“I’m not going to let you know how scared I sometimes get of history and its ways,” declares Jackson Jackson, the young Spokane (Wash.) narrator of Sherman Alexie’s “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” (from Ten Little Indians), “I’m a strong man, and I know that silence is the best way of dealing with white folks.” The paradox of this rhetorical silence as an index of the incorrigible Native American knack for storytelling is captured to a T in Kent Mackenzie’s long-forgotten 1961 masterpiece The Exiles.

Co-presented by Alexie (with Charles Burnett) on the occasion of its first official release (courtesy of Milestone Films and UCLA, who did the impressive restoration job), this stealthy film is one of the screen’s great epic poems, and an L.A. movie unlike any other. The city’s Bunker Hill neighborhood – previously a setting of underworld vagaries in such fifties crime fables as M (Joseph Losey, 1951) and Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955) – is delineated through a shot rhythm that keeps pace with a loosely tied crew of Native American locals over a random twelve-hour nocturnal span. The camera traces these characters’ roaming, roving movements as if caught by an undulating urban tide, but the physicality of their whereabouts (frequently covered on foot, which makes manifest a ghostly, slo-mo La-la Land) serves a mapping of the mind – the ‘silent’ space-between of wandering.

The film occupies an uneasy middle ground between documentary and fiction. Though the story is scripted, location shooting has it unfold on the real home turf of the actors, who more or less play themselves (and retain their names). The introductory sequence is moreover rendered in ur-traditional documentary style. Over a montage of pictures that range from Edward S. Curtis photographs of tribal elders to stills of the protagonists culled from footage to follow, a voice-over summarily historicizes the Native American plight: their erstwhile displacement to reservations and, more recently, their young people’s exodus to the cities. Finally we are promised “the authentic account” of a night in the life of the post-reservation generation, focused on a representative group of individuals in Los Angeles. The start of the actual narrative implements a seismic shift in tone. Photographic abstraction gives way to cinematic flow, but the last few stills are freeze-frames from the film. This transition not only puts into question conventional historical representations of Native Americans (as an extinct species, consigned to archives and picture books), but also complicates the status of the filmmaker’s own evocation and record of their presence.

The detached, authoritative male voice-over is eclipsed by a woman’s intimate, lived-through narration. We first see Yvonne (Yvonne Williams) silently walk around Grand Central Food Market, while we hear her express hope of giving her unborn child some of the opportunities she never had. The off-screen vocalization of her thoughts resumes after she arrives home. In the kitchen, making food for her husband Homer (Homer Nish) and his buddies, she regrets their marriage, wishes he would get his act together and rues his neglect of her. The initial narrator’s establishment of an anthropological subject-object relationship is countered only to expose the misogynist fabric of Native American community.

The men are given their due share of contemplative narration, but Mackenzie subtly privileges the motherly, future-oriented subjectivity of Yvonne, whose wistful yet practical point of view bookends the digressive storyline. The sophisticated use of first-person voice-over distorts the semblance of our direct access to the characters’ ruminations. We never see them utter their testimonials, and the camera’s tendency toward a more distant short length during spells of narration enhances the perfectly pitched mode of free indirect discourse.

The very title of The Exiles suggests rootlessness and absence, but the universe it sketches proves paradoxically self-contained. There is no L.A. beyond the supposed minority pocket the film opens up; the other, greater urban area materializes as no more than a glittering backdrop that expands below the hill where a climactic tribal gathering is held. Reservation life remains an equally intangible point of reference, never visualized into concrete existence; its elusive realm dilutes the assertion by Homer’s pal Rico (Rico Rodriguez) that many guys, including himself, easily move back and forth between the city and the rez. (When Homer, who did not grow up on a reservation, reads a letter from back home, the film does show a scene of his family, but refrains from literally revealing what they wrote, thereby sustaining its ever equivocal, coded and coated take on language.)

With the outside scope such an uncertain proposition, action on the inside – no matter how commonplace – assumes an extreme intensity, conveyed through Erik Daarstad, Robert Kaufman and John Morrill’s radiant high-contrast cinematography. The difference between day and night evaporates in the glow, which gives an aura of authenticity to sundry non-happenings – watching a movie, window-shopping, playing cards, hanging out in bars, walking and driving… Mackenzie’s work takes hold like blues, simple yet dense. It halts on the skipped beat of a subculture and sounds a selfless, whispered cry. The refrain of the characters’ numbed anguish disperses into a cyclical drift.

Charles Burnett’s association with the film’s release comes as no surprise given its artistic kinship with his own Killer of Sheep (1977), also adopted by Milestone. Their common features include an under-the-radar L.A. setting, a working class focus, conflicted sense of heritage, poetic-realistic sensibility and narrative structured by song. Yet where Burnett translates the nostalgia of his immersive, family-based vision of Watts into a final homecoming, the British-born Mackenzie operates from a broader, self-consciously distanced vantage point, and opts for a more stylized treatment of his subjects, who haven’t yet made it home by the time the film draws to a close.

Hopefully at some point a creative programmer will schedule The Exiles as half of an odd double bill with its East Coast kissing cousin, Michael Wadleigh’s Wolfen (1981). A brilliant, strange and unique blend of romantic horror and ecological fantasy, Wolfen is the only fiction film that revolves around the historical presence of Native Americans in New York City. On a grand film-historical scale, these two seemingly disparate works share the ancestry of a diptych by the cinema’s great organic visionary, F. W. Murnau. Thus Wolfen can be deemed an heir to Nosferatu (1922), and The Exiles – with its lyrical beauty and orbital temporality – to Sunrise (1927). Like Murnau, Mackenzie grasps the American spirit in a way only a cultural outsider could, ending his tale of the city as dawn rolls around to signal how nothing has changed quite momentously.

–Kenneth Crab

Naomi Klein is author of “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” and “No Logo”

Jeremy Scahill is the author of “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army”

Cooper Union Auditorium, 30 Cooper Square. Meet the panelists at the special pre-event reception.

Tickets going on sale soon! To reserve tickets, please call 212 - 221 -0521 or email jlee@indypendent.org.

Mark your calendars now!

One problem. The major owner of these blighted, underutilized, unattractive, mostly vacant buildings is Columbia University.

And the firm responsible for creating this glowing report? Why, AKRF, the very same firm Columbia contracted in developing the project.

Taking this fact as a springboard, let’s go down the rabbit-hole and take a look at the history of this expansion.

In 2004, Columbia formed a Community Advisory Board which was given the role of supposedly having substantive input on the plans’ development. The final report generated by this body told Columbia what community groups and Community Board 9 had by then been telling the university for quite some time – the university’s final plans should fall within the general framework outlined by Community Board 9’s 197-a plan. This plan called for a mixed-use area that would attempt to stimulate the return of highly-specialized manufacturing jobs and generate affordable housing while allowing the university to build a portion of the space that it was requesting. The board was summarily dissolved after publishing this report.

In April 2005, the Columbia Spectator runs an exposé on a secret deal, in which the university gave the ESDC hundreds of thousands of dollars to conduct the blight study that would be crucial to any finding eminent domain-related property transfers. Or, rather, so they could hire Columbia’s consultants to do so. Huh.

In June 2007, the City Planning Commission issues its Draft Environmental Impact Statement, thus commencing the land-use review process for the expansion plan. The document arbitrarily limits the areas which the expansion could potentially affect, considering Morningside Park as an impassable boundary and ignoring the presence of Columbia’s Washington Heights medical campus to the north. It doesn’t consider the well-documented possibility of currently affordable, rent-stabilized and SRO units leaving these programs due to landlord harassment, and only views affiliates directly generated by Columbia as potential gentrifiers. Despite these limitations, the study still concludes that 3,293 people will be at risk of secondary displacement by the year 2030.

In August 2007, Community Board 9 votes 32-2 to reject the Columbia proposal and continues to promote its 197-a development plan. In a raucous, overflowing meeting, Columbia President Lee Bollinger is booed for several minutes; it sets ten conditions for its approval. Columbia vows to continue discussions with the community board. Not a single official meeting is held.

In October 2007, Borough President Scott Stringer holds a public hearing at CCNY as part of the review process. The tone of the meeting, aside from those directly employed by or affiliated with Columbia, overwhelmingly against the plan. A week later, Stringer offers his endorsement of the plan, having extracted a promise of $20 million for a revolving loan fund for affordable housing. This is approximately equivalent to 1/350th of the total 7 billion dollar cost of the program. Opponents declare this to be miserly.

In November 2007, six students launch a ten-day hunger strike calling for Columbia to revise its expansion plans in line with CB9’s decision. No action is taken.

The same month, five members of the Local Development Corporation, the city-appointed body designated to negotiate a Community Benefits Agreement with the university, resign in disgust, claiming that the process was dominated by Columbia-friendly politicians who had no interest in standing up to the university. The representative for one of the largest public housing projects in the building, the faith-based representative, the tenants’ organization representative and the business-owners’ representative are among them.

In December 2007, the final City Council vote is abruptly pushed forward with no explanation given before the Christmas recess. Councilman Robert Jackson, who represents the area, takes a position of support for the expansion at the vote, after having been officially neutral throughout the process. He is buoyed by Central Harlem councilwoman Inez Dickens in this position. Columbia had been using Bill Lynch and Associates, a consulting firm operated by the former deputy mayor and DNC vice-chair, to lobby politicians to support its position. Although many council members profess reservations, they vote in favor of the plan because of the Harlem Democratic establishment’s support.

The entire discourse of the city planning community has been that the jobs and “neighborhood improvement” that Columbia will offer West Harlem are so essential that the City basically has to roll over so that Columbia doesn’t get angry and take its billions elsewhere. However, this is an obviously counterfactual argument – the university isn’t going to build a state-of-the-art campus in New Jersey when it owns most of the property ten blocks north of 116th street. It also happens to be a uniquely PR-sensitive institution with a vocal minority of students that are willing to make a ruckus about the blatantly corrupt way this was carried out. With the proper political pressure, a truly unique settlement could have been reached, with the university putting hundreds of millions of dollars into truly affordable housing programs that would substantially mitigate its impact and potentially slow the gentrification of Harlem in exchange for being to build some of what it needed.

Instead, what we have seen is an elaborate farce that will play out with tragic consequences for real-estate prices and already quick community displacement in Manhattanville.

USULUTÁN, El Salvador—El Salvador is a poor country whose major export is people. From recently living there, I’ve seen firsthand what’s driving people north — and why conventional political solutions aren’t going to deter desperate Salvadorans and others like them from coming to the United States. Largely missing from this year’s presidential campaign is any serious reappraisal of our foreign, military, and trade policies that have forced millions of Latin Americans to uproot themselves and seek opportunities for a better life far from home.

On the presidential campaign trail earlier this year, free trade critics failed to link corporate globalization, trade deregulation and the forced relocation of people throughout the hemisphere. While courting blue-collar workers in farm states and the Rust Belt in the United States, former Democratic senator John Edwards frequently denounced the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) — and its new Central American counterpart, CAFTA — as “trade laws that send American jobs overseas.”

In Iowa, Michigan and Ohio, free trade has fallen into disfavor because it threatens local manufacturing in economically depressed communities. As Lorri Brouer, a middle-aged Iowa Falls gift shop owner, asked a Boston Globe reporter in January: “Who’s going to turn off the lights when we grow old and die, because all the young people are going away?”

Brouer’s fearful refrain echoes in many small Salvadoran villages where the absence of people between the ages of 25 and 55 is often striking. In one remote farming community I visited in Usulután, the remaining peasants were struggling to survive by grazing cattle and growing beans and corn amid cycles of flooding and drought. Most had settled in the region after being displaced during El Salvador’s 12-year civil war. Some had served as combatants against the government forces, which received $4 billion in U.S. counterinsurgency aid during the 1980s. Because most village residents still support the left, the right-wing Republican Nationalist Alliance (ARENA) government of Antonio Elias Saca refuses to provide needed agricultural assistance and social services (which are made available to friendlier constituencies instead).

Emptying the Countryside

Parents of a large family I stayed with proudly showed me middle-school graduation photos of their two oldest children, but their pride was mixed with sadness and regret. Their children had both emigrated illegally to Houston after completing ninth grade, joining the 100,000 of their countrymen who flee every year. With few employment opportunities locally — and not many in the capital city of San Salvador either — the youth of the town “turn 14, and then they all leave,” the mother explained. She pointed to the picture of her daughter smiling in her cap and gown. “When we talk on the phone, she says she misses us. She cries and says she doesn’t like it there and wants to come home.”

This forced displacement of people — a human tragedy on a massive scale — is at the heart of the trade agreements. Enacted 15 years ago, NAFTA established a now-familiar regional pattern. It has allowed U.S. grain companies to dump cheap corn on the Mexican market, while at the same time, México was forced to cut its agricultural subsidies. Poor farmers in Oaxaca and Chiapas can no longer sell their crops at prices covering their production costs. So they’ve joined the stream of six million Mexicans seeking work in the United States.

The Salvadoran economist Alfonso Goitia sees the same phenomenon occurring in El Salvador, where 40 percent of the workforce is still employed in agriculture. Out of a total population of six million, 750,000 Salvadorans became political or economic exiles prior to the 1992 peace accords ending the civil war. Today, two million live in the U.S. because — under a series of ARENA governments over the last 15 years — El Salvador has embraced free trade, adopted the U.S. dollar as its currency, privatized public services, ratified CAFTA, and consigned a large percentage of the population to continued poverty and exploitation.

For those forced to seek work in urban areas, the choices aren’t good. In the manufacturing sector, jobs are concentrated in heavily guarded export zone factories with low wages, sweatshop working conditions, and union-busting transnational employers. An effort last summer by SUTTELL, the telephone workers’ union, to organize women assemblers at ABX Industries, an electronic component maker in San Bartolo, led to 30 of them being fired and then blacklisted. As is often the case, the human casualties of this campaign — when I met them in November — had been forced into the informal economy, joining the vast army of Salvadorans already peddling fruit, sneakers, toys, packaged snacks and home-made food items at rickety roadside stands and in crowded central market places throughout the country. One of the street vendors’ biggest product lines — pirated CDs and DVDs — is now making them a special target of local police, trained by the U.S.-financed International Law Enforcement Academy in San Salvador. Where the United States once aided and abetted death squads, it now spends millions of aid dollars orchestrating an attack on any would-be infringers on CAFTA-protected “intellectual property rights.”

The Long Journey North

Not surprisingly — given such a problematic urban and rural “job market”— I would regularly see large crowds of people at the American Embassy in San Salvador, waiting for hours with their documents in hand, to apply for some form of legal entry into the U.S.A.

When legal entry into the United States is thwarted, Salvadorans who can afford to sell any land they own, or take out personal loans, hire a coyote who charges $4,000 to $6,000 for unofficial immigration assistance. With or without such a “professional” guide, migrants are vulnerable to assault, theft and rape along the long overland route through Guatemala and Mexico.

Meanwhile back home, family disintegration is a major Salvadoran social problem. Departing mothers and fathers leave their children in the hands of grandparents and other relatives; some kids grow who up loosely supervised and feeling abandoned end up contributing to the country’s world-renowned “gang problem.” However, the remittances sent back — $3.3 billion in 2006, or 18 percent of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product — keep the economy afloat and operate as a huge social safety valve.

Despite increased repression (in the form of new laws making various forms of political protest potential “terrorist” acts), Salvadoran social movements are also stirring. Their goal when the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) challenges ARENA in next year’s presidential election, is to reclaim the idea of national economic development, fueled by much needed public investment. Unfortunately, very few North Americans currently share their understanding that publicly-funded job creation, agricultural assistance, workers’ rights, decent roads and schools, and other basic services are exactly what’s needed to keep far more Salvadorans in El Salvador, where most would much prefer to be.

Alexandra Early worked in El Salvador for CRISPAZ, a cross-border solidarity and social justice group. A longer version of this article originally appeared at counterpunch.org.

COCHABAMBA, Bolivia—Bolivian president Evo Morales and his leftist Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party are heading toward an August electoral showdown with right-wing opponents who have stalled the government’s reform programs with a campaign for regional autonomy in the nation’s more prosperous eastern lowlands.

Over the past three months, four of Bolivia’s nine regional departments have passed “Autonomy Statutes,” which Morales and his supporters have called illegal and separatist. On June 29, residents of the department of Chuquisaca delivered another challenge to Morales, electing right-wing candidate Savina Cuéllar, a Quechua Indian and former peasant farmer, to serve as the department’s prefect (governor).

Yet there is a wild card looming over the political landscape: On Aug. 10, Morales and all of the prefects except Cuéllar will be put to a recall referendum. Voters will choose both whether they want Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, to continue at the helm and whether they want their department’s prefect to continue to serve as well. MAS hopes that the recall referendum will not only reaffirm its mandate to carry out land reform, assert national sovereignty over natural resources, and redistribute wealth, but also remove a few of the prefects that have been its staunchest opponents.

Morales summarized the significance of the referendum, speaking in a rural community in Potosí: “Here the debate isn’t over Evo Morales, here the debate isn’t over the prefects, here the debate is over two economic models: If the privatizing, auctioneering neoliberal model will return or if the process of change will become stronger after the recall referendum.”

Regional Revolts

Morales swept into office in 2006 with a broad electoral mandate to enact land reform, nationalize the country’s hydrocarbon resources and redistribute the wealth to Bolivia’s impoverished majority. However, the principal political battle over the last year in Bolivia has been between the MAS-led central government and the departmental prefects.

Rather than trying to wrest control from MAS nationally, the right has led an “autonomy movement,” which seeks to transfer power from the central government to the departmental governments in its control. Over the past three months the departments of Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando, and Tarija each voted to approve autonomy statutes — essentially constitutions that would govern their respective departments. The National Electoral Court ruled that without approval from Bolivia’s Congress, the autonomy votes were illegal. President Morales urged residents of the four departments to abstain from voting. Now, with the election of Cuéllar to prefect, Chuquisaca also seems poised to go down the road of autonomy.

Partying Like It’s 1899

Cuéllar’s election is the result of the conflicts surrounding Bolivia’s constituent assembly, which was held in the former capital of Sucre from August 2006 to November 2007.

In the assembly, MAS set out to create a new constitution that would reflect the demands and desires of Bolivia’s long-excluded indigenous and poor majority. The principal opposition groups, on the other hand, saw such a new constitution as a threat to their interests and did not want to see the assembly successfully concluded.

The main demand of many assembly persons from Sucre, particularly those on the right, was to restore Sucre as Bolivia’s sole capital, a privilege the city lost in 1899. Bolivia is unique in that it officially has two capital cities: La Paz, seat of the executive and legislative branches of the government, and Sucre, seat of the judiciary. Residents of Sucre have maintained over the years both a blue-blood sensibility and a fierce grudge over their city’s lost status.

At the outset of the assembly, few thought that moving the capital would be a serious issue given the logistical costs. However, in August 2007, assembly persons from Sucre, supported by the right-wing opposition, introduced the proposal in several committees of the assembly. For the opposition, the controversy over the capital was the perfect wedge issue for destabilizing the assembly.

On Aug. 15, MAS approved a motion that ended debate over relocating the capital, relegating the issue to a special committee. The move infuriated residents of Sucre. Protests escalated and began to take on openly violent and racist qualities. Assembly persons from MAS were persecuted and beaten in the streets; in some demonstrations against the assembly, protesters, dressed in the garb of indigenous women, wore donkey masks and shouted racial epithets. The lack of security forced the assembly to temporarily shut down in October.

On Nov. 24, MAS and their allies reconvened the assembly in a heavily guarded military school several kilometers from Sucre. While the assembly approved the new draft constitution (which still must be approved by a national referendum), protesters allied with the Inter-Institutional Committee (a coalition of local business, labor and university groups allied with the mayor’s office) assaulted the school and were repulsed by police. Three people died and 300 were injured in the confrontation.

Savina Cuéllar was one of the MAS assembly persons from Sucre who supported reinstating the city as the full capital of Bolivia and joined the Inter-Institutional Committee after MAS ended debate on the issue.

The Rise Of Savina Cuéllar

Cuéllar, 45, comes from the base constituency of MAS: indigenous small farmers. She grew up in a rural province near Sucre in a Quechua-speaking peasant family. At 17 year old, she rose to be the executive officer of the regional peasant women’s federation. She raised her seven children in the countryside until cattle rustlers killed her husband and father seven years ago. She then moved in to the city of Sucre where she has since sold used clothes in the peasant market. In 2006, Cuéllar learned how to read and write in Spanish thanks to the Morales government’s literacy program, “Yes I Can.” That same year she was elected on MAS’ slate to serve in the constituent assembly. After switching sides during the conflicts over the capital, Cuéllar was chosen by the Inter-Institutional Committee as their candidate for prefect. With the indigenous Cuéllar as their figurehead, the Committee could display an image of inclusion and shield themselves from charges of racism.

“We’ve Got to Kill These Indians”

On May 24, Sucre once again exploded in racist violence. During Independence Day celebrations, groups associated with the Inter- Institutional Committee detained, robbed, and beat with sticks several dozen indigenous peasants, including the mayor of a rural municipality, who had come to the city to attend an event planned by MAS. The victims were marched around Sucre’s plaza half-naked, holding the flag of Chuquisaca, in front of the press and hundreds of spectators and were then forced to get on their knees and beg for forgiveness for supporting Morales. They then watched in shock as their ponchos and indigenous flags were burned amid shouts of “Dirty Indians”, “Long live the capital” and “We’ve got to kill these Indians.”

Broadcast widely on national news programs, the incident shocked many in a country whose population is 60 percent indigenous. Within weeks, graffiti murals appeared throughout the capital city of La Paz depicting the departmental flag of Chuquisaca with the words “Sucre, Capital of Racism.” Cuéllar and the Inter-Institutional Committee disavowed any connection to the groups responsible and blamed the central government for inciting the people’s rancor in Sucre. Jaime Barrón, president of the committee, later remarked, “In Sucre, there is neither racism nor exclusion; proof of this is that Savina Cuéllar is the candidate for prefect of Chuquisaca.”

Given her response to what occurred on May 24, Cuéllar will likely continue to toe the Inter-Institutional Committee line as prefect and throw in her lot with the other prefects opposing MAS’ agenda.

Heading Toward the Referendum

Running strong in the polls, Morales hopes the Aug. 10 recall referendum will allow him to reaffirm his mandate and deal a blow to the opposition prefects, several of whom are in a vulnerable position.

Nevertheless, even with diminished resistance from the regions, MAS will find it hard to push through major legislative efforts given that the main opposition party still controls the Senate. Crucially, the newly written constitution can only go to national referendum after the Senate has passed a law to sanction such a vote. If the Senate’s intransigence continues after a Morales victory on August 10, Bolivia’s indigenous and peasant organizations will likely resort to mobilizations to force the Senate to act.

PHOTO CAPTION
Fault Lines: A May 4 autonomy referendum in Santa Cruz, the largest and wealthiest of Bolivia’s nine regional departments, sparked fierce opposition in the capital city of La Paz. Photo by DAYLIFE.COM

For 35 years, Nisa Caraballo has relied on the tree-lined path within the Masaryk Towers apartment complex to run her errands. From her Lower East Side apartment, she uses the walkway to see her sister who lives nearby on Pitt Street, to go to the grocery store and to visit her daughter.

“The walkway has always been open since I lived here,” Caraballo, 61, says.

But all of that might change. The 15-member Masaryk Towers Coop Board wants to gate off the complex, shutting out people like Caraballo who rely on the path to complete everyday tasks.

The walkway, a retired stretch of Rivington Street between Colombia and Pitt streets, links Masaryk Towers, a 1,110-unit Mitchell-Lama Co-op, with Manhattan’s largest low-income development, the Bernard M. Baruch Houses. Thousands of residents of the 17-building Baruch Houses complex use the path to access local services.

Masaryk Towers technically owns most of the walkway, but many area residents claim that it is public property.

“A lot of old people walk through [here],” Caraballo explains. “They can’t afford to go around.” Caraballo points to her two new artificial knees. “I can’t walk that distance. I have to use my scooter.”

On a sunny afternoon, Caraballo plods along the path, pointing out the things that she will lose if Masaryk becomes a gated community. First, there’s the spot where a sparkling, toy-covered Christmas tree is displayed each year. Ahead of her, the community center that houses Grand Street Settlement, the organization that provides her neighborhood with early childhood education, meals to the elderly, and community programs, fills with elderly people.

Like Caraballo, others use the walkway to visit the community center. In fact, so many people use the pathway that Jessica Williamson, the public relations director of Grand Street Settlement, says enclosing the path could wipe out the 92-year-old organization.

“I think that people would feel really cut off from their business community,” Williamson says.

The Masaryk board tried to gate off the development two years ago, but community organizers collected hundreds of signatures opposing the proposal, and it was dropped.

In June, rumors began to circulate that the board intended to try again, and Grand Street Settlement joined with other local groups to form the Coalition for Safety Without Gates. It released a new petition in early July in support of public access through Masaryk.

Without access to the path, thousands of Baruch Houses residents will be forced to detour several blocks.

Caraballo says walking along Houston Street is unsafe due to heavy traffic and construction. And the other detour, Delancey Street under the Williamsburg Bridge, is often deserted. Further, Baruch Houses is considered a naturally occurring retirement community, meaning most people living there are more than 60 years old.

But young people will be affected, too. The walkway leads directly to Nathan Strauss Public School, two blocks west of Colombia Street. Students use the walkway to avoid East Houston Street and in the summertime kids congregate along the path to cool off in the shade.

In recent years, Masaryk residents have expressed concerns that an increase in youth presence along the path at night has led to a rise in crime. The Masaryk board cites crime and rising insurance costs as reasons for enclosing the development, but crime statistics have yet to be released, and local residents have questioned the utility of a gate in stopping crime.

Nonetheless, Caraballo says that she is scared walking the path at night. Her daughter, Nellie Flores, who , has lived in Masaryk for 10 years, shares similar concerns.

“As a tenant, I understand why they want to do it,” Flores says. “Sometimes there’s fights that break out.”

But Flores still worries that the gate will prevent her mother from visiting. No one from the Masaryk board has asked her for input on the proposed project, and she does not know how a gated complex would change access to the building.

The Coalition for Safety Without Gates, however, suspects that the proposed gates are part of a development plan aimed at driving up property values. Fueling these concerns, Masaryk has been selected to receive a $6 million allotment from the federally funded Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) for capital improvements, such as upgrading water and electrical systems. But to receive the money. Masaryk must first sign a 15-year agreement to remain in the Mitchell-Lama program. Three years have passed since the allotment, and Masaryk has made no such commitment.

Masaryk board spokesperson, Ed Kawolski could not be reached for comment.

According to Mike Murphy, the LMDC press secretary, the Masaryk board must submit a list of contractors and intended capital improvements to the complex before the money is awarded.

“But it’s not for a gate,” he says.

Caraballo has a few ideas about where to put the money. At the end of walk, she glances up and down the path, hands on hips. The asphalt below her is crumbling into jagged potholes. An old woman with a shopping bag pushes a walker over the sidewalk while three smirking boys skip past. “They should fix the street around here,” Caraballo says.

Caraballo shakes her head at the four 21- story Masaryk buildings before her and begins to recall the Rivington Street walkway before the complex was ever built.

In a written statement issued after her selection, Clemente said, “I don’t see the Green Party as an alternative; I see it as an imperative. I trust that my vice-presidential run will inspire all people, but especially young people of color, to recognize that we have more than two choices. Together, we can build the future we’ve been dreaming of.”

Her acceptance speech in Chicago at the July 12 Green Party Convention placed strong emphasis on the power of hip-hop to create change for social justice, saying, “I stand on the shoulders of a generation of young people of color that are united, that clearly understand that we are suffering from structural racism, institutional racism and capitalism.” Clemente, a Puerto Rican of African descent, and McKinney, an African-American, will make history as the first ever women of color presidential ticket for the Green Party.

Bruno, who had ruled the Legislature’s Republican- dominated upper house since 1995, was the key figure in gutting the state’s rent-stabilization laws in 1997 and weakening them further in 2003. The changes gave landlords an automatic 20 percent increase for vacant apartments, made it easier for tenants to be evicted and restricted enforcement against illegally high rents.

Bruno also repeatedly refused to allow the Senate to consider pro-tenant measures passed by the Assembly, such as a nine-bill package it approved in May. That package included bills to repeal vacancy decontrol for apartments renting for $2,000 a month or more, to increase the penalties for harassing tenants, and to repeal the 1971 “Urstadt law,” which bars local governments from passing rent regulations stronger than the state’s.

If you wonder about the results, consider this: In 1997, a mere 11 years ago, you could easily find an apartment in Williamsburg for $600 a month, and a nonprofit group renovating buildings in Crown Heights complained that it had to charge as much as $500 for some apartments.

No aspect of New York politics is more massively corrupt and undemocratic. Because of the Urstadt law, Bruno had veto power over the state’s rent laws — even though he represented a district northeast of Albany that contained no rent-regulated apartments and was more than 100 miles north of the nearest New York City voter. On the other hand, Bruno received hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions from New York City landlords, which he employed to preserve the Senate’s shrinking GOP majority.

With that majority now down to 32-30, Democrats hope that this will be the year they take control of the Senate — which, thanks to some artful gerrymandering, has been in GOP hands for all but one year since 1958. The Democrats are eyeing the seats of Serphin Maltese and Frank Padavan in Queens, who represent districts that were once dominated by Reagan Democrats, but are now increasingly immigrant and less sympathetic to the politics of white resentment. They also expect to pick off seats upstate and on Long Island, where the gross unpopularity of President Bush has hurt Republicans.

If the Democrats win the Senate, tenant activists want them to repeal the Urstadt law and high-rent vacancy decontrol within the first 100 hours of the 2009 session. A Democratic majority would greatly increase the chances of that happening, but would not guarantee it. In May, when Senate Democrats sent a letter to Bruno urging him to repeal vacancy decontrol, Minority Leader Malcolm Smith of Queens was among the three who did not sign it.

Perhaps Smith had his eye on the rivers of money with which New York real-estate interests water its politicians. Those now flow heavily toward Republican senators, but they also fund Democrats such as New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn.

“I think that Malcolm [Smith] is attempting to be the voice of reason,” Joseph Strasburg, head of the Rent Stabilization Association, the city’s main landlord lobby, told the New York Observer in late June. “Because clearly you would recognize that if that’s the direction the majority is going to go, then the people who provide resources in the real-estate industry clearly will not assist the Democrats in their endeavor to take over the Senate.”

All photos by Chris Cascarano

German Rodriguez

German Rodriguez drives an ice cream truck for a living. He supports his wife as well as his mother and father. Every morning he fills his truck with regular gas, and another tank with diesel fuel to run the generators that power his coolers. He pays about $100 to fill up his tanks, and the costs are still rising. It has caused him to increase the price of an ice cream cone from $2 to $3. Whether it’s a poor economy or the higher prices he is charging, Rodriguez says business is sagging. “It’s tough out here,” he says.

James Cromwell

Business has been slumping for James Cromwell, who sells sunglasses and belts on the corner of 14th Street and Fifth Avenue. To get his goods there, he takes a car service all the way from East New York in Brooklyn. Since gas prices have increased, so has the price of the ride. Meanwhile, due to a comatose economy, he is selling far less merchandise. “I used to make $700 or $800 each day,” Cromwell says, “now all I’m making is about $300 or $400 a day.” Cromwell supports his wife and two kids and pays an assistant to help him move his goods across the city. “It’s hard to even make half of what I used to,” Cromwell says.

Eric Thompson

Eric Thompson, a 16-year-old high school student, sells candy in Union Square to make pocket money and help the six members of his family. When he began his business several weeks ago he paid $7 for a large box of candy. Today, he pays $10 and fewer people are buying. “I’m making a lot less these days,” Thompson says.

NOT BUSINESS AS USUAL: A Cato Corner Farm employee packages goat cheese July 12 for a customer at the Grand Army Plaza Farmers’ Market in Brooklyn. Like other vendors at city farmers markets, Cato Corner has been hard hit by soaring prices. Photo by Jamie Lehane

Local farmers in greenmarkets across New York are being squeezed from all sides by rising prices linked to oil and natural gas. Foremost, the cost of transport to market has gone up. James Kelseo of Tree Licious Orchards in Port Murray, N.J., says the cost of traveling to market has risen from $14 to $50 in only two years. But that is only the start. Bill Maxwell of Maxwell’s Homestead in Changewater, N.J., says, “There have been price spikes, quite dramatic spikes … Everybody’s worried.” The rise in petrochemical prices affects everything from packaging, animal feed and fertilizer to the electricity needed for cooling and heating.

Kelseo says the price of fertilizer, which utilizes natural gas, has doubled this past year, impacting livestock producers. Increased fertilizer and shipping costs have been compounded by widespread floods in Iowa, which destroyed up to 12 percent of this year’s grain crop according to the Iowa Farm Bureau, leading to the price of feed concentrate rocketing upward by “at least 35 percent,” according to Liz MacAlister of Cato Corner Farm in Colchester, Conn. For DiPaolo Turkey Farm in Trenton, N.J., the cost of feed has tripled. Laurent Danthine of Arcadian Pastures, an organic meat company in upstate New York, says he has raised prices by 10 percent to cover the jump in prices of both gas and animal feed.

Many local producers are trying to absorb the costs without raising prices. Patches of Star Dairy in Nazareth, Pa., says it has switched to cheaper packaging, which reduces shelf life. DiPaolo has kept most products at the same price but is increasing the price of whole turkeys by a dollar per pound, the largest increase the family-owned farm has made since 1947.

Shoppers at the Grand Army Plaza greenmarket have noticed the increases but say they are committed to supporting local farming. However, a source in the greenmarket program, which organizes the 45 markets in the city, told The Indypendent that business could decline 25 percent this year compared to 2007, the most successful year in the market’s history.

While greenmarkets and local farms are in no danger of disappearing, individual farmers face uncertain futures. A squeezing of margins makes unexpected costs hard to manage and may push some over the edge. David Graves, a bee-keeper and owner of Berkshire Berries in Becket, Mass., has a heart condition but cannot afford employees on his family-run farm. He says medical insurance and bills cost him $1,800 a month and he can’t afford to miss a market.