General Custer relied on a survey much like this before his last campaign

"Gosh, this isn't anything like our planning survey said it'd be." Image by jshyun via Flickr

For accurately reflecting sheer, undiluted, jaw-dropping obliviousness, this survey has to take the prize:

Your Input Is Needed!

Decision-makers from the Cities of Salem, Keizer, Turner and Marion and Polk Counties are working together to develop an Economic Opportunities Analysis (EOA) for the Salem Keizer region. A regional EOA identifies the regional competitive advantages and opportunities for long term economic growth. EOAs generally are created to ensure that there is enough land to meet regional employment and community objectives.

Your input needed on the regional economic study. Weigh in! Take the five minute survey now at http://bit.ly/cmUuTF”. The online EOA Survey will be open until July 30, 2010.

You can find additional information at www.mwvcog.org/planning/eoa or contact Suzanne Dufner the Council of Governments at (503) 540-1616 or sdufner@mwvcog.org.

Thank You!

Kimberly Moreland,
Senior Planner
503.588.6173, x7511
kmoreland@cityofsalem.net

Read over the questions and answers and you see a survey that's more accurately described as a push poll -- the chance for business groups to stuff the ballot box with votes for government to do more of A, or B, or C, depending on whether the voters personally benefit the most from A, or B, or C.

What are the real barriers to economic development in Salem-Keizer? How about:

(a) that the bedrock source of America's wealth and preeminence (oil) is at or near the final peak production rates (meaning that an inexorable, unstoppable decline begins, just as huge nations like India and China are wanting to ramp up demand);

(b) that peak oil means the end of economic expansion in a system designed to require continuous expansion and very badly suited to contraction, which will wipe out huge stores of capital;

and (c) that this occurs just as we need to invest massive amounts of capital in renewable and non-carbon-based energy supplies to have any prayer of limiting the destruction of climate chaos.

We've seen the planning mindset shown in this survey before: it's the same one that got the US mired in Vietnam and that General Custer displayed before his grand finale: a complete and total failure to engage with reality and a fantasy belief that planners can make plans and set goals without considering the forces that would tend to work against attainment of them.