.Birds Must Die!

Feathered friends get attacked, plus Oakland a model of middle-age pimps and Madoff debacle hurts East Bay causes.

What is it with the East Bay and birds these days? First, two
Rossmoor retirement community housing associations reject pleas from
the Audubon and Humane Society and vote to move ahead with their plans
to hire a sharpshooter and slaughter fifty woodpeckers. Then someone
drills a Castro Valley wild turkey named Pinky with an arrow, and the
poor bugger is seen trying to move on with his life, even as the arrow
is lodged in his aviary abdomen. Despite all the efforts of East Bay
park officials to catch and treat him, Pinky is still roaming loose,
unsettling small children unfamiliar with the concept of cruelty. Good
luck to ya, Pinky!

HBO Discovers Oakland

But enough about birds and their troubles; everyone just wants to
talk about pimps anyway. HBO officials are moving forward with plans to
develop “Gentlemen of Leisure,” a series about a middle-age pimp who
tries to retire, but the game just keeps pulling him back in; along the
way, we’re sure to be treated to a menagerie of hookers, violence, thug
life, and rap-fueled montages of life on the street. And wouldn’t you
know it, but producers have decided to set the series in Oakland! In
fact, Oakland will serve as one of the main characters in the show, a
hard-luck town where the bodies drop and the Glocks go pop. This has
Oakland’s elected officials, including City Councilmembers Pat
Kernighan and Ignacio De La Fuente as well as Mayor Ron Dellums,
howling with indignation. “The people of Oakland have come too far to
have our city’s name trampled upon in the name of entertainment,”
Dellums chief of staff David Chai told the Oakland Tribune. We trust we
don’t have to point out the absurdity of a city reeling under one of
the most deadly years in its history complaining that some filmmakers
are planning a show that depicts it as violent. Wait, we just did!

Sacto Meltdown

Let’s turn to Sacramento, that other hard-luck town full of
grim-faced men. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, you may recall,
recently declared a fiscal emergency in California, effectively
ordering the state legislature to come to work and not leave until it
had hammered out a plan to deal with a structural budget deficit that
is expected to rise as high as $42 million by 2010. The Democrats
wanted a combination of spending cuts and tax hikes; the Republicans
wanted spending cuts and not much else; the two-thirds majority rule
meant they had to come to some sort of consensus, never a likely
prospect in state politics. But then the Dems noticed that if they just
slapped a new user fee on gasoline consumption, they could convert some
gas taxes into a new sales tax, direct the revenue into the general
fund, and get around the two-thirds majority rule with just a simple
majority. This they promptly did, cutting the deficit by $18 million so
far.

But even though the bill contained many of Schwarzenegger’s own tax
proposals, the governor has vowed to veto it, because it doesn’t
contain enough of his economic stimulus package or spending cuts. As if
to show he means business, Schwarzenegger issued an executive order
this weekend, forcing 238,000 state workers to take two days off per
month without pay, the equivalent of a 9 percent pay cut. He also
ordered state departments to begin mass layoffs to slash 10 percent in
payroll expenses.

Economy Takes Its Toll

Jeez, where to begin? Let’s start with your house. Last week, the
realty research firm MDA Dataquick released its numbers for the month
of November, and Bay Area homes have lost 44.4 percent of their average
value in the last twelve months. The average Bay Area home is now worth
just $350,000, a record drop from the value of $629,000 a year earlier.
Meanwhile, the stock market bleeding has caused the Alameda County
employee pension plan to lose 30 percent of its value, or $1.7 billion,
in the first ten months of the year.

And individual East Bay firms aren’t doing much better. UTStarcom,
the Alameda-based telecommunications giant, announced it would have to
lay off 500 workers and eliminate its Korea-based handset unit, in an
effort to slash $100 million in costs. The PMI Group, the Walnut
Creek-based mortgage insurer and until recently one of the East Bay’s
largest publicly traded companies, has sold off its Asia operations to
an Australian insurance company. Up until two months ago, that company
used to be called PMI Australia, until PMI sold it to GBE Insurance
Ltd.

Finally, Bernie Madoff’s shenanigans have destroyed the charitable
JEHT Foundation, which relied on Madoff to handle its portfolio. The
JEHT Foundation financed a number of worthy causes in the East Bay,
including the Boalt Law School’s death penalty clinic and Berkeley’s
Center for Investigative Reporting. But by the first quarter of next
year, the foundation will simply cease to exist.

Three-Dot Roundup

State water regulators have slapped C&H Sugar’s Crocket refinery
with a fine that could reach $500,000, for repeatedly dumping sugar,
bacteria, and mercury into the Carquinez Strait. … The state
Commission on Judicial Performance has admonished Alameda County
Superior Court Judge Christine Moruza for being a little too loose with
her tongue on the bench; Moruza once declared that a man who beat his
neighbor with a baseball bat for having sex with his wife and
sixteen-year-old daughter was kinda doing the court’s work for it.

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