I answer a question with a question. The Cambridge Chronicle asks, “Who Wants to Run for City Council?” I didn’t have my media consultant and make-up artist with me. I’ve worked on four other candidates campaigns. Three of them won. Only one of them do I regret. It was no one of the ones the won. I probably need to talk to the one that lost, but it will not be an easy conversation.

If I had been on top of my game, I would have hung out and caught the interview with Minka van Beuzekom. Most everybody is some sort of environmentalist nowadays. But the effectiveness of different approaches depends on political economy more than climate science. And even the wonderful folks at The International Forum on Globalization have given only passing notice of the fact that when America finally decides to go green, labor will do most of the work.

When I first met Steven Chu at his talk at MIT, he mentioned that, in dealing with the abrupt climate change crisis, there is a lot of room for conservation using existing technology. He then proceeded to ignore that wisdom, and talk about avenues for research. I chided him about this. He was then the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He was basically taking care of business.

This is important because conservation is something that can be done in the near term. The danger of a research dependent program is that might has the implication that the rest of us should wait for the experts. The experts may have answers for the long term, but we need to make it possible for there to be a long term. When Steven Chu appeared at Harvard he said a lot about research but he did mention that building energy use can be reduced 80%. That’s the way somebody who’s just gotten an honorary doctorate suggests there is more Harvard could do than research.

The HEET idea is one of a large number of things that are worth doing. It is definitely acting locally on a global issue and it is good economics. [Hopefully it will become more apparent that these are the same thing.] But it has a definite focus on a selected portion of Cambridge buildings .i.e. individual homes. We need to do all of Cambridge’s buildings, city, commercial, university. Lesley College will be very responsive, if they haven’t already. Harvard Administration will quote Ban Ki Moon, “global warming is the defining issue of our age.” But they will point to their tepid commission report,

Harvard University has committed to a GHG reduction goal of a 30 percent reduction from Fiscal Year 2006 levels by 2016, including growth.

Is this about the ‘defining issue of the age’ or a fad that might blow over in a decade?

From former Harvard Crimson President Bill McGibbon.

A primer for those not up on Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, and Transexual matters. Here in Boston, a weeklong celebration of Pride culminated on June 13. In Providence, a weeklong celebration of Pride culminated on June 20. In New York, a weeklong celebration of Pride culminates today. Why? It all goes back to a gay bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village - the Stonewall Inn - in the wee hours of the morning on June 28, 1969.

DemocracyNow! spent a large part of the hour on Friday on it.  |  Wikipedia has a very long article about it.

Update: June 28, 2009 Fort Worth, TX; Rainbow Lounge

“It felt so very Stonewall, but without the standing up for ourselves.”     -Robert H.

It’s been on the wires. Police claim that it was a routine Texas Alcohol Beverage Commission inspection but here are eyewitness accounts from LBGT  publication the Dallas Voice. Chad Gibson,  hospitalized for bleeding in his brain, has stabilized but will remain in the hospital. Further updates will appear in the Weblog of the Dallas Voice, Instant Tea.

It was the very beginning of my PhD from the edge of hell. We had just moved in to an apartment in Brooklyn. We had heard a commotion outside. “He’s got a gun!” Gilbert said. Not long after someone broke in through the airshaft window. It was little Michael, about 10 or 12, next door. When it got cold, we had no heat. It was less than the best of times.

A voice - a youthful voice - another Michael - more like 8 - it lifted me. Thanks Michael.

I cannot find a picture in the public domain of the Michael I remember. He was perfect the way he was. Or, if you must, he was perfect the way God made him.

Fanpop has a copyrighted image.

Update from DemocracyNow!

Amy¹ had commentary that brought insight to the discussion of Michael’s later life that I had not heard in the pop-fanzine coverage. A quote from James Baldwin that I would not dare to paraphrase. Margo Jefferson, Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic and Mark Anthony Neal, Professor of Black Popular Culture at Duke University pointed to hints about gender, race, and art that may never be understood.² It is a challenge. I rise.

Mourning at the Apollo.

In my ten years in Harlem, hundreds of walks on 125th st., I never went to a show there. Scores of artists who later became famous played there early in their careers. Most of them were African-American. But there was also white Texas rocker Buddy Holly, “I’m surprised to see y’all too!”³

Amy interviewed folks gathered at the Apollo to remember Michael.

Fans mourning the death of Michael Jackson at the Apollo Theater this weekend, and tens of thousands of them were signing and giving—sending best wishes and condolences, long sheets of paper along 125th Street.

¹Democracy Now! anchor and executive producer Amy Goodman graduated from Harvard in 1985. She was an anthropology concentrator.
²Amy is sooo smart.

³According to the movie, The Buddy Holly Story at least. This is not listed among the inaccuracies of the movie.

He Who Has the Gold, Makes the Rules.

-The Wizard of Id.

It doesn’t have to be so.

-the guy by the door

The Crimson reported on the e-mails we all got. The Crimson reported some workers’ responses. The No Layoffs campaign was more demonstrative. More coverage at Open Media Boston.

Dave Goodman of IBIS Radio(staff) and OpenMediaBoston reports on a rally by a coalition of housing and social justice groups held on Thursday June 12, 2009 - pictures, audio, and resource links. This follows on previous rallies at the Statehouse and Boston City Council as well as joint activity by local organizers and the Human Rights Program of Harvard Law School.

*Massachusetts Alliance Against Preditory Lending.

The No Layoffs Campaign, which argues that laying off low wage workers is not the way to deal with Harvard’s ‘financial woes’, made itself visible at the morning excercises of the Harvard Commencement. A phalanx of new graduates, held up yellow signs with one red letter each spelling out ‘No Layoffs’ . Most likely they are members of the Student Labor Action Movement which has been a cosponsoring group throughout the year. They appeared very briefly on the official internet feed.*

Update:  Graduates shown above were in fact members of SLAM from the Law School.  The No Lay Offs Campaign Blog has more complete report including pictures of the rest of the days activity.

*My experience has been that commerical internet video players block screen capture software. A word picture will have to do for the time being. I suspect that this will survive into the archival footage.

Shared vs. Commodity Knowledge

Public libraries have a special place in a world which is, with a few notable exceptions, increasingly commoditizing knowledge. They are the way society arranges for copyrighted works to be shared by people who cannot otherwise afford them. It is an approximation to the idea that knowledge is free. But of course it isn’t. It must be paid for and managed.

The Watertown Free Public Library

Watertown has done a remarkable job. They have a spacious new building with ample stacks, computers, and pleasant staff. Clyde Younger and Anna Kuwabara are two members of the Board of Trustees running for re-election. If you go to the library you can see their record. I rest my case.

On Tuesday May 5, the Boston City Council Committee on Government Operations held a hearing on the protection of victims of the foreclosure crisis. Jason Pramos of Open Media Botson reports that over 60 activits attended [ photo]. There is also a number of bills before the Great and General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts¹in this vein. The Green-Rainbow Party and City Life/Vida Urbana have invited me to a rally and hearing at the State House. The action alert from the Mass Alliance Against Predatory Lending website. It was todayTuesday May19.

It was a clear sunny day. Perfect for pictures. But since I broke the LCD at the “Break Up the Banks!” Rally, I couldn’t see that my camera was set wrong. The folks for City Life/Vida Urbana[CL/VU] showed up.

Steve Meacham of City Life/Vida Urbana [standing] with Professor Jacqueline Bhabba of Harvard Law School. See my earlier post.

Steve was in good form as he was two weeks ago. Professor Jacqueline was probably back at Harvard grading final exams.² A number of members of the CL/VU Bank Tenants Association told their stories. They were seeking passsage of H.B. 1232 which would require the Banks to keep them as tenants until they actually sell the building.

Grace Ross who ran for Governor on the Green-Rainbow ticket, is leading the lobbying effort for Maapl. She made quite a good picture introducing the hit sensation anti-foreclosure group, ‘The Raging Grannies’.

Representative Gloria Fox came out to greet us. If we could just clone her about 200 times we would have a great legislature.

A number of public officials testified in favor of several iniatives citing the effects of the foreclosure crisis on their communities. Details of this legislation is available on the MAAPL Legislation page. MAAPL asks concerned citizens to contact their State legislators on these issues. It is not too late. The WhereDoIVoteMa website will give you links to your legislators’ home pages.

All of these measures affect a small segment of the people effected by the foreclosure crisis. The Obama plan is also limited. I urged the legislators to pass these bills because we, the homeless, do not really need anymore company in a system that is already taxed beyond the limit. They must pass these bills quickly because there is much more needs doin’ There are so many more in the foreclosure pipeline.

¹This is the offcial name of the state legislature. ‘Court’ is in the name but it is not judiciary.

²Lee Goldstine was there and testified, but he was not representing Harvard i.e. I don’t think Bob Iuliano asked him to go :).

The Longfellow Park Latter Day Saints Chapel was destroyed by fire. Pictures of the early phase of the fire were posted almost in real time at a collaborative blog Faith-Promoting Rumor: exploring Mormon thought, culture, and texts .

Videos taken by J. Souza posted on YouTube by knowsaydo and a video by …posted by cambchron give a fairly complete narrative. My only contribution is to try to put them in sequence.

Smoke is pouring out of the steeple, but no flames are visible yet. A firefighter arrives pulling a line. A gentleman from the Quaker Meeting House offers refuge. [J. Souza]

Firefighters on the portion of the roof that would later collapse. [J. Souza]

Fire companies have lines going in the front door. A firefighter comes out to look through the front window. The roof collapses. He motions to firefighters inside. Out now! He goes in to get them. Firefighters with pikes and oxygen tanks emerge. [J. Souza]

The firefighters emerge pulling the lines from the building and set up to fight the fire through the windows. [J. Souza]

This has to be later when companies from neighboring municipalities have arrived. [J. Souza]

On scene interview with Cambridge Fire Department Chief Gerald Reardon. The fire is under control at this point. Interview with Grant Bennett LDS spokesman, “We’ll definitely rebuild.” Interview with parishoner Carolina Galvis. Footage of parishioners in a human chain moving recovered articles to the Quaker Meeting House.

KnowSayDo also has links to aerial photos of the day after by Chris Hirsch and Mathew Wall and interior shots by Hutchison on the Chapel Roof Collapses page. They are extensive. This one from Chris Hirsch is a good synopsis.

Rebuilding started today May 20, 2009:

Biologist Robert G. Wallace appeared on Democracy Now! with an analysis of the origin of the “swine flu” based on a

…cutting-edge formalism based on the asymptotic limit theorems of information theory to describe how punctuated shifts in mesoscale ecosystems can entrain patterns of gene expression and organismal evolution.

that he presents in his forthcoming Springer¹ published book, “Farming Human Pathogens Ecological Resilience and Evolutionary Process”.

Robert G., one of three Wallaces who authored the book. thinks that “swine flu” is a misleading monacher.

…pigs have very little to do with how influenza emerges. They didn’t organize themselves into cities of thousands of immuno-compromised pigs. They didn’t artificially select out the genetic variation that could have helped reduce the transmission rates at which the most virulent influenza strains spread. They weren’t organized into livestock ghettos alongside thousands of industrial poultry. They don’t ship themselves thousands of miles by truck, train or air. Pigs do not naturally fly.

The onus must be placed on the decisions we humans made to organize them this way. And when we say ‘we’, let’s be clear, we’re talking how agribusinesses have organized pigs and poultry.

This quote is from his blog, Farming Pathogens: Disease in a world of our own making. He argues that factory farming, in this case of pigs and poultry, was spread first to East Asia and later to Mexico, by the structural adjustment requirements of loans made by the International Monetary Fund. Wallace calls this the “Nafta Flu” because NAFTA is the local instance structural adjustment that brought us this particular flu which broke out in Mexico. NAFTA was mostly the work of the George H.W. Bush whitehouse, but the Clinton whitehouse signed it.

¹For those on the humanities side of the Two Cultures problem, Springer, formerly Springer-Verlag, has long been one of the leading publishers of establishment science. The Late Larry, who tries to borrow legitimacy for economics from real sciences, will have a hard time dismissing something published by Springer.

The Future of Housing Under the Current Regime:

[Photo: Courtesy of Direction Home]

What to Do About It?

Some muckahs from the Law School and;

some real people¹ from City Life/Vida Urbana

presented:

I had hoped they would say what I have been saying all along. We need a moratorium on foreclosures and we need to write down the value of these predatory mortgages.  Steve, who you can see above being arrested for Harvard labor, has lead a number of eviction blockades. He provided a very concise [ 10-minute] summary of market failures in real estate.  Melonie was one of the foreclosed upon homeowners. The lawyers represented people in both foreclosure procedings and in post-foreclosure eviction proceedings.  Law student Nicholas Hartigan, said that his hope was to get enough  homeowners resisting foreclosure and eviction to force the banks to change their way of doing business.  This is better than letting the tide of foreclosures go unopposed, but a change in bank policy is more easily undone than legislation. But in the current environment, legislation is also harder to get.

¹Anything but a One Dimensional Man, when Steve Meacham was a tenant organizer in Cambridge, between arrests, he did radical stuff like driving the truck for the food pantry. Walking the walk - it’s a good thing

The Student Labor Action Movement drops a banner at the ‘town meeting’
called by Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Michael D. Smith.

It says, “Greed is the New Crimson, No Layoffs”

One questioner asked the Dean, “How did we get where we are now? Did we believe the paper gains in the endowment were real?” It’s a very real question oh so carefully couched in academic terms. My homes I be sayin’ it, “Did the Late Larry Summers and Robert Rubin convince the rest of the Fellows they were real.?” Smith’s particular way of ducking was to say, “Not in my job description.” A dean will only answer a question about the conduct of the Fellows if s/he¹ becomes more afraid of the shellacing from ‘below’ than the shellacing from ‘above’. All the orchestration and control at the event was an attempt to prevent shellac. ² We’ll see.

Tomorrow. Expecting news from Iris Mack. The Larry Summers interest-rate swaps on the new buildings. Y’all come back, hear?

¹Could somebody please show me how to do the non-sexist thing without bludgeoning the lingo?

²So now you know what you’ve gotta do This allow gives you some ‘guidance’ about seeking administrative positions. I refer to the Russ Meyer film Super Vixens which I actually saw after I became an enlightened feminist. I was pretty upset about some of the more graphic scenes of gratuitous violence toward women but there was one line, the one applicable here, that I found funny. I will assume that the Berkosphere censorship code is no stricter than network television and use the BattleStar Galactica word ‘frackin’:

“Always be sure the frackin you get is worth the frackin you take.”

Formerly mighty financial services institutions get bailouts because, we are told, they are too big to fail. Does formerly mighty Harvard, down to single digit $Billions, need a bailout too? They haven’t asked for one. Their solution? Layoff workers. In response, Cambridge City Councilors Decker and Reeves have offered an “Economic Stimulus Package for Harvard and MIT.” As a “non-profit” institution Harvard is exempt from, among other things, property taxes in the City of Cambridge [and with the Allston Campus, Boston as well.] But Harvard is required to meet with the City Manager and negotiate a Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT). The Council Order would forego about $398, 372 of the Harvard PILOT to cover the salary of 19 cleaners and about $ 70,688 of the MIT PILOT to cover the salary of 2 cleaners. For those watching at home, that’s $20,967/Harvard cleaner and $35,344/MIT cleaner. I gotta ask if Harvard has had some Living Wage slippage here. The Katz Commission that resulted from the Mass Hall Sit-In of 2001, insisted that their had to be ‘market discipline’. They were afraid that Harvard might pay the janitors too well and bring on a colossal market failure. These figures show you that Harvard is not a “price taker” in the labor market. [Doesn't anyone at Harvard know any economics?] Harvard is a market maker and it has always and still does set it’s wages for low wage workers lower than ‘comparable’ institutions. What we got here is a local market failure engineered by the same guys that brought you THE BIG ONE.

The Medium Sized Picture

The Order was in legislative limbo going into this meeting. I asked them to leave it there for bit. Here’s why. While there has been some activism on this:

This week will probably have better weather.

Second of all, there are lots of other things to look at about the University’s finances before we ask the Cambridge homeowners to forego such little as the PILOT provides.¹ Among them:

Get back the $3+ Million we paid the Late Larry for mismanaging the University.

Get back the $2+ Million we paid the Late Larry since he mismanaged the University.

Get back the $26.5 Million fine the Late Larry paid for, out of the University coffer, for his regrettably still alive crony Andrei Shleifer. Together with legal fees the total is probably more like $30 Million. In case you missed it, the early history of the tawdry affair is chronicled in:

Janine R. Wedel, The Harvard Boys Do Russia, The Nation June 1, 1998

Subsequent revelations are revealed in an article written by Harvard Alumnus David McClintock which appeared in Institutional Investor 1/13/06. Titled, How Harvard Lost Russia, it was passed around the faculty shortly before Summers’ resignation. If you have trouble finding it, bring your Driver’s License to Harvard’s Lamont Library and ask to sign in for Government Documents. Reference staff will help you find it as a network resource. Harvard has a site license. As of this writing there is an open source mirror online.

Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Michael Smith is due to hold a town meeting with his folks ² today. Hope sombody asks him about this stuff.

The Big Picture

We need to look at the political economy of Harvard in the era of the Summers-Rubin led irrational exuberance or, if you prefer, derivative security feeding frenzy. I need to get ready for the Dean’s town meeting now[See above]. If you aren’t going why not check out Noam’s interview with Amy on Democracy Now! If you are going to the town meeting and haven’t seen the McClintock article, you could take a look.

¹Harvard PILOT 2008 $2,173,492. I don’t know what the total assessed value of all Harvard property is, but I’m pretty sure that if we looked at what Harvard would pay if treated like a normal private business, the PILOT amounts to a small fraction of a penny on the dollar. If you have good numbers on this, by all means e-mail me at: the (dot) guy (dot) by (dot) the (dot) door (at) gmail (dot) com^A,B

²This expository vagueness is the result of desperation. I couldn’t call us ‘constituents’ cause we didn’t vote for him. Nor did we vote for anybody up to and including The Fellows. I can’t call us ’subjects’ without knowing the man. Is there anything majestic about him?

^AYou can comment if you are in the Berkosphere. I apologize for not having my comments open, but with the proliferation of comment-spambots. I can’t keep up with the moderation effort necessary.

^BIf anybody tried to e-mail me with yesterday’s e-address please try again with today’s. Spam was in part to blame.

It rained in Boston, but some stalwarts showed.

I’ll try to find some reportage from around the country.

As Noam says real change “… is never a gift from above. It comes about because of people like you.” The ‘Obama’ bank bailout plan is in yet another revision. It’s architects realize that it is far too little and far too late. Early editions were welfare for Bank Executives - so blatantly so that even the corporate dominated media noticed. Newer editions promise improvement. But of the millions of homeowners in the foreclosure pipeline, only those who almost don’t need help will get any. The plan is still largely to save the financial institutions and ignore the peope.

Earlier I pointed to Dave Korten’s proposal.

Now there is a grassroots and netroots movement around the country.

Demonstrations around the country today Saturday April 11, 2009 starting 11AM Pacific - 2 PM Eastern.¹

In Boston, the demonstration is at the State House. Rain gear is advised.

Logos by Harvard Living Wage Campaign Alum Matt Skomorovsky

¹“the guy by the door” is hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard - close to the Atlantic. Because the corporate offices of the major media are in our time zone there is a substantial ‘Eastern Daylight chauvinism’. In my own modest way, I seek to address this.

Martin Luther King 1964 [Lib of Cong] Barack Obama 2008 [U.S. Government]

It’s the day after Martin died 41 years ago. In October I echoed the warning Martin sounded a year to the day before he died. It has gone unheeded.

Seventeen days ago marked the sixth year since the onslaught of “shock and awe” in Iraq. Harvard’s Legal Left commemorated the day with a talk by Pakistani-British journalist and activist Tariq Ali. He had some positive notes about very recent events reported in the Harvard Law Record.

But most of his remarks were sobering and echoed remarks made on Democracy Now! and in his book The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power.

Duncan Kennedy introducing Tariq Ali

Tariq Ali

Tariq was erudite, knowledgable about ‘facts on the ground’ and eloquent. But no less eloquent was a security guard from Nigeria with considerable anger at the arrogance and ignorance of Americans, “Afghanistan is a giant killer! You should look to history!”

Below ‘Impeach Cheney’ under the heading, ‘the guy away from the door.’

    

Paul Krugman, Laureate of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2008 at a press conference at the Swedish Academy of Science in Stockholm [Photo Wikimedia Foundation] Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner [Photo: U.S. Government]
  

A zombie idea is an idea that you keep on killing because it’s a bad idea but it just keeps on coming back.

Bank of Sweden Prize winner¹ and New York Times Columnist Paul Krugman on today’s Democracy Now! They aired before the formal announcement.

¹‘The Bank of Sweden Prize’ is the correct name for what is popularly and incorrectly called ‘The Nobel Prize in Economics.’ The meaning and purpose of this premeditated mislocution will not comfortable fit in a footnote.

The first feature after headlines on today’s Democracy Now! showed a clip of British Prime Minister Harold Brown admitting the AIC have imposed Neoliberal principals on developing countries, but not followed them themselves.

Too often, our responses to past crises have been inadequate or misdirected, promoting economic orthodoxies that we ourselves have not followed and that have condemned the world’s poorest to a deepening crisis of poverty.

Amy segued into an interview with a prominent critic of Neoliberal Globalization, University of Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang. Her introduction:

Ha-Joon Chang, Economist at the University of Cambridge specializing in developmental economics. In 2005, he was awarded the Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. He is author of the books Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective and, his latest, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism.

Chang mentioned the Late Larry Summers by name. Tomorrow I’ll tie this together with the Sandel Summers Course at Harvard “Globalization and It’s Critics”. Y’all come back now, hear?

It was Sunday. I wouldn’t have know about my sin, but for Amy.

More to come.

and more from Jason Pramas at OpenMediaBoston.

Attorney Barry Wilson and Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner at Moakley Court House.

Attorney John McNeil, Assistant to U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Michael Sullivan, argued for a ‘protective order’ against Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner. If granted, the order will forbid Turner to publically rebut evidence and insinuations of evidence previously released to the press by the FBI. Attorney Barry Wilson characterized this as “closing the barn door after the horse is gone.”

U.S. Attorney Sullivan’s Record: A history of prosecutorial misconduct?

“The egregious failure of the government to disclose plainly material exculpatory evidence in this case extends a dismal history of intentional and inadvertent violations of the government’s duties to disclose in cases assigned to this court,” Chief Judge for Massachusetts Max Wolf Jan. 21, 2009.

Turner pointed to the recent rebuke of U.S. Attorney Micheal Sullivan by Chief Judge for Massachusetts Max Wolf.  While focussed on a single case, the judge mentioned nine other cases. Turner asked the press, “Where were you?”

[Previously on 'the guy by the door' Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark Joins Chuck Turner Denounces Political Targeting by Federal Attorney Sullivan.]

Turner had more. I’ll give links when I find them. They are not easy to find.

“You are as responsible for the corruption of the justice system as the U.S. attorney is,” Turner told reporters before leaving to chants of “Chuck! Chuck!”

At least as far back as the Harvard Living Wage Campaign, Boston City Councilor and Harvard Alum (’62) Chuck Turner has stood for Harvard Labor. Since his arrest on corruption charges the key prosecution witness is “no longer cooperating.” [See next post.]

The Boston Globe wrote the following:

“‘Chuck is naive,’ Wilburn said in an interview at the Globe. ‘The only thing I said to him was, ‘Take your wife out to dinner.’ It’s conceivable that it could have been a gift or a campaign contribution.’

“He went on to further distinguish between the two cases, saying: ‘Dianne [Wilkerson] is a thief. Chuck isn’t. Dianne knew better. Chuck is a victim of circumstance.’”

Jack Pramas¹ of Open Media Boston has more.

The Support Chuck Turner website announced a teach-in Tuesday February 24, 6:30 - 8:00 PM Cafeteria Roxbury Community College Student Center. About 100 people attended. It was a Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Honkie Holdover Hippie crowd. Charles Clemons, co-founder of Boston’s only Black owned radio station Touch 106.1 FM announced his Walk for Power. Chuck was characteristically electric. Lady Enchantress performed her song Changes [Video on her site].

¹Jack quite properly includes a full disclosure of his relationship with Chuck. My own is nowhere near as extensive. I will just tell one brief story.

We had gathered at Faneuil Hall to confront the government scientists and PR hacks^I about the proposed construction of a Bio Safety Level 4 Lab in Boston’s South End neighborhood. After the gummint made its presentation there was a public testimony. People lined up to get to the microphone. It was a racially mixed crowd, but unified in opposition to the lab. Nonetheless, the black people ended up at the back of the bus - except for State Representative Gloria Fox who went first. Chuck Turner was in the back of the line with his constituents. The gummint had a young under assistant twit in charge of trying to limit public testimony constantly cutting people off. I worried that they would close the place down before Chuck had a chance to speak. Claire Allen, co-chair of Safety Net, thought it would be OK to try to move Chuck up the line, but Gloria told me, “He won’t come. He won’t leave his constituents.” He finally did speak with fire the under assistant twit had no hope of putting out.

^IIt was very hard to tell the difference between the scientists and the PR hacks.

Doctors from the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School gave free consultations to students¹ to improve the quality of their sleep. WGBH staff gave out free “Got Sleep?” T shirt’s and staffers from the University Health Service Wellness Center gave Free backrubs ¹. I’m told they plan to take this show on the road throughout the University, but in the meantime, their website is:

http://understandingsleep.org/

¹at least one staff member participated.