attorney Bill Panzer once said the Vapor Room may have been the only marijuana provider in unambiguous compliance with the confusing law (created by legislators to “clarify” Prop 215).

Cannabis Dispensaries Closing

Last Call at the Vapor Room

by FRED GARDNER

As the sun was going down over Twin Peaks in San Francisco on the last day of July, two staffers took down the Vapor Room sign. Handpainted and hung on a wrought iron bracket, the sign had not seemed out of place on a Haight Street Victorian built of redwood in a time when carpenters could express their artistry.  Inside, people commiserated and said their goodbyes. The United States government had threatened to seize the building if the landlord didn’t evict the club.

And the Vapor Room was a club —a Cannabis club on the original Dennis Peron model, where people could hang out and socialize. It was way smaller than Dennis’s place at 1444 Market Street, but it had the same friendly feeling, as if it was an extension of the proprietor’s living room. Among the 40 people saying goodbye Tuesday evening were some friends of Dennis’s who had circulated petitions for Prop 215 all those years ago. “We were there at the beginning and here we are at the end,” said Kitty, a frail woman who was trying unsuccessfully to hold back the tears.

Unlike the retail outlets that defined themselves as “collectives,” the Vapor Room was organized as a Co-operative Corporation under California law and met all the formal requirements. Attorney Bill Panzer once said  the Vapor Room may have been the only marijuana provider  in unambiguous compliance with the confusing law (created by legislators to “clarify” Prop 215). If members of the Vapor Room co-op hadn’t liked the way Martin Olive was running the place or allocating funds, they could have voted him out as director.

With only a few exceptions, the entrepreneurs who built the medical cannabis industry after Dennis’s club was taken down in ’98 (as a “nuisance” under California law) did not defend the right of medical cannabis users to consume and socialize on-site. The entrepreneurs’ goal was to sell cannabis —a right-on mission, given the federal prohibition, but a retreat from what Dennis had created and what he and many voters thought Prop 215 had legalized. Sitting with Kitty and her friends I recalled what Dennis had told the Institute of Medicine investigators on their visit to 1444 Market St. in December, 1997: “marijuana is part of it, but the biggest part of healing is not being alone.”

Flashback: The Institute of Medicine Investigates the SF Cannabis Buyers Club

Some influential figures in the medical establishment had been embarrassed by the Dec. 30, 1996 press conference at which top federal officials dismissed as “Cheech and Chong medicine”  a therapeutic agent they knew to be effective and safe. An editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine —“Federal Foolishness and Marijuana,” by Jerome Kassirer, MD, the editor-in-chief—  called the federal policy “misguided,” “hypocritical,” “out of step with the public,” and “inhumane… the absolute power of bureaucrats whose decisions are based more on reflexive ideology and political correctness than on compassion.”

On January 30, 1997, the very day the NEJM editorial ran, Dr. Harold Varmus, director of the National Institutes of Health, announced that there would be a special conference to resolve “the public health dilemma” raised by the passage of Prop 215.

“I don’t think anyone wants to settle issues like this by plebiscite,” said Varmus, calling instead for “a way to listen to experts on these topics.”

There followed a big conference in February,  organized by Alan Leshner of the National Institute of Drug Abuse, at which various experts  decreed that there was no proof —which they define as placebo-controlled, double-blind clinical trials—  that marijuana was safe and effective medicine in treating pain, neurological and movement disorders, etc.. They called for “more and better studies.”

Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey, who in December ’96 had mouthed the Cheech-and-Chong soundbite, then announced a $1.5 million allocation for a study by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) on the medical potential (and dangers) of marijuana. Somebody evidently had explained to the Four Star Drug Czar that there really are some compounds in the plant that the drug companies hope to develop into marketable synthetics, and that his shop (ONDCP) and NIH, NIDA, DEA, and FDA would from now on be running a five-cornered stall to prevent “the crude plant” from gaining status as medicine.  The line would be “more research is needed” (with Prohibition staying in place until the more research got conducted.)

The Institute of Medicine study was conducted by two male MD “investigators” —Stanley J. Watson, a  research psychiatrist from the University of Michigan and John A. Benson, a professor emeritus from Oregon Health Sciences University— and three female “staff.”    On a Saturday in December ’97, they visited Bay Area cannabis buyers clubs. It was the day after an appelate court had ruled that Dennis Peron’s club was illegal. The headlines carried Lungren’s vow to close down all the clubs.

Their first stop was the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Co-operative, where Jeff Jones and colleagues described their operation in careful detail.  The OCBC had prepared diligently for the meeting, and presented the IOM team with a report on the illnesses their members had been diagnosed with. Tod Mikuriya, MD, explained the advantages of vaporization over smoking. Watson and Benson nodded and the staff took notes.

Watson et al arrived at the Market St. club while a memorial service was being held.  They left to get some lunch, heading towards Van Ness on windy, desolate Market Street. On the fourth floor Dennis Peron sat alone in the last row, head bowed as friends, co-workers, and family members recalled Ken M., a person with AIDS who had worked at the club for four years.  “The friendliest guy,” Dennis said of him. “We always used to talk baseball… He was one of the best warriors for medicinal marijuana… When we marched on the DEA, it was Ken who made up those wonderful chants…”

When Dennis finally spoke with the IOM team in his office, he explained that his head was someplace else: his right to operate, established by California voters, had just been taken away by three judges. Dennis said he had glanced at the IOM questionnaire when it arrived in the mail, but it was buried under a pile of paper on his desk. As he started looking through the papers to find it, somebody came into the office with Ken’s ashes under his arm, said goodbye, and exited. Dennis turned back to the investigators and generalized:

“People’s responses to marijuana are like an inverted U. On one end of the U there are people who should never do marijuana. They take a puff of it, they get red, they cough, they get paranoid, they feel like death is imminent. And on the other end of that U is somebody in a wheelchair or they’re in constant pain, they should never be without it. In between is everybody else.

“This is a club of last resort for some people,” he went on. “How I run it is, I try to think of it as a country club for poor people who have never really had much in their life. And now that they are physically challenged, they even have less. Most of them are living on SSI in tiny one-room hotels downtown where everything’s crazy and the bathroom’s down the hall and there’s screaming people down the hall.

“When they come here it’s like a sanctuary for them. There’s comfortable couches, there’s places to sit at tables and talk. You’ll see combinations you never see outside except on a bus: a black person with a white person with a brown person with a gay person, all at the same table, all sharing a part of their life.

“I like to think of this as a giant group therapy! And no matter what you got, this is therapy for it. And marijuana is part of it, but the biggest part of healing is not being alone. They always find that people who are alone die faster.”

Dennis told the doctors, frankly but diplomatically, that he was skeptical about their mission. “You know, the medical potential of marijuana has been studied to death. The Shafer commission came back —you remember that one, 1972? Nixon appoints this commission. ‘I want you to study it.’ The commission comes back and says ‘Legalize.’ ‘We can’t do that!’ So he totally disregarded the commission’s voice….

“The National Academy of Sciences, 1981-82 report, originally commissioned by Jimmy Carter…”  The investigators nodded as if they had just read that report. “It was vague, it was ambiguous, but there was enough room to reschedule marijuana. Only by then Reagan was president and he threw the report in the garbage. Wouldn’t even publish it for a while.

“Then there was the DEA study that they chose to ignore, Judge Francis Young, 1988… And now there’ll be another study.”

After a beat Dr. Benson smiled and said, “Help us,” in an earnest, encouraging tone that implied, “the medical establishment is all ears.” Dennis said he would show them around the club.

Back in the Now

The tasteful Vapor Room sign was painted by New Bohemia Signs from a design drawn by Jeremy Fish… The club will carry on as a delivery service, as will HopeNet, another Cannabis outlet closed July 31 after the landlord was threatened by the U.S. Attorney. HopeNet also used to allow use on-site, although it was such a small space it wasn’t a social scene… With a delivery service, instead of getting to spend time with friends and like-minded people, medical cannabis users will have a brief transaction with a driver. It’s an immeasurable loss for Kitty and countless others for whom the Vapor Room was a place to hang out. After hugging her goodbye (will we meet again?) and paying my respects to brave Martin Olive I walked down Haight towards Fillmore where I had parked. There are five bars on that one block and on a warm evening the smell of spilt beer wafts up from the floorboards and out into the street.  I went into the Mad Dog in the Fog and had a Guinness.

Fred Gardner is putting O’Shaughnessy’s back issues online at BeyondTHC.com.