TThhee NNeeww DDeemmooccrraatt A Publication of the Peninsula Democratic Coalition (PDC) July 2019 In Memoriam Mark Your September 3, 1953 - June 30, 2019 Calendar! Dear friends, As we celebrate Independence Day Sunday, August 18, 2019 today, I write to you with great sorrow in my 4:00-7:00 pm heart. I am very sad to report that our dear friend and champion Eitan Fenson passed PDC Annual away Sunday, June 30th from complications of thyroid cancer. Details Family Potluck regarding his memorial on August 3, 2019, will Picnic & be forthcoming. Eitan was a founding member of Funwildl ber heald ait as er the DVC in 2012 and took on the role of , CEO in 2016 where he Cuesta Park provided great located directly beside the El Camino leadership and YMCA and El Camino Hospital, outreach. In 2018, Eitan brought together in Mountain View. resistance groups, Democratic clubs, and activists throughout the Special Guest South Bay to open the DVC early and offer a Speaker: space where we could all work together to achieve our Ricardo Lara progressive objectives. Insurance We will always remember his enthusiasm and tireless work on behalf of Commissioner of democracy and our common goals. California Please feel free to share your thoughts about Eitan and we will post them on the website. Send messages to: [email protected] As Karen Rivers said, "We must make Eitan proud in See page 7 and 8 for 2020, let's win this!" Remembering Eitan, information & map. Pam Salvatierra Chair, DVC Board of Directors The New Democrat 2 July 2019 nation devoted to representing detained immigrants before the immigration court — challenging conditions of confinement and contesting their confinement in federal court. ” This language is also taken from the UC Davis website. Cooper is one of the few advocates who is allowed to enter President’s the detention centers and talk with the people and children who are held there. She’s visiting the centers and interviewing Column children, some of them toddlers, to find out about their conditions. Here is her latest AP article, where she talks about the Leora Tanjuatco current conditions: https://www.apnews.com/46da2dbe04f54adbb875cfbc06bbc615 “In my 22 years of doing visits with children in detention, I have never heard of this level of inhumanity,” Cooper said. You’ve probably already read all the horrifying details, so I The woman fighting for won’t recount them here. But they’re unacceptable. Author Brene Brown recently said, “If your response is, ‘The parents should not have brought their children here illegally,’ sanitary conditions for know this: I pray that you never have to flee violence or poverty or persecution with your children. And, if the day comes that you must and your babies are forcibly removed from your arms, I will detained children fight for you too.” If you’d like to donate to Holly Cooper and her team, you can donate to Together Rising here: https://togetherrising.org/give/ Remember this fire. We’ll need it to fight next November. Photo credit: https://www.apnews.com/46da2dbe04f54adbb875cfbc06bbc615 Hand I don’t have much to say this month, because I, like you, am painted so distraught by what I’ve read about the children who are being kept in various Border Patrol facilities around the country. silk Most of us are going to survive this Trump administration, but not everyone will. Some of the victims have been, and will be, scarf! children. Meet Holly Cooper, one of the lawyers on the front lines of this humanitarian crisis. According to the UC Davis website, she 8”x54” Habotai silk* “has extensive litigation experience defending the rights of immigrants and is a nationally recognized expert on immigration There are plenty detention issues and on the immigration consequences of of favorite Democrats Only criminal convictions.” to choose She heads UC Davis’ Immigration Law Clinic, which “stands from this season! alone in its statewide role providing critical advice to public Margaret in Connecticut defenders about the potential immigration consequences facing wearing an Obama immigrant defendants. The Clinic is one of the only clinics in the scarf! Made to order at [email protected] The New Democrat 3 July 2019 graduates have compassion and respect for everyone striving to Martin’s attain a better life. These goals can only be met with vibrant, strong and well- functioning public schools. That requires money as well as good EDITORIAL governance. Money cannot guarantee a good education, but the by PDC Member Martin Gorfinkel lack of proper funding does guarantee poor education. Charter schools are a menace to public education in California and in many other states. The original concept behind charter Some people are fond of saying that private enterprise can schools was to allow innovative educational programs without the handle tasks better and more efficiently than government. These burden of public-school bureaucracy. people want to privatize almost everything from Social Security to However lofty the original goal might have been, the current the postal service to the prison system to the schools. Their reality is that charter schools now offer selected students an premise is false! The result of privatization is at least added education at public expense, but without significant public expense for the consumer and at worst disaster for the country. oversight or benefit. Charters offer staffing by less experienced and Supporters of privatization of government argue that less credentialed personnel who are paid less than their government brings ponderous bureaucracy to any task. They say equivalents in the public system, and they drain funds from the Government does not provide for competition between suppliers public schools. and competition is supposed to drive prices down and quality up. Charter schools draw students by asserting that they provide The flaws in this logic are too numerous to deal with in one better results, on average, than the public schools when measured column. For the moment, suffice it to say that almost anyone with by standardized tests. At least three things are wrong with this experience working in a large company will attest that the claim: bureaucracy, inefficiency and sometimes the stupidity, of a 1. The differences are marginal and subject to debate. corporation is on a par with what exists in government and 2. Charter schools, in one way or another, select their students sometimes surpasses it. eliminating many of those most likely to do poorly on the tests. Privatization has extra costs for the public–and extra benefits 3. Standardized tests should not be used as the sole measure for those in the business. There are advertising and public of the quality of a school. Standardized tests could be one relations campaigns to sell the now-privatized goods and services; indicator of one portion of the goal of the schools, but they have there are executive salaries; there are stock-holder benefits, and little or no bearing on the function of the schools to produce good there are political contributions. It is big business. The rich get citizens. richer, and the political campaigns reap the money—at public The Charter School movement is well-financed privately, and expense. this private money makes large contributions to political Economic theory does show that capitalism generates optimal candidates in order to curry favor in the legislature. results for low costs, high production and customer satisfaction. Gaining oversight over the charter schools and/or limiting their But capitalism as defined for that result bears no relationship to influence and their growth will not be easy. Find out where your the real world, and capitalism as practiced in the United States representatives in Sacramento stand on charter schools, how does not come close to meeting the criteria of generating optimal much they have reaped in contributions from the charter schools, results in terms of public good and public satisfaction. That said, and what their stand is on current legislation to provide more the economic arguments will be set aside—possibly for a future public oversight and accountability while limiting charter school column. growth. Some work is too crucial to society to be entrusted to private The life of public education may depend on it. hands; the economics are irrelevant. Public Education is in this category. The primary goal of public education in a free society should be to guarantee a thinking, caring and rational electorate. Our public schools do provide job skills. We hope that graduates will come out of high school with the knowledge and skills to enable them to continue their education or to find productive work. But that is not the important reason for public education. Public education should prepare students to be good citizens in a democracy. Mathematics, science, history and grammar can all be learned from a book or from an on-line class. Learning to get along with people–particularly those with whom you do not share background or political views and learning to be responsible citizens and knowledgeable voters–are not easily learned without person-to-person contact with others, especially from diverse socio-economic, racial, cultural and ethnic backgrounds. We hope that students come out of high school with common goals for the common good – even if, or especially if, they have See page 6 for information on differing ideas as to how to reach those goals. We hope that Voter Registration & Issue Outreach The New Democrat 4 July 2019 Eric Swalwell, did a fine job, I thought, but I later heard him described as seeming to be running to be quarterback on his high CA Democratic Convention school football team. People are not always kind! The other big issue at the convention was election of a new super in SF! chair.