Answering the Kennedys’ Call

Noozhawk.com

I recently attended the 10^th anniversary of the Goleta Dam Dinner held at Lake Los Carneros, on a dam built long before the City of Goleta, California was formed.

Here in this relatively new and still small city, founded in 2002 and nestled beside its famous neighbor, Santa Barbara, were families of all ages and stages happily celebrating not only their sense of community spirit, but the natural beauty of its surroundings that is a unique blend of mountains and ocean located on the central California coast.

This made me realize how successful was the formation of this new, very livable, California city, where I had been privileged to live and help establish, in spite of the many obstacles to the formation of new governmental entities in recent years.

It was a successful community because of the attention paid to both the environment and safety concerns of its citizens—especially the children.

I know Goleta won’t make the list of The Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual Global Liveability Index that really only pays attention to larger cities, where we don’t see this community spirit and camaraderie.

Vienna was the top city on The Economists’ list, with Australia and Canada each having three cities in its top 10 listing of the better-known cities that made The Economists’ Liveability Index. .

1. 1. Vienna, Austria
2. 2. Melbourne, Australia
3. 3. Sydney, Australia
4. 4. Osaka, Japan
5. 5. Calgary, Canada
6. 6. Vancouver, Canada
7. 7. Toronto, Canada
8. 8. Tokyo, Japan
9. 9. Copenhagen, Denmark
10. 10. Adelaide, Australia

No U.S. city was in the top 20, with Honolulu ranking highest at No. 22. Atlanta came in 33rd place; Pittsburgh, 34th; and Seattle, 36th. New York was all the way down in the 58th spot, in part because of low scores for infrastructure, stability and possible crime issues.

That could be because it’s easier for the residents of smaller cities to confront city councils with their concerns—at least in the U.S. of A. It has to be why the City of Goleta became one of the 50 safest American cities in 2017, fifteen years after its formation, according to a survey by Safewise, a security firm.

What then does “liveability” mean? The Economist is a UK Magazine, which might serve as a bias for a more European civic viewpoint, perhaps. But the issue of safety is certainly at the forefront of making any community livable—especially for children.

And the rising tide of violence in American cities—so much so that in 1992 U.S. Surgeon General Everett Koop declared violence a public health emergency—means the situation in American cities hasn’t improved.
 
And now even more so when U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy was fired by President Trump in 2017 after he spoke against gun violence, calling it a public health issue that needs public investment, and stood in support of the victims in Orlando, Florida, where one of the worst mass shootings in American history had just occurred.

It also has much to do with so-called Smart Urban Planning. Architect Suzanne Lennard, and Psychiatrist Henry L. Lennard have written extensively on what makes communities livable in books such as The Forgotten Child (2000, Gondolier Press, Carmel, CA).


Children are safest where there are neighborhood adults with ‘eyes on the streets’ that watch over them, as in many densely-packed European cities with their public squares. Children are also safer where streets are designed and neighborhoods zoned to allow children to roam and explore, rather than be dependent on the auto to transport them to school, for instance, as is the case in many poorly-planned American suburbs.

Such concerns were incorporated into the City of Goleta—that made it such a close-knit, ‘liveable’ community, in my opinion. It was also why attending the Goleta Dam Dinner’s 10^th anniversary was such a special event.

Harlan Green © 2019

 Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

The Divided States of America

Financial FAQs

It is now becoming obvious that we are not a United States of America. There are many states that restrict voting rights, abortion rights, immigration, even the collective bargaining rights of workers that are no longer able to negotiate for their own living wages.

This is when the media is lamenting the possible breakup of the European Union with Great Britain’s Brexit vote to depart from the EU. But the US is breaking up in far more serious ways, even without the influx of millions of Muslim refugees that Europe has to deal with and is causing its drift to xenophobia and the fear of foreigners.

The US in many ways is still fighting the Civil War of 150 years ago, with the defacto apartheid of poor vs. wealthy neighborhoods, and the police killing of blacks at traffic stops. A recent study by the New York based Center For Policing Equity showed that African Americans are more than 3 times as likely to be beaten, bitten by police dogs, pepper sprayed, Tasered, or shot, according to the New York Times.

There are now 26 right-to-work states that either don’t allow workers to join unions, or pay dues, or bargain collectively for their wages, even when their workplace may be under a union contract. This has resulted in those states having the greatest income inequality and lowest wage-earners.

Graph: Wikipedia

There are a very similar number that restrict abortions—even in the case of rape for women—and restrict voting rights when the Voting Rights Act was gutted by a 5-4 Supreme Court vote in 2015.

And it is many of those same states that don’t allow convicted felons that have served their time from voting—as many as 30 percent of voter-age African Americans in southern states, thanks to the War on Drugs, according to Michael Moore’s movie, Where To Invade Next. GW Bush probably only won Florida because some 80,000 ex-felons were stricken from the voting roles—mostly in Democratic-leaning counties.

This is why African-Americans now comprise 50 percent of our 2.3 million prison population when they are 12 percent of our population. It provides the cheap labor that prison factories have used to generate products for most large corporations plus the military—another form of slave labor.

Florida leads the pack in the number of citizens excluded. According to Desmond Meade of the nonprofit Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, "Over 1 million people in Florida right now are disenfranchised. Nearly 1 in 3 of them are African American men.” If these people were able to vote, Meade continues, "Florida would no longer be a swing state."

But according to the Brennan Center for Justice, 48 states (exceptions: Maine and Vermont) prohibit current prisoners with felony convictions from voting and 29 of them also bar those on probation or parole. All told, felony disenfranchisement prevents more than from voting. And of the four states that permanently bar voting by former felons—Kentucky, Florida, Iowa, and Virginia—the latter three are battleground states.

Then there are the gun laws. Only 6 states restrict or outright ban the sale of military-style assault weapons, when more than 30,000 gun deaths are recorded every year, and Orlando-style massacres occur because of unlimited magazine sizes of those same assault weapons.

What is behind the defacto civil war still raging? Many economists says it’s the globalization and export of good jobs to developing countries with cheaper wages that have hurt those blue collar workers in the poorer states.  But too many blame immigrants, or nonwhites, or anyone not belonging to their tribe. But we also have to look at the monopoly power of corporations that have pushed such free trade treaties, suppressing their employees’ wages while paying their executives record incomes.

In fact, these states have in many ways already withdrawn from the United States of America in trumpeting state and local rights over inalienable rights. It is just a modern incarnation of our ongoing Civil War.

Harlan Green © 2016

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen