The above image is the same foreclosure data I showed in the previous blog posting, with the surrounding Alameda County cities removed…

This second image is exactly the same area, but it shows the percentage of African-Americans out of the total population of each Census Block in 2000. The data is provided by the Association of Bay Area Governments and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. Why did I use 2000 data instead of 2010 data? I will get to that below. First, let’s overlay these two maps:

Yeah, what I suspected and dreaded. But wait: what about the Fruitvale area in the center of Oakland, where the density of foreclosures is high, but the concentration of African-Americans is not so high?

Mmm. Higher concentration of Hispanics.

Now: why did I use 2000 Census data in these maps? Because in the Planning Department at UC Berkeley we have been tracking the exodus of African-Americans from Oakland for more than a decade. We know that African-Americans are being displaced, moving to Antioch, Stockton, and new developments in smaller Central Valley towns like Patterson. The maps above show indirect evidence of this: the UC Census only releases block-level data to protect the privacy of individuals; so we can only impute that a high rate of foreclosures in a neighborhood with 60-80% African-Americans means that the African-Americans themselves are being displaced. But a comparison of the 2000 and 2010 Census data for Oakland confirms the actual exodus:

This is a screenshot of ABAG’s data with African-American data underlined. Alone among all the populations in Oakland, the proportion of African-Americans is declining. This is a reversal of the Great Migration of the 20th century, when African-Americans fled rural violence in the South and moved to cities where they became industrial workers. Now, they are being priced out of the job-center–the inner Bay Area–and commuting far longer distances from places where they thought they could live. I have been hearing (and now I am collecting) stories about this exodus: moving out to Pittsburg/Bay Point/Antioch, and Stockton, Modesto, and smaller Valley towns and then facing even more severe foreclosure and community collapse in the Central Valley.
So: if I had used the 2010 Census-block data, the presence of African-Americans would show up more faintly on the maps above, because the massive displacement of African-American families was already underway (as the table above shows). The older data shows the communities that would be targeted by deregulated banks and mortgage-sellers from 2002 to 2007.

One more map, to show what we may want to fight for and defend: diversity.

The East Bay stands out among cities across the world for its ethnic diversity. Technically, formally, we are citizens of the United States. But in practice, we are residents of the East Bay, and in its original form, citizen is a contraction of ‘city-denizen.’ Citizenship–the sense of being a member of a public society–still has this meaning because our habits and dispositions are formed from direct experience of the places we inhabit. The East Bay–and Oakland especially–is one of the great formative sites of what the Stoics dreamed of as Kosmo-politei: being an engaged member of the whole, a world citizen in practice, not just in ideals. That diversity means age (the foreclosures in the hills may be concentrated among elderly people who were also targeted for bad mortgages), as well as ethnicity and class. This foreclosure crisis is forcing yet another re-segregation, a mass-expulsion which amounts to a refugee crisis. I do not use the term ‘refugee’ lightly: my primary work over the past decade has been in Afghanistan. The American foreclosure crisis is not as visible, until you start looking a little closer and seek out stories of foreclosure.

This brutal mass-expulsion is all legal. We have written the laws and allowed the policies that make predatory lending practices legal. If we are an ethical people, we will pressure our legislatures, courts, and corporations to change those policies.

I close with a brief meditation on racism. In the 1960s we talked very abstractly about “the System” and “the State” when in fact discriminatory policies were very specific. Now I think we need to flip that pattern. In general, the structure and rules of social relations in the U.S. are racist. That should not be news to any American; but if it is, the data above is pretty good evidence of that bias.
The way racism works, though, is through neutral market rules applied in a non-neutral society. As one example, deregulation has meant that banks are free to behave as their staff prefers. When we get to the fine detail of loan decisions, bankers assess risk based on a lot of social factors. One of those factors is whom they know. So if bankers live in the hills, and send their kids to prep schools, and take vacations in Tahoe and Europe, then poorer African-Americans who are a lower default-risk are an unknown population. That sort of unfamiliarity promotes phobia (fear/hatred) in a very human way.
Very common, prosaic practices are perpetuating racism. The way we commute in cities, patterns of recreation, whom we encounter on a daily basis on sidewalks, in public-transit vehicles, in cafes and(or) fast-food joints. If we know this, what are the ethical things we can do to prevent this legal means of forced re-segregation and displacement?

If foreclosure refugees want to come back, then as citizens we should implement this right-of-return.

Foreclosure-evictees were mortgage-holders. One way to facilitate their return is to request reparations from banks in the form of new and rehabilitated housing for the victims of foreclosure, in the neighborhoods from which they were expelled. The legal rights-nexus is clear, and many of these neighborhoods are precisely the places that need investment in the people who live there. Building and refurbishing housing for foreclosure-refugees might do what gentrification fails to do: improve the condition of the urban environment by actually helping the people who have lived in that neighborhood for decades.

I got public data from the City of Oakland (light brown parcels), public data from Alameda County (light gray parcels), and foreclosure data from the San Francisco Chronicle. This map now shows the 5,187 parcels that were sold at auction between January 2009 and the end of February 2012.

I have exported the data to a PDF file so that you can see a lot-by-lot view, with street names. Caution! Please do not left-click on this link! The file is 16.5 MB. If your web browser is set to open and view PDFs by default, it may overwhelm your web browser and even cause your computer to lock up. Please download directly (right-click and select “Save link as…”), and then open the file with a PDF reader. Detailed information only becomes visible when you zoom in to 1000% (1500% preferably). It may take more than one minute for the file to open on your computer.

In my view, this is what GIS (geographic information system software) is for. I pray that this analysis is used for some form of social justice. Consider: 4% of the properties in Oakland were foreclosed between Jan 1, 2009 and Feb 29, 2012. That means 5,187 families were forced to move out of their homes. Conservatives, who claim to support family values, are still promoting the policies that have caused this humanitarian disaster. And it is highly racialized: the further southeast you go in Oakland, the higher the percentage of African-Americans. Both the proportion and absolute number of African-Americans in Oakland have been declining significantly over the past 20 years, and it is not voluntary. They are being forcibly displaced through the legal but unethical means of deregulated rents and deregulated mortgage lending.

Here are some summary arguments against deregulation and “free”-market policies:
1. Poorer American families often did not have access to regular mortgage-lenders for either initial purchases nor for refinancing of homes. Instead, sub-prime lenders entered “the poverty business” and loaned at far higher rates, variable rates, and ‘teaser’ rates with balloon-payments that were expected to default.
Why would lenders design loans that were expected to fail? Wouldn’t that be self-destructive for the lending agency, too? No, not after 1999, when the Republican-dominated Congress repealed part of the 1935 Glass-Steagall Act that separated deposit (savings & loan) banking from investment banking. Once this regulation was repealed, loans could be bundled (‘securitized’) into investment-instruments, and the risk could be passed through to investors. This is what Goldman-Sachs did: it sold mortgage-backed securities to AIG. The brokers at AIG assumed that the name of this financial product was self-descriptive: that the security was secure because mortgages are secure.
Thus, deregulation meant that the lender no longer bore the risk, and therefore could sell higher-risk, higher-profit mortgages. Those mortgages were designed to fail, which harmed both investors and the millions of American families who have been forced out of their homes. Notice! This is legal. What was not legal was Goldman Sach’s knowledge that it was selling financial products that it knew to be unsound. Their knowledge was demonstrated by their own purchase of insurance against defaults–Goldman actually profited from the 2007 mortgage crisis–and when the Obama Administration revealed this, Goldman promptly paid the $550,000,000 fine without complaint. In other words, the fine was too low; the corrupt practice was profitable enough to justify the penalty.
(source for most of this: Michael Lewis, The Big Short)
John McCain, in a radical departure from his fellow Republicans, wants to reinstate the portion of the Glass-Steagall Act that separates savings & loans from investment banking. However, other Republicans are still calling for more deregulation.
By the way: does anyone know of a time and place where deregulation actually did help promote economic growth? I know plenty of instances where highly-regulated economies have grown rapidly, such as the U.S. from 1935-1973, Scandinavia since 1925, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore since the 1950s, and China and Viet Nam since 1978. When and where have deregulation actually helped increase overall wealth? Maybe India after 1991?

2. Conservatives now claim that banks were ‘compelled’ to lend irresponsibly to poorer families because of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1978. In fact the role of the CRA was precisely the opposite. The mandate of the CRA was quite narrow: banks had to provide credit in areas where they were taking deposits. In other words, poorer families were making money, and saving money, and depositing it in banks; but the banks would not offer loans in poorer, racial-minority neighborhoods. Unfortunately as a consequence of CRA banks chose instead to close up branches in urban neighborhoods with higher concentrations of minorities. So in fact few CRA-regulated banks were lending to poorer households in cities like Oakland during the Bush-era bubble.
(source: Elvin Wyly, 2010, “The subprime state of race.”)

To quote Wyly: “Challenging today’s inequalities requires a vigilant politics of measurement and mobilization. The new racial state operates by hiding in plain sight, obscuring racism by declaring the good intentions of lenders and the bad qualifications of consumers, by emphasizing technocratic financial details and the virtues of deregulated market discipline” (Wyly 2010:53). Amen, Elvin! This data counts as measurement. Since it was requested by members of Occupy Oakland, my hope is that it can be used towards further mobilization.

Boo, Columbus.
Many of my fellow Italian-Americans grudgingly try to defend Columbus Day, but I think it is a doomed cause.

The thing that mystified me was: the problematic aspects of Columbus were common knowledge among adult Americans from the early 20th century onwards. So why were we exposed to this two-step introduction to Columbus at all?

By about 1998 my tentative answer was this: propaganda for the cause of science. First, Columbus is set up as the Hero of Science; the one who proved that the earth was a sphere through empirical testing, rejecting the blind superstition of medieval, Catholic, doctrinaire knowledge. Then schoolteachers knock him down to promote skeptical, critical thinking about history itself–but only after we are indoctrinated as little children about the ‘rightness’ of science itself.
I think the historical model for this ‘Hero of Science’ was Galileo Galilei, who pushed Copernicus’ heliocentric model at risk of censure by the Church. But Galileo was a tainted hero.  Giorgio de Santillana (The Crime of Galileo, 1955) argues that Galileo was to abrasive and politically tone-deaf to the pressures of his friend and supposed ally, Pope Urban VII. In a semi-fictionalized account, Bertold Brecht suggested that Galileo was busted for claiming that he invented the telescope in 1610. In any case, the story of Galileo is less dramatic, less tied to the immediate conditions of Anglos living in the New Republic. He actually got in trouble for advocating Copernicus’ concept of heliocentrism, which Copernicus had published in 1553 with no controversy. Galileo used his (much-improved) telescopes to show the shadows of mountains and craters on the moon, to show that the moon is also a sphere; to show the phases of Venus; to show the moons orbiting Jupiter. It seems that the Papal astronomers were going to accept the heliocentric model eventually; they were just waiting for the old astronomers to retire and die off. It was a politics of patience. But Galileo would not wait; and so his jealous peers had him censured by the Inquisition (1616). That teaches the wrong lesson: that jealous political schemers and scholars obstruct the advancement of knowledge–even scientific, ‘objective’ knowledge–to protect their own reputations and privileged positions.

This last year (2011) my daughter Sophia acquired a strong distaste for Columbus as antihero. Her fourth-grade teacher is pretty adamant about the injustices and violence of the Europeans against Native Americans. It piqued my interest again; and with current technology, I put the old rhyme into an internet-query and found that the earliest match was a comment in the Yale Literature Magazine (vol. 6, p.139) in 1841. Wikipedia authors, citing early 21st-century research, point out that in the 17th and 18th centuries, Anglo-Americans (including Thomas Jefferson) were apparently unaware of Columbus. 18th-century Americans seem to assume that Amerigo Vespucci had discovered the New World, which would explain why Italian and Spanish geographers called it ‘America.’ But in the early 1800s, a new United States needed a hero, and Washington Irving wrote the Life and Voyages of Columbus in 1821. Irving (author of Sleepy Hollow and Rip van Winkle) began the myth that Inquisitors had challenged his spherical-world view. So somewhere between 1821 and 1841, the “In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue” rhyme became common knowledge among American schoolchildren.

However on Monday (March 12, 2012) I taught the infamous Johnson v. M’Intosh case to my students at San Francisco State. This 1823 Supreme Court decision deprecated the right of Native Americans to sell land to Anglos by deprecating their right to claim the land they controlled. The opinion in the case was given by Chief Justice John Marshall, whose 34-year tenure as Chief Justice (1801-1835) substantially defined the role of the U.S. Supreme Court and American jurisprudence. In his long and rather appalling opinion on the case, Marshall establishes the “Doctrine of Discovery,” arguing that European powers established territorial claim to land through the principle of first discovery. He acknowledges that Native Americans were here already, but dismisses their claim because 1) they were heathen, and Europeans compensated them by bringing Christianity; 2) they were uncivilized, did not build permanent settlements, and did not cultivate the land as farmers. In its older usage, peoples who did not cultivate quite literally did not have ‘culture’.
I expect that even the most reactionary 21st-century Americans would object to Marshall’s justifications for his opinion in Johnson v. M’Intosh. But the case still stands in American statutory law. If it were overturned, the basis for most (but not all) American private property would be thrown into question: first in the parts of Indiana and Illinois cited in the case; and then most of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi because of the following, equally heinous Cherokee Nation v. State of Georgia decision in 1831; and then most areas westward of the Mississippi River. Not all the land of the western U.S., but at least half of it. So Marshall’s ‘Doctrine of Discovery’ still stands as the basis for several trillion dollars worth of property from Fort Wayne, Indiana onward. Mormons actually treated (and treat) Native Americans far better, and have more legitimate claim to Salt Lake City, I think; and the American claim to California/Nevada/Arizona/New Mexico is via right-of-conquest (jus belli) against Mexico–although the legitimacy of the prior Spanish claim might also rest on this ‘Doctrine of Discovery’ if the question were pushed.

Marshall gives a very detailed account of the sequence of discovery of North America, but does not name Columbus. Marshall cites the English King (Henry VII) who issued letters patent to John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto) in 1496 “to find, discover and investigate whatsoever islands, countries, regions or provinces of heathens and infidels, in whatsoever part of the world placed, which before this time were unknown to all Christians” [Biggar (1911), the precursors to Jacques Cartier, 1497-1534]. This was the basis for the English claim to the Atlantic seaboard, which after several failed attempts began to stick with the commissioning of the Virginia Company in 1609 and the Plymouth Company in 1620. Though he doesn’t mention Columbus, Marshall does argue that the Spanish used the same principle of First Discovery as a basis for their claim to territory. Whether Spanish monarchs in 1500, 1600, or 1823 would agree with that governing doctrine is uncertain. But Marshall argues that England, France, Spain, and the Netherlands all used the same principle of first-discovery to assert their claims against each other, and that all these Christian powers disregarded the Native claims to the territory, especially as full property rights. Marshall argued that native usufruct (right-of-use) was acceptable until Europeans were able to subdue the locals, plant crops, and settle permanently.

Marshall’s opinion, in 1823, comes only two years after Washington Irving published his popular and semi-mythological account of Columbus challenging the ‘received knowledge’ of the late-medieval Catholic intelligentsia. Thus, I believe, sometime between 1823 and 1841, the “In 1492″ doggerel was inserted into American schooling and consciousness for several reasons. First, I think the Hero of Science aspect did play a role, at the end of the Age of Reason and the beginning of the technologically-focused Industrial Revolution. But behind that, and more importantly, I think the Columbus-as-hero myth supports Marshall’s Doctrine of Discovery. Thus it supports the very basis for American property-claims west of where the Wabash flows into the Ohio River.

Urban brilliance and luxury were not new in history, but secular, public access to them was. The splendor of the modern city would be experienced by everyone who strolled its boulevards and parks, or visited its department stores, museums, art galleries, and national monuments. Paris, a ‘looking-glass city’ dazzled the crowd, but at the same time deceived it. The City of Light, it erased night’s darkness–first with gas lanterns, then with electricity, then neon lights–in the space of a century. The City of Mirrors–in which the crowd itself became the spectacle–it reflected the image of people as consumers rather than producers, keeping the class relations of production virtually invisible on the looking glass’ other side. Benjamin described the spectacle of Paris as a ‘phantasmagoria’–a magic-lantern show of optical illusions, rapidly changing size and blending into one another.

Quod erat demonstratum:

The standard narrative about the modern world is that it is rational, secular, and objective. Max Weber (1918) once called the modern world “disenchanted.” This, perhaps, was the down-side of the eighteenth-century campaign to eliminate superstitions through the Enlightenment of Reason.

Walter Benjamin, however, argued something very different: that the modern world is not only enchanted, it is a phantasmagoria of material consumption. He studied a transitional moment in Paris, in the 1860s, when mass-production reached a whole new order of magnitude. The “Second Industrial Revolution” of the late 19th century was different in both scale and character from the “First Industrial Revolution” (about 1760 to 1848).

In the Second Revolution, advances in chemistry produced cheap pigments and dyes. This meant brighter paints and fabrics of every color were affordable. Electricity began to be used, first in telegraphs and then for all sorts of devices including the vacuum cleaner, but also lights for display. Printing also became much cheaper, which facilitated a very different phenomenon–mass marketing–and the mass-production of all sorts of commodities including toys. Even the mass-production of large sheets of glass transformed retailing. Shops could suddenly display their products like art exhibits. Imagine what it was like to promote your shop-goods when your front windows were little panes of leaded glass! The bakery-display, the candy-shop or pet-store window; these are all phenomena that date from after the Second Industrial Revolution. While the First Revolution lowered the cost of fundamentals like textiles, the Second Revolution began to produce marvels.

So far as I could tell, the automatons on display at SFO were not mass-produced. These were hand-wrought progenitors of the mass-produced toys of the 20th century. They also have a connection to the earlier,  hand-carved wooden animatronics of Swiss “cuckoo clocks.” But in their uncanny detail, their design for intimate-range entertainment, and–above all–their portrayal of specific stereotypes, they express something distinctly modern.

What Benjamin noticed was something more, something subtle. Parisian retailers began building “arcades” in the early 1860s, with narrow streets covered by glass, and shops on each side. By the end of the 19th century, these spaces were out of fashion, replaced by multi-floor department stores. Benjamin noticed that these neglected, out-of-fashion spaces made people uneasy. They represented a recently-out-of-fashion world. Quixotic changes in style had existed among the aristocracy in the past, but these were now whole urban spaces whose entire aesthetic had become ‘dated.’

Martin Scorsese captured something of the sense of wonder in this era of clockwork-wonders in the movie Hugo. More importantly, Scorsese portrayed the painful trauma of an early filmmaker who saw is works go quickly out of fashion. We look at these automatons and sense how much they are from a different time; the SFO curators placed a background-fabric whose color and pattern evokes the era–not our era–or is it? How divorced are we, truly, from the industrial-mechanical era of exotic wonders and racial stereotypes of the 1860s and 1870s? Just to tickle this point, take a look (below) at the funkadelic fantabulosity of an African-American female astronaut-doll made by Mattel in 1985 (These dolls are on display at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum):

What does this short aesthetic lifespan mean about the present? Present styles, the ‘latest’ fashions, quickly become ‘so yesterday’ and discarded. But in our present, the latest gadgets and styles must be purchased! What Benjamin realized was that the whole world of commodity-production and commodity-marketing was producing a sense of enchantment. Mass-marketing may have been a hard-nosed strategy to sell product, but the effect was to produce and sustain a sense that the present was an ever-becoming magical moment. It is a phantasmagoria of the senses and desires; a materialization of dreams. Once that materialization becomes shabby and worn, it is worse than a an old tool; it is more like a necrotic dream. It must be discarded, deprecated, rejected.

The Automatons on display at SFO express the nature of those dreams. Automatons embody nineteenth-century mechanical ingenuity, and reflect the same taste for display and spectacle that caused the parallel rise of circuses, zoos, museums, and the Great Exhibitions of London (1851), Paris (1889), and Chicago (1893). The automatons are mechanical marvels, but they also express cultural and racial stereotypes. There is the Italian mandolin player (above), the French artiste, the Chinese acrobat and musician, the African (/American) magician. These were the dreams of their time, and look quaint and historic and dated in precisely the way that Benjamin describes. They also express what Timothy Mitchell identified in his 1989 essay “Egypt at the Exhibition:” such modern displays also produced stereotypes of whole societies. As observers we are uncomfortable with a previous generation’s stereotypes–and that is part of our production of our own imaginary, our enchanted present.

But the automatons have another connection to our present. In the 1800s, the prevailing metaphor for the nature of the universe was an elaborate clockwork. In Newton’s fashioning of the metaphor at the end of the 1600s, God was the superlative clockmaker, and the motion of the spheres was driven by his ‘original impetus’–an early modern reinterpretation of the medieval concept of primum mobile. By the late 1800s, that clockwork-universe was secularized, but even more reinforced by an age of mechanical innovations. However the automatons express something more: they evoke medieval conceptions of animation such as the golem and the homunculus. Automatons are animate technology. That can be a source of anxiety, such as Fritz Lang’s portrayal of “Maria” in the film Metropolis (1929), and successors in the genre: HAL 9000, Stepford Wives, Terminator, Cylons. This haunting of technology began with Mary Shelley’s interpretation of Paradise Lost into Frankenstein: or, the modern Prometheus. If we can create our own homunculi, our own golems, what is our ethical position as creators?

In another part of SFO, a different animated marvel is displayed for sale:

It is a toy drone, much like the ones used by real-estate photographers in Los Angeles, and like some of the smaller drones used by U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. These new automatons reveal the fantastical nature of modernity from another angle: labor-relations and the “business end” of modern technology.

The larger drones used for targeted assassinations (Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Israel/Palestine) remind me of the airborne Hunter-Killers (below) portrayed in the first Terminator film (1984). The crucial difference is that in Western pop culture, we are tempted to remove the human presence from the machine; part of the experience of wonder of the Mechanical Turk was the suspension-of-belief that a human operator was required. In fact this narrative act of erasure conceals a form of labor-relations: the concept of “mechanical Turking” is now used to describe information piece-work done over the internet. In the picture above, the toy drone is being operated by the sales clerk holding the controller in the photo.

How does our perspective shift when we use such devices ‘to keep us safe’?

Journalist Pir Zubair Shah notes that Pakhtuns in Pakistan’s Tribal Areas express a better sense of the personhood and ethical accountability of these tools, these extensions of human capability. They use the phrase “I will drone you” as a sarcastic threat. In a popular love song the lover professes “I am looking for you like a drone, my love,”–a witty reference to the drones’ surveillance capabilities. Both expressions put the narrator in the position of the drone itself, unlike the Western narrative of anxiety about being dislocated, displaced from the position of agency. That haunting anxiety is the shadow-side of the phatasmagoric experience of modernity. The Pakhtuns who satirize drones are also very modern, very 21st century. But they experience the modern phantasmagory from the nightmare-side, from the ‘receiving end’ of modern power.

The production of our enchanted modernity has always had a back-stage, a servant’s area. That production continues to require a lot of labor, like the women in China who produced the smartphone I used to photograph the automatons at SFO. The 19th-century recruitment of St. Nicholas into a promoter of toy sales and ‘holiday spirit’ even included a mythology of happy laborers: Santa’s elves. Maybe Roald Dahl portrayed them better as the ‘native’ Oompa-Loompas who replaced English workers in Willie Wonka’s chocolate factory.

Whereas Marx and Engels tended to reduce these lopsided labor-relations to a very straightforward story of exploitation and injustice, Benjamin saw something more when he suggested that the exploiters bedazzle themselves. Our world is being governed by children at the display window, blissfully unaware of the labor relations and transactions involved in producing that display. Neither the ignorance nor the bliss are innocent; but the ethics of that self-deception and self-distraction are not so simple either.

It occurred to me several years ago that most of these appalling interruptions are entirely preventable.

Smart phones have calendars. Therefore, we can “schedule” the ringing, vibrating, and silence of smartphones. Thus far neither Apple, Google, nor RIM have promoted this capability, and it is possible that none of these companies have actually written their their software to enable this function. But I know it is possible, because in Linux you can schedule “cron jobs” since there is always a clock running as part of the operating system. So! Mobile-phone companies! Make “scheduled ring” a default component of your phone software! Make it part of the initial setup process on every smartphone!

Consider: you know when you will be in regularly-scheduled meetings. You know that under most circumstances, you do not want your phone to ring in the middle of the night. So you should be able to go into a weekly calendar, and set your phone to silent or vibrate during those times. Yet another benefit: you won’t have to remember to turn the ringer back on after the event.

Furthermore, whenever you schedule a meeting–even if you are doing it on a laptop with iCal or Google Calendar, the default dialog-box should have a drop-down option or radio button to specify whether you want mobile devices to be silenced during that event. If you sync your calendars, then any even you put into any electronic calendar can silence your phone when you want it silent.

All of us who read too much science fiction from the 1950s onward keep worrying that technology is going to ‘take over.’ Meanwhile, we should spend a little more mental energy figuring out how to make it work well for us!

Jane Jacobs praised sidewalks in Death and life of great American cities, praising the public social quality of the ‘sidewalk ballet.’ I encountered the need for an integrated sidewalk network when I oversaw the rebuilding of two city blocks in San Francisco in 2000-2001, when the city was working out its accessibility policies for public areas outside of buildings. I have seen the broad general benefits of curb-ramps, especially for parents with strollers, people with roller-luggage, and people using wheeled baskets for shopping and hauling laundry.

This third group–those who haul small bits of freight up and down curb-ramps–may be the most important for urban living and overall sustainability. My colleague Ria Hutabarat-Lo has been researching ‘informal’ circulation networks in Jakarta, Indonesia, and she points out that the vast majority of urban movement in that city–and in most cities–is pedestrian paths. But it is not just people walking to and from destinations, which is the classic way that transportation planners conceive of transit needs. For many people the sidewalk is the destination, as vendors push their carts along and sell to passers-by. It is the place to find a lot of casual goods and services, such as shoe repair and used books. This ‘casual’ economic activity is often maligned, but if you think about the ‘proper’ people doing the maligning, it is a pretty raw class-based process of wealthier people disparaging poorer people. Hopefully, that sort of elitism is becoming ethically indefensible, and it is certainly something that planners should oppose, both for the sake of broader social justice and for the sake of economic development.

We need to thank the disability-rights community for an extraordinary and unforeseen contribution to city life in the twenty-first century and beyond. The ‘accessible path-of-travel’ standards in the ADA design guidelines are the first set of standards for sidewalks that I know of. Roads have been carefully engineered since the 1920s, but sidewalks have been neglected or even eliminated in many cities. Ironically, the paving of vehicular streets was most strongly advocated by bicyclists in the late 19th century, and in due time, bicyclists may become the dominant vehicles on roads. Yet, sidewalks are the carriers of the most sustainable traffic in the world: pedestrians and wheelchairists. And they do a lot of business and haul a lot of freight on sidewalks.

So! If you are in a city where sidewalks are being neglected or disrupted, here is an argument in your favor. Over time, I will gather documentation and peer-reviewed publications that support this argument and link them to this blog-page. But right away, here is an important argument that planners in many cities should consider: when I go to a city, what gives me a sense that it is modern, developed and attractive? I look for a place where the city is supporting the urban life of its inhabitants. One of the most obvious ways an urban government can show its capacity, its modernity, is to shape its streets so that they work for people. Big, shiny buildings and cars are thin indicators of wealth, because even Dubai can suffer sudden market collapse. But sidewalks that allow and support full public life show a deep wealth that will survive sudden shocks to the economy. So if you are a planner in Jakarta, or Rabat, or Peoria, what I look for in your city is the system of sidewalks you maintain. That is what signals ‘development’ to me.

Note the dry ground behind Lizzie–but the weather was beautiful! We went to Emerald Bay, and hiked down to the water…

…where the kids found the coolest picnic table EVER. It is literally in the water.

And we found Vikingsholm, a summer pad build with pre-Depression money in 1929.

Pretty awesome detailing! Glad it is accessible to the public as part of the state park system!

Gabriel thought it was ‘okay.’

The ‘period’ architecture of Vikingsholm made me realize something else: some of the best Deco architecture in California is the public-park stonework, especially stairways. Whereas there are fabulous private-money skyscrapers in Manhattan from the 1920s and 1930s, virtually all the good Deco architecture in the rest of the country is public: post offices, city halls and halls of justice, and infrastructure. The best in the Bay Area is the Golden Gate Bridge. What I had not thought about before is the park infrastructure that was also such an excellent expression of the aesthetic of that time.

Speaking of public service: as we hiked back up to the Highway 89 overlook of Emerald Bay, we came upon this stunning wedding party! I call this the Joint Services Wedding Party. The men, from left to right, are: Army (10th Mountain Division); Firefighter; Navy Officer (the groom); Air Force; Marines. “What are the women, though?” Lizzie asked herself, and then realized the answer: “Ninjas. They are all beautiful-but-deadly ninjas.”

Following the advice of our hotel concierge we just continued on up the canyon above Emerald Bay, to Eagle Lake–which is frozen, and situated in a stunningly beautiful basin just inside of Desolation Wilderness.

We all had a fine time running around, as other skated and dogs scrambled.

The coolest thing I found–beside the whole lake itself–as a series of pressure-cracks in the ice. There were many simple cracks, but some had formed after the ice sheet had become pretty solid. With these, the little cracks always oriented the same way even if the overall crack changed direction. So up close, a crack running diagonal to the direction of pressure would be a series of conchoidal-form (spiral) cracks.

Here is a closeup of the same image as above. The images may seem blurred, but that is because the bubbles frozen into the ice have left upward ‘tracks’ as they have migrated towards the surface. Uncannily beautiful!

And, just to complete the true Californianess of this hike, a large group of young men arrived on the ice just as we were leaving. Our local public radio station had just run an ‘Only in California’ photo contest, and I thought of that as I asked this fellow to hold still for a photo. I guessed rightly that his family is Punjabi, but he is with about forty guys, mostly from UC Davis, who come up each year for fun-in-the-snow! He mentioned that they hail from all over: Palestine, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan…so I hollered out to the group in Farsi to find the Afghan in the crowd. We had some good laughs about who is in-or-out-of-place, and where!

On the two-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, I am re-posting some older essays I have written that pertain to this movement. I strongly endorse the OWS policy of not taking any specific position. I think it makes sense to simply point out what I call confiscatory inequality. That is to say, that Marxists (and Levellers before them) were extreme in wanting to force equal distribution, but neoliberal free-marketeers are equally extreme in advocating deregulation and the consequent hyper-concentration of wealth into so few hands that it damages the economy as a whole, and the welfare of the vast majority of society.

Free-marketeers like to ignore what Adam Smith argued: that you need an effective regulatory government and an effective judiciary to maintain a market economy. If there were no government, there would be no currency, and thus no market. This is standard economic theory from Locke through Smith (1776), Ricardo (1811), and even Marshall (1890); this is the standard theory argued today by Amartya Sen (1999), Paul Krugman, and Robert Reich (2010). They want economic growth. They want top-earners to become rich; it is an effective incentive. What they do not want is to unbalance wealth-distribution to the point that it damages economic growth, as has happened since 2007. Is this “redistribution”? No; what is a fair wage? If an individual is ‘freely negotiating the contract to sell their labor services’ to Wal-Mart during a job interview, are they really free to negotiate higher or lower? Is Wal-Mart a ‘wage-taker’ in most markets? No, it is a geographic monopoly in many regions and therefore a wage-setter. So if Wal-Mart (and every other large corporation) can compel workers to receive less compensation for their labor, then those workers are being underpaid.

We don’t need redistribution. What 99% of us need is fair payment for our labor.

That does not mean equalization. That does not mean income for not working (only the rich get that through capital gains on investments). But it does mean being able to earn a livelihood for a family. It does mean that the prevailing wages and costs of living, in any region, need to be justly balanced. If people work hard, especially for others in jobs that customers value, they should be making a living wage. Any system that does not result in such a condition is morally bankrupt and unjust, regardless of whether it is legal. Since elites have been the primary authors of laws and regulations since at least Hammurabi and Asoka, we may reasonably assume that laws tend to be written to benefit them. Any correlation between legality on the one hand, and justice and morality on the other, is indirect at best.

The general consensus among Occupy Wall Street protesters is, increasingly, a general opposition to capitalism. Here I show my age and disagree: there are many forms of capitalism, from Scandinavia to Southeast Asia to brutal forms of mafija-capitalism in former-communist countries. When extremist free-marketeers declare that there is only one form of capitalism, and that it has to be deregulated, they are equally unrealistic. Whatever the label, I reiterate the litmus-test: inequality should be permitted so that workaholics can earn more and generate more wealth; but regular households must be able to earn a living.

And a few more policy recommendations:

1. The right of private contract should be protected, but just as a corporation is a collective-bargainer, workers should have the same right of collective bargaining.
2. The purpose of the corporation as an entity is to mitigate individual risk to make possible enterprises that benefit the society. If an enterprise does not benefit the society, its corporate charter should be annulled.
3. Corporations are not people. They should have no protections as ‘citizens.’ Their members can act as citizens; if both the members and the entity as a whole are granted citizenship-rights, that is double-representation.
4. Since unregulated markets tend towards monopoly, there is no such thing as a free market. It is too simplistic a term. If we want market competition, then markets must be regulated to prevent monopolism and anti-competitive cartels. If an activity needs to operate as a monopoly (the postal system, for example), then it should be a publicly regulated enterprise, even if it is partially or entirely privately owned.

None of this is rocket science. All of these ideas have been argued by economists before; indeed some of these arguments are more than two hundred years old. This might be considered a ‘mainline’ or ‘orthodox’ argument for a market-based political economy. What is radical, and dangerous, is the argument to remove regulation and destroy the wealth of this society. Deregulation of mortgage-lending and banking after 1999 led to the mortgage-crisis of 2007, and thus the financial panic of September 2008. Deregulation of Savings & Loans in the early 1980s led to the S&L crisis. Deregulation of investing in the 1920s led to the Depression. What amazes me is that any public figure can keep a straight face and propose that more deregulation could actually be helpful.