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*Impressions of elections in San Leandro* Two years and three months ago, for reasons totally unrelated to politics, we moved back to the United States from Colombia. After nearly twenty years of life in Bogotá, we landed in San Leandro, California. During that time, I kept up on the USA through Marxmail, the New York Times, the Sacramento Bee and sundry other sources, but I paid close to zero attention to the nitty-gritty details of local politics in this country. A few months after we arrived, Donald Trump was surprisingly elected. Ouch. That was a wake-up call. I had thought that the next big crisis of capitalism in the USA was going to be presided over by a Democrat and that one result would be radicalization to the left of the Democratic Party - something like what happened during the 1960’s when Kennedy and Johnson presided over US escalation of the war in Viet Nam. Now, it seems that the new radicalization is occurring during the presidency of a racist, misogynist, authoritarian Republican. One consequence is that radicalization to the left is occurring mostly in, and through, the Democratic Party. I guess you could say that the United States suffers from a form of bipolar disorder. Leaving aside any deeper discussion of the present conjuncture, here are my impressions of the 2018 midterm elections from my current vantage point on the border of East Oakland and San Leandro. I live just inside of San Leandro at the north end of town, one block from East Oakland (which is really in the southern part of Oakland). The dividing line is Durant Avenue. When I was a kid, it was the dividing line between all-white San Leandro, and all-black Oakland. Segregation was a reality here even if it was not written into law. Here, it was a strange kind of segregation because “white” in San Leandro meant “not-black” most of the time, so English speaking Chicanos, various other brown Latinos, Filipinos, and various Asians were able to live in San Leandro and own property here. Now both sides of the city line have integrated, but not in exactly the same ways. Real estate prices are substantially higher here than they are two blocks away in Oakland, so this part of San Leandro has gentrified with leakage from Silicon Valley as well as gaining more Asian and Latino residents, a substantial number of black residents, most of whom are professional people, and a slew of multiracial and multicultural couples with their kids. Now the neighborhood reminds me of the way south Berkeley and north Oakland were back in the 60’s and 70’s. Nearby East Oakland has mostly avoided gentrification, although real estate prices there have risen apace with real estate prices throughout the Bay Area. Integration there has taken the form of Latino and Asian renters moving in. There are also a smaller number of white gentrifiers buying moving in. In 1960, this neighborhood was full of white trade unionists with a smattering of small business owners and professionals. The Oakland General motors plant was located just a few blocks away at Durant and East 14th St. (now called International Blvd in Oakland). In 1963, GM opened its big new assembly plant in Fremont, so the Oakland plant was turned into a parts warehouse, but the adjacent neighborhoods remained UAW bastions: white GM workers across East 14th street in an extension of San Leandro, and black GM workers north of the plant and north of the white workers’ neighborhood. In those days, there was also the giant Caterpillar tractor factory nearby (the first Caterpillar factory anywhere, since Caterpillar was started here in San Leandro.) My first wife worked there for a time. Not too far away, there was a Mack Truck factory, a Peterbilt truck factory, a couple of GE plants, many food processing plants, and dozens of machine shops and sheet metal shops. Black east Oakland was even more a bastion of trade unionism than was San Leandro, especially the UAW, the ILWU and the UE. East Oakland and San Leandro were right in the center of the World War II industrial belt that snaked along the bay from Pittsburgh, California on the Carquinez Straits, where US steel had a plant, through Martinez and Richmond, where the oil refineries and chemical plants were located, through the enormous Kaiser shipyards which stretched from Richmond almost to Albany, through the foundries, glass factories, food processing plants, and automobile, farm machinery and truck factories of Oakland, San Leandro and Hayward. In the center of it all was, and still is, the Port of Oakland. In the 1960’s it was transformed by the war in Viet Nam into one of the world’s most important container ports. In those days, silicon valley did not exist: San Jose was a big town in a sea of fruit orchards with just one big factory called Farm Machinery Corporation (It was actually a tank factory.) Now, union membership in this neighborhood usually means teachers and other government employees. The Fremont GM factory has morphed into a giant non-union Tesla factory. Caterpillar no longer has a plant here. In its stead there is a BART station and office buildings occupied by Datasoft. The Richmond shipyards closed up long ago, the Pittsburgh steel plant a few decades later, most of the food processing plants are gone. The industrial East Bay has dwindled down to handfuls of scattered job shops, recyclers and junk yards. Aside from Tesla, the only significant remnant is the cluster of oil refineries spewing out poison in Richmond and Martinez, and the Port – grown far bigger due to US-China trade. Also bound up with the China trade is Silicon Valley. It emerged from the womb of the cold war military industrial complex of the Bay Area. Centered on Ames Research laboratory near Moffett field and the Lawrence Livermore Radiation laboratory, nurtured by UC Berkeley and Stanford, it extended its tentacles around the South Bay, and then ate San Francisco and much of the East Bay as well. Now San Leandro is a silicon valley bedroom community of about 90.000 people with a growing presence of high-tech companies moving into the old industrial neighborhoods. It is much cheaper than San Francisco and closer to Palo Alto than Oakland. It is, like all similar places, dependent on retail, construction and service workers. They are overwhelmingly black and immigrant. Immigrants here come from Asia and Latin America. Latin Americans are mostly from Mexico but include Central Americans, and a handful of Peruvians. Asians are divided between Chinese and Filipinos with handfuls from other countries. If you go into the local Safeway (now owned by Albertson’s), the people in line often speak both Spanish and English. I marvel at how they switch effortlessly from one language to another either because they want some privacy or because they can’t think of the word in one language so switch to the other. In 2016, I was not yet tuned in to the details of this town. Now, I still feel a little like a Martian here, but at least I more or less know the lay of the land. Every day I ride my bicycle for a half hour to an hour depending on how much time I have available. The result is a pretty good knowledge of the area within a radius of a few miles around my house. In 2016, my neighborhood had one Donald Trump sign but lots of Hillary Clinton signs and a substantial number of Bernie Sanders signs. In fact, even now there are still a couple of 2012 Obama signs around. Every election year, these signs sprout up in front yards. They join the *Black Lives Matter* signs and the more elaborate ones that say things like *Black Lives Matter, Women’s Rights are Human Rights, Science is Real…* and the small number of American flags and the larger number of California flags. This year there are no lawn signs for either of the US Senate candidates here, but why should there be since they are both Democrats! There are only a tiny handful of signs for the Democratic Party’s candidate for Congress here in the 13th Congressional District and none for her opponent. I didn’t even know that Barbara Lee had an opponent until I read my voter handbook. It turns out that the Green Party is running a candidate! although without any visible campaign. Still there are lots and lots of lawn signs that have sprouted up for San Leandro mayoral and city council candidates. This is in stark contrast to the East Oakland neighborhoods on the other side of Durant where you can walk for blocks without any sign that an election is happening. This is one of those nonpartisan elections in which no one identifies themselves by party affiliation, but it seems that ALL of the candidates in San Leandro are Democrats. We have four candidates for mayor, and two and a half slates of city council candidates. My neighborhood seems to be the center of the lawn sign action. Two of the mayoral candidates live here: Pauline Cutter the incumbent Bay Area style Clinton Democrat, and Jeromy Shafer the Our Revolution Berniecrat candidate. Pauline is grandmotherly and clearly winning the battle of the lawn signs, but Jeromy, who is very nerdy, is giving her a fight. Cutter’s slogan is “Moving San Leandro Forward”, exactly what this means is not clear from her literature, but can be seen by her practice as mayor. She came into politics 20 years ago as a progressive defending the rights of LGBT students at San Leandro High School. She was elected to the school board, then the city council, and then to her current office. As Mayor she helped San Leandro become a sanctuary city on paper, but one whose police actively cooperate with ICE. Cutter also has a taint about her after helping her daughter get a high paying city job, and as the result of a scandal involving the city manager who was accused of sexual harassment of a woman. Although Benny Lee and Dan Dillman do not live in my neighborhood, they are also running for Mayor of San Leandro. Lee is currently a member of the city council who was elected in an uncontested race. He is Chinese, has the backing of a list of Asian/American Democratic Party office holders and a chest of donations from Asian/American businesses. His campaign promotes the idea that the city government should provide free Wi-Fi, and also tries to appeal to Asian and Latino voters by promising to provide interpreters at city hall. Other than that, his campaign literature sounds just like Pauline Cutter. In fact, his slogan is “Move San Leandro Forward with Integrity. He supports city police cooperation with ice and supported Cutter’s purchase of a tanklike vehicle for crowd control. Dillman likes to talk about Taoism and has a website with pictures of hot air balloons floating in the air. An apt visual image, in his case. He owns an old movie theater that he converted in a venue for concerts with a major investment from the city government. Beneath empty feel-good rhetoric, he also supports the local police. Shafer is running a campaign for a rent control board and protection against eviction and foreclosure. He calls his big idea “Community Stabilization”. He highlights the donations to Cutter and Lee from apartment building owners and real estate agents and has pledged not to accept donations of more than $99 from anyone. He has lots of airy rhetoric about building the community and making San Leandro grow in a way that benefits the community. His wordy website does not say a word about the local police department’s cooperation with ICE. Shafer is the local leader of Our Revolution, a proud member of the California Democratic Party Central Committee, and an endorser of Democratic Party candidates for all of the top spots in the state. He and his group of San Leandro Berniecrats are the tepid tea of radicalization in the here and now. I am going to vote for the Green Party candidate for Congress, although after watching the end of her video, I will have to hold my nose. Laura Wells https://laurawells.org/ _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
