The toll

Click to enlarge.

I look at this informative map of COVID death densities from the New York Times and I see our US history of inequity and dispossession. Those very dark chunks in Arizona, New Mexico and Montana are traditional native lands, still largely the home of indigenous peoples. That dark smudge in Georgia is the old Black belt where formerly enslaved people still exist in rural poverty. The dark bits in South Texas are the home of impoverished Hispanics who found themselves on the Anglo side of a border imposed in the 1840s. 

It's still a better deal to be white non-Hispanic, in this country, even though, since most of us are white, we have had the largest raw number of deaths:

Find more statistics at Statista

The power of a good idea whose time has come

Still neutral on the Dem presidential hopefuls -- I need a shorthand nickname for this gaggle. Any suggestions?

But if Elizabeth Warren can spread the idea that it is the responsibility of government to ensure that the country's wealth is better distributed, she'll have served us well. She wants to tax, moderately, not just "earnings" but the stored horde of accumulated wealth that gives the One Percent their permanent sway among us.

Note that this is not just a throwaway line political line from Warren: she's assembled the economic experts to design a tax that would do the job. Read all about it here.

Arenas of denial

This is a testing time.

When commentators talk about “denialism” in Trump’s presidency, they tend to mean denial that climate change is real and human-caused. But Trumpian denialism can stand for something much broader: a refusal to see the facts that tie people together so powerfully and inconveniently. These things include the history of American inequality, the perennial presence in our natural life of migration and undocumented labor, the decline today of relative American power. You could distill it by saying that denialism is the ethos that refuses to see how the world is deeply plural at every scale, how it draws people inexorably into uncertainty and potential conflict, how it puts us at odds.

The denial comes not because the denialist cannot see this, but because he does see it, not because he doesn’t believe others are there, but because he feels their presence so acutely, fears they will make claims on him, fears they will get power over him and take what he has. ...

Jedediah Purdy

Fear paralyses and forecloses. Fear isolates. Fear is bleak lonliness.

We are as a culture moving on to a future with more people and more voices and more possibilities. Some people are being left behind, not because the future is intolerant of them but because they are intolerant of this future.

Rebecca Solnit

What a bleak prospect. Fear is an empty road to nowhere. We have no choice but to discover courage and to go forward together.

The great sorting on college campuses -- and an exception

Erudite Partner teaches ethics at the University of San Francisco. That's the Jesuit institution, not the state school. She often tells me how interesting the place is, how diverse the student body is, how generally progressive both faculty and students seem.

Well no wonder. The New York Times' Upshot looked a study of the economic demographics of who goes to which colleges (or to college at all) and came up with some stark findings. If your parents were part of the one percent, you have to screw up pretty badly not to have a chance to attend an elite college. If your parents were part of the 60 percent of the population which earns less (often a lot less) than $65K annually, even if you get into one of these places, the largest fraction of your classmates will be children of the one percent.

At 38 colleges in America, including five in the Ivy League – Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, Penn and Brown – more students came from the top 1 percent of the income scale than from the entire bottom 60 percent.

A few schools are different. And, lo and behold, USF is one of them.

According to the article, 7 percent of USF students come from one percent families while 27 percent derive from families under $65K. Good for USF.

Do you feel the Bern?

Here's a strong Bernie Sanders clip (5:38). It is worth watching the candidate being articulate and passionate about what he cares about. He's good!

It also points up why many of us no matter how liberal or progressive we are on vital economic issues don't instinctively trust him. I'm old enough to remember when old white guys who talked about doing right by the working class didn't really include women in their picture of that class -- and certainly they weren't thinking of queers or single women. It doesn't take a lot of imagination for me to wonder whether Bernie's mental image of the working class really includes people of color. I suspect Bernie's pretty good on my issues and even on communities of color's issues.

But for an awful lot of the people, people who are the contemporary working class, old white guys have to prove they mean it. They have to work for an awful lot of people's trust.

For what it is worth, if he's still in the game, I'll vote for Bernie in the California primary. I've even sent him a few bucks. I don't expect him to be the Democratic nominee, but he's playing a good and honorable role, demanding national policies to fight economic inequality.

A non-judgmental call to action

When Robert D. Putnam talks, policy makers listen (or at least pretend to). In his new book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, the eminent Harvard social scientist is sounding a gentle, reasoned alarm: he doesn't want to point out any upper middle class villains (who tend to read books), but he argues that economic inequality is destroying equality of opportunity and hence the life-chances of too many, perhaps most, of today's young people.

... most Americans have not been greatly worried about [inequality of income and wealth] ... we tend not to begrudge others their success or care how high the socioeconomic ladder is, assuming that everyone has an equal chance to climb it. ... The prospects for the next generation -- that is, whether young people from different backgrounds are, in fact getting onto the ladder at the same place and, given equal merit and energy, are equally likely to scale it -- pose an altogether more momentous problem in our national culture.

The book looks at Putnam's own middle-class upbringing in a white, Rust Belt, Ohio community where most all the adults treated all the town's young people as "our kids." No longer does this impulse prevail. Both class and racial segregation mean that the affluent (still white) stratum of the town has no idea of how poor kids live and no intention of finding out.

Subsequent chapters explore how today's affluent and poor kids inhabit separate and unequal worlds in the kind of families they experience, the sort of parenting they receive, the schooling to which they are exposed, and the communities which create their sense of the adult world. The book is a fluid mix of story and hard data, easy to read, unlikely to be broadly refuted -- and scary as hell. Highly recommended.
***Perhaps one third of this small volume is devoted to stories of real kids and their families based on several years of interviews. Putnam gives gracious credit to his doctoral fellow, Jennifer M. Silva, who carried out most of these and helped him sort them into narratives. These stories are central to his project:

... class segregation means that members of the upper middle class are less likely to have firsthand knowledge of the lives of poor kids and thus are unable even to recognize the growing opportunity gap. One reason, in fact, for including the life stories of the young people in this book is to help reduce that perception gap -- to help us all to see, in the words of Jacob Riis, a social reformer of the previous Gilded Age, "how the other half lives."

The inclusion of these narratives also provides Putnam's means of approaching the racial divides that are so central to how our society is structured. In addition to white children and families, there are Black and Latino vignettes. The stories show that the class divides in white society also play out in the families of color that the white people most likely never meet. Those who own and earn more live and raise families more comfortably, regardless of race.

I felt this approach, though presenting some truths that dominant white narratives tend to erase -- yes, upper income Black parents also want their kids to go to good colleges; who knew? -- also left gaps, things unsaid. I'm just a comparatively well-off white lady, but I have been fortunate enough to live and work for a lifetime in a far more economically and racially integrated context than many white U.S. residents. Yet as I read this book, I was haunted by a snippet of a quotation from one of the two Black students Putnam went to high school with back in the 1950s. "Cheryl" went on to college, became a teacher, and, though she agrees their shared town gave her opportunities, does not remember it fondly. As she puts it:

"Your then was not my then, and your now isn't even my now."

I have to wonder whether interviewers of color could have crossed a divide that is not as visible in this book as it in our lives.

The bleaching of the City continues

Yesterday the Wealth and Disparities in the Black Community Committee with Black Lives Matter converged on San Francisco City Hall to force accountability "for the consistent indifference towards issues of education, poverty, gentrification, police brutality and mass incarceration in black communities."

Phelicia Jones from SEIU Local 1021 presided over a wide range of speakers.

Etecia Brown, organizer of December's #MillionsMarch protest presented an astonishing truth:

San Francisco is experiencing the fastest outmigration of Black residents since post-Katrina New Orleans.

Pastor Yul Dorn Sr. of the Emanuel Church of God in Christ, a lifelong San Franciscan, waved his own eviction papers, served today by some tentacle of the Chase bank empire. African Americans are 3 percent of San Francisco's current population, down from a high water mark of 13 percent in 1970. San Francisco sure wanted Black workers during World War II, but ever since other groups have been clawing back the Black toe-hold in this inflated real estate market.

Vanessa Banks is calling for a summit in October 2015 to work to change today's pipeline to prison for young people into a pipeline to success. "If you are Black or Brown, you are in as much danger now as your ancestors were back then."

Roberto Hernandez outlined the struggle in the Mission neighborhood where "8000 Latinos have been displaced over the last few years by 6000 tech workers."

Every speaker emphasized that, in San Francisco, the economic gulf between the affluent few (mostly white) and the less fortunate many (frequently of color) is yawning -- and growing. And the City is doing nothing about it.

Mission homecoming

Back in San Francisco, I'm once again at ground zero for a novel and painful urban transformation. The Google buses transporting affluent tech workers in and out of the neighborhood roll on; resentment from longer term residents potentially or actually displaced runs high. Most of us will be voting YES on Measure G, a modest impediment to rampant real estate speculation.

A few observations after a four month absence, all perhaps merely the result of spending most of four months in car-centered US exurbia.

• Parallel parking is a necessary skill here. I don't think I had to do it more an a couple of times driving across the country. It comes back quickly, but the unfamiliarity helps me understand how foreign most of our fellow citizens find any city.

• My partner says the streets feel more densely crowded than when we left. That makes sense if poorer people hit with rising rents are crowding into smaller rental units.

• Venturing into one of the city's more squalid blocks to snap photos, I thought the street scene seemed a bit more painful than usual.

The second two items may simply reflect that San Francisco has enjoyed unusually comfortable weather for the last two months, so we're not huddled inside against the fog. Or maybe four months away has de-urbanized us.

There's no question that many of my neighbors feel under attack.

The landlord chasing the almighty dollar is an obvious culprit.

This street complaint is more sophisticated but also more debatable. "Tech" is a culture, nowadays a controlling, confining corporate one, but certainly a sort of "culture," just not the kind that long time Mission and many other city residents would choose for themselves. Artists and poor immigrants simply don't fit in the world the current crop of newcomers are creating. They don't have enough money. Note however that the creator of this bit of lamppost art uses the ubiquitous tools of the new "culture" to communicate.

In the 1970s and 80s, we called this kind of development -- expensive, antiseptic, homogenized -- "Manhattanization." Having spent some time recently on the Upper West Side, I think we were right then and we can see where this goes. Sure, that neighborhood still has pockets of middle-income people and business hanging on, but chain retailers have crowded out most old-time stores on Broadway. Want to shop somewhere "different"? There are still plenty of gourmet foods outlets, but Trader Joe's and Whole Foods are working to reduce their number. Even New York, that most "urban" of US cities, is losing diversity to corporate culture. Jane Jacobs spelled out the consequences two decades ago.

Get out there and vote!

The Latino Democratic Club reminds Mission residents that this is their chance to show they are still here and not going anywhere. San Francisco seethes as inequality surges.

"... reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity ..."

Another prescription for a well-functioning republic to which I was pointed by reading The Founding Fathers (American Presidents):

In every political society, parties are unavoidable. A difference of interests, real or supposed, is the most natural and fruitful source of them. The great object should be to combat the evil: 1. By establishing a political equality among all. 2. By withholding unnecessary opportunities from a few, to increase the inequality of property, by an immoderate, and especially an unmerited, accumulation of riches. 3. By the silent operation of laws, which, without violating the rights of property, reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity, and raise extreme indigence towards a state of comfort. ...

James Madison, 1792

Say it, Mr. Madison. He would have had no problem recognizing whereof Thomas Piketty writes.

"The haughtiness of domination combines with the spirit of freedom..."

Over the long weekend, I had time to read Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Case for Reparations. Don't miss it. Take the time.

I have no trouble with Coates' call for discussion of reparations owed to African American citizens. Having lived inside California's fight over affirmative action -- the white majority outlawed it by popular vote in 1996 -- I know well that African Americans don't get a fair start in life from schools, from neighborhoods or from the criminal justice system. White supremacy is in the very air we breathe -- far more foully polluted in black neighborhoods than in white ones.

These days I'm reading the early history of the Republic, something I skated over in university, too much of an intellectual snob to care much about my own story when I could immerse myself in European and world stories. One of the conundrums of U.S. history has been how the founding fathers could so ringingly assert that "all men are created equal" and concurrently write a Constitution that embedded chattel slavery defined by race in the fabric of their new nation.

The first section of The Founding Fathers (American Presidents), consisting of historians James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn writing about George Washington, pointed me to this explanation from the English conservative Edmund Burke when he tried to explain to Parliament in 1775 why it would serve no purpose to try to coerce their uppity colonists.

... in Virginia and the Carolinas they have a vast multitude of slaves. Where this is the case in any part of the world, those who are free, are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom. Freedom is to them not only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank and privilege.

Not seeing there, that freedom, as in countries where it is a common blessing, and as broad and general as the air, may be united with much abject toil, with great misery, with all the exterior of servitude, liberty looks, amongst them, like something that is more noble and liberal. I do not mean, Sir, to commend the superior morality of this sentiment, which has at least as much pride as virtue in it; but I cannot alter the nature of man. The fact is so; and these people of the southern colonies are much more strongly, and with a higher and more stubborn spirit, attached to liberty.... Such were all the ancient commonwealths; such were our Gothic ancestors; such in our days were the Poles; and such will be all masters of slaves, who are not slaves themselves.

In such a people, the haughtiness of domination combines with the spirit of freedom, fortifies it, and renders it invincible.

Burke concluded that pride in liberty created by living at the apex of a slave system would make the colonists too expensive to subdue. That a slave-owning class would feel a particular devotion to its own liberty as reinforcing its own privileged status seemed only natural to this insightful 18th century political thinker.

Overcoming this white supremacy stuff has never been simple.

The net is our home

The net regulator, the FCC, is threatening to ratify the practice by service providers of selling a few big companies fast service -- and consigning most of us to under-maintained back roads. The video above describes this very well. I hope everyone reading this has already "commented" -- yelled and screamed -- at the FCC.

Bill Moyers did a terrific show on these issues that you can watch in full here. I was particularly struck by how New York Times media columnist David Carr observes us interacting with the net.

People have a close, intimate relationship with the Web in a way they don't other technologies. It's where they see their loved ones. It's where they communicate with people. And they have the precious propriety feelings about it. And I'm not sure if the FCC really knows what they're getting into.

...people don't get excited about this until their movie starts stuttering or they can't upload big files. Then they get plenty, plenty excited. People expect it to be like electricity. You expect to turn on the cold water and to have it flow. You expect to plug something in and for it to light up. And you expect to turn on your Internet, and for it to work. ...

[When the entertainment industry tried to pass a law that would choke the internet,] people went ballistic. And, with the support of Google, with the support of Facebook, came off the sidelines and said, you know what? You're going to break the Internet. We don't want you to break the Internet. That’s ours. Keep your hands off our Internet. If you look at the hierarchy of communication that comes to you over the web, there's your email. What could be more interesting than that? Somebody's thinking about you, sending a message.

You hit the button, and up pops your grandchild. Or, if you want, you move over and you can talk to them in real-time on FaceTime. We're living in an incredibly magical age that all this technology has enabled. ...

Transcript

Carr has caught how fully embedded in our intimate lives the option of internet connectivity has become. The net is a great part of where we live. It is home. No wonder we holler when somebody tries to seize and sell off our home. Will they get away with it?

H/t to Time Goes By for the video -- one of the best of a large genre.

UPDATE: The FCC voted to go ahead with the changes that will make for a two-(or more) tiered internet. There will now be a 120 day comment period -- a 120 day fight back period.

You can put yourself in the loop on net neutrality issues here.

Net Neutrality and unexpected populism

Anyone who reads here knows that I have mixed feelings about my Congresscritter, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. On the one hand, I'd be nuts not to admire her grit, her dominance in an institution filled with delusional ego maniacs (of both parties), her determination to make those clowns listen to a strong woman. On the other hand, she frustrates me because ever since she became Speaker in 2006, I've felt as if I didn't have Congressperson -- Pelosi works for her House caucus and her political party. The urgent opinions of her constituents, way to the left of both entities, receive only grudging acknowledgement.

But about two weeks ago, I was surprised to see that her constituent email was calling on us to chime in against President Obama's own Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman's apparent intent to allow the internet to be sold to the highest corporate bidder. Here's some of the email.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently released a new draft proposed rule on protecting the open Internet. Press accounts of the draft proposal from the FCC raise serious concerns that the Internet might soon lose the core of what it is – an open space for innovation, entrepreneurship, connection and communication. The FCC proposed allowing broadband providers to negotiate with content providers for preferential treatment of what content moves the fastest on the Web— a move that would dramatically reshape the Web experience for all consumers. The rules would effectively change net neutrality, the idea that your Internet provider must treat all Web traffic equally. Clearly, the American people believe in preserving an open Internet where anyone can bring an idea to the table without seeking permission or paying a toll to each internet provider.

Success should be founded on merit and good ideas; not on who has the deepest pockets. We must not allow broadband providers to relegate competing ideas, products, and services to slow, congested speeds.

I urge Internet entrepreneurs, experts, and users to contact the FCC to make their voices heard and urge the Commissioners to establish rules of the road that protect the freedom, entrepreneurship and openness that must always define the Internet and American innovation. By embracing principles of nondiscrimination and transparency, this proceeding will ensure that the internet continues to be an engine of innovation, job creation and free speech for all Americans.

My Congresswoman was rousing the masses! How unlikely! She even gave us a link where we could send comments.Well, goodness knows, I write Pelosi often enough, so it seemed only right to send my comments to the FCC. Here's what I tossed off:

Subject:   No preferential treatment; preserve net neutrality

The internet is an essential resource of our society. It was developed with government money -- our money! There is no reason why you should give away the right to determine access to it to corporations who will stifle innovation, creativity and free speech.

The courts have indicated you can do what you should have done originally: declare the internet essential telecom infrastructure, a common carrier.

Not brilliant, but makes the point.

Now I send lots of emails, I sure didn't expect even a form letter in response. But here's what I -- and probably a few million other people -- received in reply:

Thank you very much for contacting us about the ongoing Open Internet proceeding. We’re hoping to hear from as many people as possible about this critical issue, and so I’m very glad that we can include your thoughts and opinions.

I’m a strong supporter of the Open Internet, and I will fight to keep the internet open. Thanks again for sharing your views with me.

Tom Wheeler
Chairman
Federal Communications Commission

Wheeler is a former Comcast lobbyist, not the sort of person I trust to muck with the internet. Let's hope he recognizes that when you go to work on the government side, you have to at least pretend to listen to aroused people.***For background on how powerful corporations have historically monopolized, homogenized, and defanged communications innovations, you can probably do no better than Tim Wu's The Master Switch.

Inequality and voting

A friend with whom I've worked to increase voter participation in communities of color asked for comments on this insightful article about "inequality and the electoral system." The whole is very much worth reading, but I want to pull out a couple of points. Daniel Laurison writes:

One reason people may not vote is that they feel disconnected from the political process. People are more likely to participate in politics if they believe it is something that they are legitimately entitled to do – in other words, if they think of it as something for ‘people like me’.  People can be connected to electoral politics by being asked directly to participate, or by knowing someone who is involved.

I couldn't agree with this more. This goes to the essence of what community organizers who dip a toe into the electoral arena are struggling for: they seek to help people create a sense that voting is something "we do" in our community and to build the habit of participation. A participating community is harder for politicians to brush off.

Particular campaigns are something else again. They are not about a community's empowerment. They are about winning for a particular candidate or issue in a particular immediate, time-limited context. Sometimes that goal may be assisted by using resources -- time and money -- to engage low income communities and communities of color; more often campaigns think the effort will not be worth it. And campaigns sometimes make false assumptions about what sort of community engagement is possible or desirable because of the racial, cultural baggage they bring to their project.

Laurison points out that people who work on campaigns frequently come from privileged backgrounds -- and consequently assume politics is about the interplay of people like themselves. That certainly has sometimes been my experience. On the first campaign I was hired on over 40 years ago, I found myself working with a fancy New York lawyer and the adult children of prominent East Coast academics. I come from a comfortable background myself, but these people, nice as they were, made me feel like an alien being.

Moreover, he notes that people who work on campaigns learn from more experienced operatives that there are things you just don't do if you want to prove your chops -- and one of those is to think you can find the voters you need to win among people who are not habitual members of the electorate. That route looks too hard; the outreach costs too much; and besides, very likely you don't have the right people and tactics to do it. So campaigns don't try.

These reasons campaigns don't even try to widen the electorate are sometimes rational, though always short sighted.

But contempory political polarization is undermining that conventional wisdom. From a purely utilitarian point of view, it begins to look as if a Democratic Party that wants to win beyond Presidential surge years is going to have to learn to turn out less likely voters: young people and communities of color. It is now generally agreed that Democrats got hammered in Congressional races in 2010 not because people had decided they hated President Obama, "his" health insurance reform, or completely blamed him for a terrible economy -- no, the base Democratic constituencies just aren't used to voting in midterm elections.

This year, in some places, establishment Democrats are putting money and brains into how to turn out unlikely voters because they understand their survival depends on it. This particularly applies in tight statewide Senate races whose results may decide which party controls that legislative body. And, at least by past standards, they are working at the project. For example:

Part of that effort is focused on boosting black turnout from traditional midterm levels to something closer to presidential levels in Arkansas and Louisiana, as well as one of the Democrats’ best pickup opportunities in Georgia, and potentially Michigan and North Carolina — both of which saw plenty of attention in 2008 and 2012.

Rothenblog, Roll Call

Political guru Stu Rothenberg goes on to insist, accurately, that campaigns can't expect to create huge swings in voting behavior through this sort of effort. Gains on the order of 2 percent are a lot. But putting resources in people and money into these efforts can win these close contests. (If they do, look out for a new conventional wisdom; campaigns are faddish.)

And it is worth understanding that such gains can become cumulative over time, not that any particular campaign much cares about that during any particular election cycle. In established African-American communities this has taken place to a significant extent. In 2012, commentators marveled that Black voting rates as a percentage of their community's overall numbers were even higher than those of whites. Was this just because President Obama was on the ballot? Well, perhaps, in part. But in the 2013 Virginia Governor's race, African Americans again turned out at the same level as whites for an under-inspiring white corporate Democrat (who won). Black voters in places where the habit of voting has become established are participating at levels like those of whites.

Part of what is going on here is that age is an under-appreciated variable in creating patterns of participation. Across all communities -- white and of color, rich and poor -- older people vote more habitually. Putting aside other barriers to voting, such as citizenship status, past felony convictions and Republican voter suppression efforts, eligible voters in communities of color are simply on average younger than the great mass of whites.

Throughout the country, younger age groups are more brown than older age groups. Will more of these people vote as they age? Very possibly. That is the historical pattern. This makes efforts like Battleground Texas particularly important. Veterans of the Obama campaigns are trying to bring grassroots organizing techniques to building Latino and African American participation in that difficult state. They seem to have some funding for the project. This may not look like much right away, but putting resources into it should bring higher participation down the line.

All this activity is good, at least for Democrats, but I'm describing "outside" forces bringing money and expertise into non-participating communities -- can this really be good for the communities? I like to hope it can. These sorts of efforts only work because some members of the under-participation population decide it is time for a change. Scratch any successful voter registration, voter education, or "get out the vote" campaign and there will be some devoted local leaders who are central to the effort. Political parties and other organizations can provide funding and even some workers -- but vibrant campaign organizing isn't going to happen without local buy-in. I've seen more than a few dead campaign offices; lots of phones and paper, no people. I've also enjoyed turn out campaigns that hummed with local energy.

This goes back to Laurison's first point: people vote because they think voting is for "people like me." They won't vote if they experience "the system" as completely rigged against them. If politicians want their votes -- and right now the Democratic Party needs their votes desperately at all levels -- they need to feel over time, incompletely, but genuinely, that voting is worth it.

Does our system make voting worth it? For all our stifling inequality, I still say "yes." But do people who are only now coming into the process agree? That's the question for our democracy.

San Francisco becomes a conflicted bedroom community; now what?

This:

leads to this:

Considering that where I live in the San Francisco Mission district is ground zero for this conflict, I have written very little about the sense we have these days of being engulfed by a tidal wave of folks with a lot more money than the current population. Their arrival is radically changing the neighborhood. I have written about several eviction protests, but I haven't felt ready to summarize what I think about the implications of these developments.

This week the estimable community organization Causa Justa/Just Cause published Development without Displacement. This study provides some data:

Latinos are being displaced at a significant rate from the Mission district while white residents and homeowners have increased. Between 1990 and 2011, the number of Latino households in the Mission decreased by 1,400, while the number of White households increased by 2,900. White homeownership more than doubled during this time.

Gentrification is changing the population of Oakland and San Francisco as a whole. Between 1990 and 2011, Oakland’s African American population decreased from 43 percent to 26 percent of the population, the largest drop by far of any population group. During the same period of time, San Francisco’s Black population was cut in half from about 10 percent to only 5 percent of the population.

That is, Black and brown people are being pushed out of what was once their 'hood by affluent, mostly white, mostly very young newcomers, many of them beneficiaries of the current tech boom. Tech workers are currently 6 percent of employed San Franciscans, but their impact is larger. At the essential San Francisco site, 48 Hills, Sara Shortt, director of the Housing Rights Committee explains what is happening very cogently:

... tech companies [aren’t] taking responsibility for the impacts the influx of well-paid employees is having on the city. ...

Encouraging their recruits to live in the city and commute on private shuttle buses has created an incentive for the real estate industry to take advantage of those higher incomes, Shortt said, and low-income residents just can’t compete.

“The city has let it rise to a dire situation,” Shortt said, and has been “bending over backward for tech.”

That last is a reference to the enormous "Google buses" that use the city streets and bus zones, essentially for free. As reported in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Budget and Legislative Analyst Office reports

... there are 131 regional shuttles with 8,030 boardings (to San Francisco and back) per a day. Of the shuttles making 273 trips to and from San Francisco daily, the lion's share (57) are owned by Google. Its workers represent just over half of daily boardings.

The invading buses are also enormous. Taller than a Muni bus, the BLA reports that the Google buses weigh 31 tons when fully loaded, nearly twice the weight of a big rig truck. That's also a far cry from the seven-ton intra-city shuttles used by the likes of the Academy of Art University and Kaiser Permanente. That size comes with a cost.

"The Department of Public Works staff concur that heavier vehicles contribute to faster roadway deterioration," the BLA wrote. The damage a shuttle makes on the pavement with a single trip accounts for $1.08 out of the $1 million it will ultimately cost the city to reconstruct a mile of pavement. A typical personal car will cause $0.00023 of damage to pavement over its entire lifetime. So one shuttle trip is "equivalent to 4,700 passenger vehicles driving over the same lane."

The city fathers have just got around to asking for $1 for each use of a city bus stop by these behemoths -- somehow I doubt that is going to cover the cost of repaving streets.

In addition to working politically to get the city to attend to the interests of its long time residents, I find myself focused on what we can do to encourage the people who are moving in to preserve the city they find so attractive. It's not as if the city has not accommodated influxes that changed our culture before. In the over 40 years I've been here, I've seen the city assimilate migrants from the Chinese mainland, hippies, queers, Central Americans, and the ascendancy of a progressive labor movement that was before its time in incorporating all these different groups. The intersections were not always comfortable; far from it. I remember when Mission Latinos picketed a new lesbian bar right out of business -- today they'd probably be protesting together.

The city can (perhaps) reduce real estate speculation and slow the current dislocation. But we have only begun to consider what being a bedroom community for people who spend their working lives somewhere else means to our politics. This will probably take a while to work out; a great many of the new tech workers are under thirty, hence not particularly likely voters. Few of them have children, so they are not likely to get involved with the city schools, a frequent entry point for citizen activism. Mainly using the Google buses to get to work and Uber and its competitors to get around the city, I don't imagine they'll be into transit activism, except perhaps to defend their private buses. The tech workers are more white and much better paid than many long term residents. They are probably socially liberal or libertarian -- that seems the norm for their generation. But can they imagine that a community needs considerable collective provision of services to be a good place. Have they ever even used a public library?

There's some political science literature on the political behavior of people who live in bedroom communities. Years back, when I was trying to gin up electoral activity in southern California suburbs, I remember reading that people who worked in jurisdictions where they didn't live tended to be more aware of issues in the place where they worked than in where they slept. I know when I've been trying to get out the vote in far exurban bedroom communities (such as Tracy, CA), the reality that adults spend long hours commuting in traffic as well as working greatly reduced their inclination to get involved. But I haven't found much written about the situation in which we are now living, where the city is the bedroom and the periphery is the workplace. I guess we are going to find out.

Democrats and demographics

If you read Thomas Edsall's New York Times opinion columns -- and you should if you care about intelligent presentation of data about the political opinion and trends among the United States population -- you might think that he contradicted himself in a couple of recent articles.

On March 4, he wrote about popular responses to rising economic inequality and offered a dismal prediction about inequality's implications for people who hope to use the Democratic Party to win populist changes.

... minority voters – and Democrats generally, including single women and single mothers – are far more supportive of taxing the rich than Republicans or independents. Gallup, in April, 2013, found that three-quarters of Democrats think the “government should redistribute wealth by heavy taxes on the rich,” while 72 percent of Republicans opposed such action.

However, this leftward ideological and demographic shift is taking place largely within the Democratic electorate and much less so among the public at large.

With recent history as a guide, the smart handicapper will take the safe bet on the power of money over demographics. For the moment, the political reality is that the Democratic Party does not have the stomach to seriously engage the issue of inequality, and remains far too conflicted to take on the concentration of power and income at the top. Those benefiting most from the system as it is will continue to determine the operative definition of optimal inequality.

He goes on to document that Democrats are nearly as dependent on big money as Republicans, so the preferences of the base have a hard time getting heard.

A week later, Edsall weighed in on the hardy perennial topic of how Democrats could increase their vote among members of the white working class. For decades, many white working class voters have distrusted Democrats as the party of affirmative action and care for poor people, policies they firmly believe advantage black and brown folks at their expense. But in this column, Edsall shares data about why this may be changing.

White working-class voters outside the South are becoming more open to the Democratic Party because, as the P.R.R.I. polling on abortion and same-sex marriage shows, they are coming to terms with the cultural transformations stemming from what sociologists call the “second demographic transition.”

As I wrote last September, one of the more visible dividing lines between left and right in American politics is the extent to which voters in a particular state or region have adopted the values of this second demographic transition — a lessening of sexual constraint, extensive nonmarital cohabitation, delayed childbearing, reduced fertility, family disruption, a stress on personal autonomy and individual self-expression, declining religiosity and growing acceptance of women’s rights.

For decades, the cultural conflicts that emerged from the 1960s gave the Republican Party highly effective wedge issues to build support among white working-class Americans.

These voters were first the “silent majority,” then “Reagan Democrats” and subsequently “angry white men,” but they were crucial at every point to the conservative coalition that produced presidential victories for the Republican Party in five of the six elections between 1968 and 1988.

The declining commitment of white noncollege voters outside the South to conservative values has been masked, politically and culturally, by the continued ferocity of sociocultural and racial conservatism among working class whites in the South. But insofar as the second demographic transition is taking hold among these voters in the North, the Midwest and the West, Democratic prospects may well be better than national polling data suggests.

If these voters, who are by-and-large sympathetic to economic populist policies like raising the minimum wage and taxing the rich also finally are making peace with the 60s and thus participating more comfortably in the Democratic coalition, the party's demographic advantage will simply become overwhelming.

If East Coast pundits paid a little more attention to California, they'd notice this has already happened in the Golden State.

In the early 2000s, I was commissioned to study election data for an outfit that was trying to sell itself as helping Democrats win statewide elections. After a decade of losing a series of nasty fights over initiatives (see Prop. 187, Prop. 209, and Prop. 227)designed to divide the state along age and racial lines, we'd elected a Democratic governor -- and then lost him to a smart Hollywood cartoon character. What was it going to take to forge a winning Democratic coalition in this racially and socially fractured state? I spent a week or so looking at numbers, and though I had to be encouraged by the increase in the proportion of the electorate from the various communities of color over the previous decade, I concluded that the process of forming a new Democratic majority would be a long slog. Why white people would remain a majority of the electorate until 2040 at the earliest!

I was simply wrong about my timeline. Whites will still be a majority of the electorate for a long time to come in California, but a significant and growing fraction of the white population became ready to dial back racial and cultural fear much earlier than I'd expected. The result, plus the very hard work of unions and community groups to increase turnout among new voters of color, is that today California is the new model Democratic state. The Democratic coalition doesn't need a majority of white voters; it needs a significant fraction, maybe 40 percent of these mostly married whites, and a lot of other voters. And in California, that is the shape of the electorate.

The outcome of these happy demographic changes is that the struggle about whether the democratic process can be used to moderate inequality now resides not between Republicans and Democrats, but within the Democratic party.

This isn't something that demographic change can make us complacent about. In progressive San Francisco, where all office holders are Democrats and actual leftists have long been a force, progressives have lost power to tech tycoons and developers. They were smart, but we were also somewhat asleep at the switch after a decade of hard fought victories. In consequence, the mass of more entrenched San Franciscans again need to struggle for the soul of the city.

Edsall's slightly contradictory data do point toward where this is going. We need to understand where the fights take place these days and organize our Democratic coalition accordingly. We still need more Democrats -- but even more, in California we need better Democrats. This should be a project that many in the aging white working class can get behind.

The world can no longer afford old people

That blog headline states the message of an Associated Press story proliferating around the world as we enter 2014. Make no mistake -- there are real social strains that flow from the world's longer life spans and from growing global inequality that funnels wealth to the top of the pyramid, but that is not what articles like these are about. Articles exploring the terrible burden elders place on our societies are ideological propaganda, much like the endless din of stories about the horrors of the "national debt." They serve to soften us up for shredding whatever collective responsibility we have taken for old people.

Over the next week or so, I'm going to write a series of posts about various elements of this elder bashing campaign.

Here's a prime example: a judicial decision last month allowed the bankrupt city of Detroit to cut and escape its obligations to its retired workers. People who work for government routinely accept lower wages for the security of better benefits, including pensions. Lots of cities and states neglected to pay into pension funds adequately. Now they want to escape the consequences of mismanagement by breaking their promise to older people who can't fight back.

James Surowiecki, in the New Yorker, has provided a cogent summary of the situation.

Tis the season for taking retirement benefits away from public workers. …

… politicians often just let pension contributions slide, passing the bill on to future taxpayers. … Governments also got in the habit of promising workers higher pensions in the future so that they would accept lower wages in the present. To make matters worse, whenever pension funds looked especially robust public employees lobbied for higher pensions, and politicians were all too willing to grant them. ...

Everyone pushed off the day of reckoning, with no real thought for the taxpayers who would eventually have to foot the bill. Now that that day has arrived, you can see why governments want to claw back some of the benefits that were handed out. But this would be unjust: state and city employees worked for those benefits—teaching kids, policing the streets, and so on—and they often did so for lower wages than they would have accepted with no promise of a pension. Governments should live up to their obligations, but we can’t let them make irresponsible promises again. The temptation to defer expenditure is intrinsically hard for politicians to resist. We need reforms to control costs and to insure that governments actually pay their bills.

Go read it all.

Surowiecki has some ideas for future remedies that don't consist of screwing old people. All government workers should fall under the Social Security system -- for historical reasons, some now do not. Moreover a federal law could mandate that whatever pension obligation any unit of government should take on, it must pay into the pension fund every year, come hell, depressed taxes, or high water. Corporations are subject to such a law; their obligations receive federal insurance in return.

Instead cities, states and other units of government can be expected to spend 2014 and decades beyond trying to to wriggle out of what they promised their former employees.

A tidbit to chew on: where do the politically committed go?

As Mayor Bloomberg's tenure in New York City reaches an end, Chrystia Freeland makes an observation.

Part of the appeal of plutocratic politics is their power to liberate policy making from the messiness and the deal making of grass-roots and retail politics. In the postwar era, civic engagement was built through a network of community organizations with thousands of monthly-dues-paying members and through the often unseemly patronage networks of old-fashioned party machines, sometimes serving only particular ethnic communities or groups of workers.

The age of plutocracy made it possible to liberate public policy from all of that, and to professionalize it. Instead of going to work as community organizers, or simply taking part in the civic life of their own communities, smart, publicly minded technocrats go to work for plutocrats whose values they share. The technocrats get to focus full time on the policy issues they love, without the tedium of building, rallying — and serving — a permanent mass membership. They can be pretty well paid to boot.

The Democratic political advisers who went from working on behalf of the president or his party to advising the San Francisco billionaire Thomas F. Steyer on his campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline provide a telling example. Twenty years ago, they might have gone to work for the Sierra Club or the Nature Conservancy or run for public office themselves. Today, they are helping to build a pop-up political movement for a plutocrat.

I think she is on to something. In my youth, the politically concerned threw themselves in leftish proto-"revolutionary" struggles and disdained the prosaic practice of U.S. politics. I'm not going to say we were all wrong -- the complacent racist and sexist society of the Vietnam era needed a good shaking. But aside from a few stalwarts, mostly African American community leaders like John L. Lewis, those of us who insisted on maintaining critical distance, on staying "outside" the system, ceded a lot of everyday power to people who didn't share our values.

A subsequent generation of political types, the cohort of the Reagan/Clinton era "free market" era, threw themselves into the sort of non-profit policy advocacy organizations Freeland references. There didn't seem to be anywhere else to be. And her characterization of the allure of plutocrat-funded "pop-up political movements" to contemporary young techies seems apt, if maybe too glib.

Freeland is an accomplished journalist, the author of Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, a book that deserves a lot more attention among my progressive friends than I'm aware that it has received. Interestingly, having chronicled the damage the super rich are doing to democracy, Freeland now seems to have joined the political fray herself. A Canadian, she's a a Liberal Party candidate for Parliament. (That positions her as a left liberal, even a socialist, in U.S. terms, though probably merely a solid centrist citizen in her own.)

This post was queued up before I left for Bhutan.

On how the very, very rich people view our world

For starters, many of them seem to deny this is "our" world. They assume they make it possible for the rest of us to survive in this world and consequently they ought to run it. What did we ever do except work for them if we were lucky?

But there are nuances:

A few days ago I was looking through the Board of Directors list at Freedom Works [a right wing political fund] and happened across the bio of board member Mary E. Albaugh. ...

"When our daughters were born, my husband and I envisioned an ever-expanding world of opportunity and continued prosperity. But the government grew faster than our children, shrinking their future prospects and each person's ability to flourish through his own efforts."

Now, these bios are often boilerplate. And Albaugh is just as likely to be a delightful human being as the next person I know little or nothing about. But what a mindset and worldview ... The government grew faster than her daughters and now they're faced with diminished life prospects and ability to flourish.

Joshua Marshall at TPM

Marshall figured out that Albaugh is Betsy Fisher, the owner of a DC clothing store.

This item reminded me of something I heard from a friend the other day. She is employed as an anonymous clerk in a business that helps some very, very rich people keep track of their money. Here's my paraphrase of what she passed on, in wonderment, about the mindset of the clients:

Do you know how billionaires think about taxes? The way they understand how much they are paying works like this: they look at the raw total of the sum that comes in to them annually and mentally deduct everything it costs them to live, including all their residences, entertainments, and purchases. The residue -- what they didn't spend -- is what they think of as their income. Then they calculate what percentage of that unconsumed surplus they pay in taxes and that is what they complain about.

Most of us think of taxes as yet another unavoidable living expense, like the electric bill or the rent. But for rich people, taxes are what the government appropriates out of what they showed the self-restraint not to spend.

No wonder very rich people who pay less than 15 percent of their income -- often way less -- think they are overtaxed. In their way of thinking, the expenses of their lifestyle are simply their right, not something they pay out of their income.

The very rich really are different from most of us.

Warming Wednesdays: questions for Tom Steyer

Ryan Lizza writes a terrific dissection in the New Yorker of the struggle to block the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline. The piece revolves around what I've always wondered: can this fight serve as a political pivot point to build a broad-based people's movement for action against global warming? Is it the right fight? Why and why not? If those are your questions too, read it.

Central to this struggle has been the involvement of California hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer. Lizza presents an interesting profile of this guy who can raise money for Obama by inviting guests to a fundraiser while offering them an opportunity to jack up the Prez about climate change.

Lizza elicited this in answer to why Steyer has thrown himself into the cause:

“In every generation, there’s an overwhelming issue that people may not recognize at the time, but that becomes the issue that is the measure of what you did,” he said. “In World War Two, if you look back, everybody was measured by what they said in the thirties and what they did in the forties. Charles Lindbergh was the biggest hero in the United States of America, and he went wrong on the biggest issue of the day, and that was the end of him. Look back to where people came out on civil rights in the fifties and sixties: maybe you were right about economic policy then, but, if you blew it on the big issue, then that’s the measure.” Climate change, Steyer insisted, “is the issue we’ll get measured by as a country and a generation. If we blow this, it will be because we were very focussed on the short term, on our pocketbooks, and we had no broader sense of what we were trying to do and what we were trying to pass on.”

That's a politician's answer and a good one. We need climate change politicians; people whose primary issue is human-caused global warming. Steyer wants a political office, probably to succeed Diane Feinstein or Gov. Jerry Brown. I can't see him going for any lower platform. Politically inexperienced California billionaires have a lousy record of success when they try to jump to the top of the heap, but this one seems to be building a sort of base.

So Mr. Steyer -- if you want me to vote for you when your time comes, I'll be looking to hear your answers to a couple of questions. I completely agree that our response to climate change is the issue on which our society will be judged, but our response comes enmeshed with other very broad, deeply unsettling, realities that a serious politician should address.

• How do we make carbon emission reductions and warming mitigation measures a means of building a more equitable economy and society? The state and nation need money from somewhere, presumably those who have it, who have profited from a polluting, inequitable system. That's tough, but essential. And having acquired the cash to do the work, how do we use it so that wrenching economic change is more beneficial than harmful to the entire population, not just a boon to a limited class of the masters of new technologies?

• How do we make an equitable response to climate change that is global? Anyone paying attention knows this isn't something that can be solved by one state or one nation. That's sort of the point here. But concurrently, we're living the reality that the United States isn't what it was, momentarily in the last century, undisputed top world empire. That's on balance a good thing for the world; humans need to organize ourselves less through such systems of dominance. But declining US preeminence comes with issues: we believe the country is broke; our actions are often unimaginative, held back by legacy inefficiencies, the opposite of creative or bold. Rising empires innovate; declining ones stagnate. But if we are to prevent the worst of climate change, somehow the US has to do its part, as well as get out of the way when appropriate. How to navigate this circumstance?

I'm not claiming I know the answer to these questions -- but I do think they are the right ones to be asking politicians seeking high office for whom climate change is the central agenda.

How about it, Mr. Steyer? Will we get a campaign from you that touches on these facts? Now that would be bold.