Elevate People, Not Boondoggles!

ELEVATE PEOPLE, NOT BOONDOGGLES!

As consultants and construction contractors in the Chamber of the 1% salivate over the prospect of spending further millions of your money to lay the groundwork to grab hundreds of millions more, it’s time for the people of Salem to send a clear message to every elected official within 100 miles:

It’s an obscenity to pour money down the planning rathole for a project that backers are trying to sell with an ever-changing rationale but will never be built, in a city that is so apathetic to the actual residents’ needs that it doesn’t even provide weekend bus service.

We’re against blowing four to eight hundred million dollars on an enormous elevated boondoggle. 

What are we for instead? It’s simple: we are for ELEVATING what’s right, not what’s wrong.

·      We support elevating people, not pork-barrel bridges.

·      We support elevating transit in Salem above the level of a third-world country.

·      We support elevating transparency over the backroom, backscratching maneuvers by politicians conspiring with their campaign funders, the maneuvers that produced this camel pretending to be a racehorse.

·      We support elevating honest government instead of the profits of the CH2M-Hills and the others sucking at the teat of a giant pork project.

·      We support elevating health for people by spending on projects that support biking and pedestrians, not just drivers.

·      We support elevating downtown Salem businesses, not the ones in Keizer and beyond West Salem.

·      We support elevating the needs of the “bridgehead” neighborhoods over the profits of the contractors who want to destroy those neighborhoods.

For all those reasons and more, that is why we support elevating the “Salem River Crossing” just enough to drop it in the trash can and move on to more important things.

George Orwell knew the Salem Statesman-Journal well

The new drive-by corporate boss dropped into Salem briefly haz a sad.  Some of the rabble have noticed that it's hard to do journalism about folks you only approach on bended knees.  So Newguy recycles the old tropes about "conspiracy theorists" imagining phone calls to tell the paper what to print.

Well, anyone paying attention knows that nothing could be further from the truth than any suggestion that it requires a phonecall from the Chamber of the 1% to tell the Statesman-Journal what to cover, who to favor and who to marginalize. After all, as George Orwell observed years ago,

Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip. -- George Orwell

Great Stuff - Oregon Common Cause Rips Away ALEC's Cloak of Darkness

[ALEC is essentially the stormtroopers in the trenches for the Koch Brothers' war against democracy.]

Do you know who ALEC is? Chances are, your elected representatives do.

Join us Thursday December 5th for a special screening of The United States of ALEC, a documentary film narrated by Bill Moyers that examines how corporations and lawmakers are colluding to write laws and remake America one state house at a time.

After the film, you’ll hear briefly how ALEC model-legislation is playing out here in Oregon, including the special session “grand bargain” deal preempting GMO labeling, and upcoming ballot measures to undermine Oregon’s clean energy laws and weaken our right to organize in labor unions.

You won't want to miss out on this informative evening, please RSVP today!

WHEN:    Thursday December 5th, 7 p.m.
WHERE:    Grand Theater, 191 High St NE, Salem
TICKETS:    Just $5.00

Counting among its members some 2,000 state legislators and business executives, ALEC passes cookie-cutter pro-corporate model bills through state houses across the country -- without the public ever knowing who's behind it.

Bill Moyers describes ALEC as "the most influential corporate-funded political force most of America has never heard of."

Join us to learn how to combat this secretive special interest-funded effort to rewrite our state's laws.

Tickets for this event are a bargain $5. We are looking forward to seeing you there!

Sincerely,
  
Kate Titus
and the rest of the team at Common Cause

Internet freedom under corporate assault again

 Click on each image to enlarge.

The problem with talking about "corporate corruption" is that it's like accusing a skunk or an outhouse of having a bad smell -- corporations aren't corrupt or non-corrupt, they're just being corporations.

Corporations aren't people, they're inhuman machines that are designed for one and one thing only: seeking and grabbing more profits. 

They're like sharks, which are designed for one and one thing only, finding and consuming prey.

Like sharks, corporations are efficient and relentless. They're fine in their place -- but that place is NOT in policy making roles, because their amoral nature means that the only thing they can see or think about is more profits.

Corporations cannot recognize values of fairness and access any more than a shark can recognize the value of a great painting.

Take action, before the telecomm sharks eat us alive.

http://www.commoncause.org/site/pp.asp?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&b=8799039

Fighting back against The Enemy of the Human Race (coal)

"The earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses."  - Utah Phillips

After the hottest summer in recorded history, extractive industries are still attempting to dig in the backyards of communities across the country, release carbon into the air, and poison people in their all-consuming quest for more dirty energy.

As author and veteran climate activist Bill McKibbon recently wrote, "It has become a rogue industry, reckless like no other force on Earth. It is Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization." He lays out in concrete numbers what most of us know - that climate change is real, it is caused by humans, and the reason it is happening is simple: greed.

What we don't hear as often is what groups are doing to fight back. And RESIST grantees are not standing idly by – they are on the frontlines of the devastation. Yes, these are the wealthiest most powerful corporations in the world, but that's not stopping grantees such as Citizens for Huerfano County and Erie Rising in Colorado, or Beyond Toxics in Oregon, or United Mountain Defense in Tennessee.

And this RESIST Newsletter shares a few of their stories...

Confronting Energy Tyranny
By Ceal Smith
An aggressive energy boom is sweeping across the country. And although the technologies are new, the consequences for the people and the planet are familiar. For those caught in the crosshair, hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) and massively scaled, remote-concentrated solar are two of the newest yet most disastrous dangers being forced upon our communities and the planet.

One City, Two Worlds
By Lisa Arkin
Eugene, Oregon is actually two different communities, with two different standards for the environment and public health. And when one of those communities is home to poorer families, more immigrants and more people of color, it seems to have fewer rights to health and safety. And then the polluters come knocking.

Polluters: Kiss Your Profits Goodbye
By James Kane
It’s a cold, rainy November morning on the slopes of an abandoned strip mine somewhere in the southern Appalachians. Dead grass carpets the slowly decaying, slumping piles of mining waste, hurriedly piled against the vertical gashes in what was once a mountain ridge. Mining companies abandoned this place long ago, but someone refuses to forget.

Read and download the entire Newsletter here.

All of these groups are RESIST grantees. They are fighting for the survival of their communities and for the planet by taking on the largest corporations in history. Your support makes that possible. Please donate now!

259 Elm Street | Somerville, MA 02144 US

Related articles

• Coal fight looms, Keystone-like, over US Northwest.
• Five Reasons to Stop Coal Exports in Its Tracks

New Long-Term Care Insurance Claims Protections | The Lund Report

Hat tip to the invaluable Lund Report:

New Long-Term Care Insurance Claims Protections

By: 

Oregon Insurance Division 

 

July 10, 2012 -- Oregonians who have long-term care insurance now have the right to have their claims paid promptly and to appeal an insurance company decision to deny benefits.

The changes are due to a 2011 law that became effective for people who buy new policies starting July 1, 2012. For those with existing policies, the law is effective when their policy renews, meaning it will be phased in over a year’s period.

“Consumers with long-term care insurance policies have not had the same protections as consumers with other health insurance claims, yet they are some of the most vulnerable Oregonians,” Oregon Insurance Commissioner Lou Savage said.

“Now, people with long-term care insurance or their representatives can more easily challenge claim denials or delays, which are the most typical complaints we receive,” Savage added. . . . . (more)

A sobering talk on what's really going on in the financial world

About 20 minutes. Well worth the time.

Memorial

h/t Sam Smith

Amen: David Cay Johnston

Johnston deserves a Pulitzer or two.  Sadly, none of what he writes about will change until we stop corporations from writing the rules

America's long slope down Posted: 20 Jun 2012 12:18 PM PD

A broad swath of official economic data shows that America and its people are in much worse shape than when we paid higher taxes, higher interest rates and made more of the manufactured goods we use. The numbers since the turn of the millennium point to even worse times ahead if we stay the course. Let's look at the official numbers in today's dollars and then what can be done to change course.

First, incomes and jobs since 2000 measured per American: Internal Revenue Service data show that average adjusted gross income fell $2,699 through 2010 or 9 percent, compared to 2000. That's the equivalent of making it through Thanksgiving weekend and then having no income for the rest of the year. Had average incomes just stayed at the level in 2000, Americans through 2009 would have earned $3.5 trillion more income, the equivalent of $26,000 per taxpayer over a decade. Preliminary 2010 data show a partial rebound, reducing the shortfall by a fifth to $2.8 trillion or $21,000 per taxpayer. Wages per capita in 2010 were 4.3 percent less than in 2000, effectively reducing to 50 weeks the pay for 52 weeks of work. The median wage in 2010 fell back to the level of 1999, with half of workers grossing less than $507 a week, half more, Social Security tax data show. The bottom third, 50 million workers, averaged just $116 a week in 2010. Social Security and Census data show that the number of people with any work increased just 1.5 percent from 2000 to 2010 while population grew 6.4 times faster. That's why millions of people cannot find work no matter how hard they try. In May, nearly 23 million workers, 14.8 percent, were jobless or underemployed, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. At shadowstats.com, a website dedicated to exposing and analyzing flaws in government economic data, economist John Williams also counts people who have given up hope of finding work. His figure for May brings the total to almost 30 million people, one in five. PRESSURE ON WAGES An economy with many millions more workers than jobs puts downward pressure on wages, especially for those without highly developed skills. Now let's look at debt per American since 2000 using Federal Reserve data: Mortgage debt grew 51 percent through 2010, even though incomes and wages fell, which should result in steady or lower housing prices, not higher prices. (In 2011, as banks foreclosed on more homes, mortgage debt per capita declined, but was still 42 percent greater than in 2000.) Consumer debt was virtually unchanged, at nearly $8,300 in 2010, helping explain weak sales of automobiles, furniture and appliances. Now how about trade? Exporting more than we import creates jobs and riches. From 2000, the year before China joined the World Trade Organization, to 2011 imports from China grew 62 percent faster than exports to China, Census data show. The annual trade deficit soared to $302 billion from $112 billion. U.S. exports to China in 2011 ($106 billion) were smaller than US imports from China back in 2000 ($133 billion), showing the lopsided nature of trade with China, where workers lack rights, safety rules are minimal and pollution rampant. Some 56,000 American factories have closed since 2000, as jobs and the knowledge that goes with those jobs moved to China. Trade with China has destroyed every 55th job in America, nearly 2.8 million positions, analysis of government data by Robert E. Scott of the Economic Policy Institute shows. That equals wiping out every job in the greater Philadelphia metropolitan area. Nearly two million of those jobs were in manufacturing, Bureau of Labor Statistics and U.S. International Trade Commission data show. SHRINKING TAX REVENUE And what of taxes? The 2001 and 2003 tax cuts were promoted as keys to prosperity. Now Mitt Romney, virtually all Republicans and a fair number of Democrats say more tax cuts will make us prosper. President Barack Obama wants to cut corporate tax rates by a third. Again, measured per capita, the IRS data show a pattern of shrinking numbers, with modest upticks in 2010. Individual income taxes in 2010 averaged $2,995, down $1,654 or almost 36 percent from 2000. Use 2001 as the base year — because it was both a recession year and the first year of the temporary George W. Bush tax cuts — and in 2010 per capita income tax revenues were down one third. In 2011, as the economy improved slightly, income tax revenues rose, but were still 26 percent smaller than in 2000. The bottom line: less income, hardly any more jobs, sharply increased mortgage debt and Washington ledgers awash in red ink as voters are asked to endorse even more tax cuts. How many years of evidence does it take to establish that a policy worked or failed? Will continuing our current tax, credit and trade policies produce favorable results in the future? Will they produce higher incomes? My reading of this and tons more data is that the Bush tax cuts utterly failed, the Fed's artificially low-interest rate policies under presidents Bush and Obama do far more damage than good (especially to savers), and that the United States is harmed both by the imbalance in the trade relationship with China and scores of trade agreements with South Korea and other low-wage countries that are deeply flawed at best. We need to recognize that the tax cutters were snake oil salesmen, the Federal Reserve an enabler of damaging debts and that bilateral trade deals are written of, by and for global financiers, not workers. To paraphrase the Huey Lewis song, we need a new policy.

Email delivery powered by Google

Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610

Tuesday Night: Be There!

The Great Train Robbery ... By the Trainsters at Union Pacific, trying to hold US up!

House Bill 4028A: Oregon’s Union Pacific Gravy Train

 “If their tracks need repairs, it’s their job as a business, not ours as taxpayers, to fix them.” Jody Wiser, Tax Fairness Oregon, Willamette Week, Feb. 8, 2012.

 
 “Gravy Train,” the recent Willamette Week story by Kara Wilbeck, notesthat last year, Union Pacific Railroad had profits of $3.3 billion. Yet since 2006, under a law stating that Oregon should subsidize transportation businesses that “lack capital,” the state has already handed out $24.7 million tax dollars to this corporate giant.

The current legislative session in Salem is slashing school budgets and senior services, potentially closing a jail and counting every penny. ButHB 4028A is trying to add another $10 million to the $40 million already in the fund called “ConnectOregon,” for gifts to businesses and to public entities for multi-model (non-highway) transportation projects.

Of the 69 grant applications – most ask the public to do most of the spending
·       48 are for grants where the project owner will pay 25% or less of the project cost.  Thus the public through ConnectOregon will be covering 75% or more of the cost. 

·       11 applicants will cover 25% to 50% of cost.

·       10 applicants will cover 51% to 75% of the cost.

Of course there may be other grants or loans coming to the project owners from other sources, which would further reduce their own contributions. 
 
Of that additional $10 million for ConnectOregon, $8.2 million could go to UP. The gravy train just keeps rolling along.

Why is UP once again seeking Oregon subsidies? The corporate giant’s mouthpiece Aaron Hunt answers in discredited terms that should make taxpayers grab for their wallets: the corporation just “wanted to partner with the public” and create “trickle down throughout the economy.”

This is the type of taxpayer rip-off that giant corporations like to arrange behind the scenes, even as their mouthpieces are complaining about “big government.” 

In this short session, the next decision point in the state legislature is coming right away in the Capital Construction Sub-Committee of the Ways and Means Committee. Legislators there could add the extra $10 million--but passing out more cash to corporations is not acceptable. 

Please phone or email one (or more) of the committee members now and say “NO” to the $10 million ConnectOregon allotment in HB 4028A. Tell them to use our tax dollars to pay teachers to teach, not to pay for corporate-owned railroad tracks. Thank you.

Click here for talking points and the phone numbers and e-mail addresses of committee members.

Tax Fairness Oregon

I (heart) local bookstores! More reasons to avoid Amazon

http://www.mcall.com/news/local/amazon/mc-allentown-amazon-complaints-20110917,0,2859554,full.story

Book Bin on Court Street is it for Salem, afaik. Does Salem have any other locally, owned, general interest bookstores that carry new books?

WORD again

Unhappy birthday

On my birthday last fall, Common Dreams posted this painful but all-too-accurate article about the corporate assault on public schools by David Sirota.  Excerpt:

"Let's hope the fiscal crisis doesn't get better too soon. It'll slow down reform." -- Tom Watkins, a consultant, summarizes the corporate education reform movement's current strategy to the Sunday New York Times.(Monkey Business Images via Shutterstock)

The Shock Doctrine, as articulated by journalist Naomi Klein, describes the process by which corporate interests use catastrophes as instruments to maximize their profit. Sometimes the events they use are natural (earthquakes), sometimes they are human-created (the 9/11 attacks) and sometimes they are a bit of both (hurricanes made stronger by human-intensified global climate change).   Regardless of the particular cataclysm, though, the Shock Doctrine suggests that in the aftermath of a calamity, there is always corporate method in the smoldering madness - a method based in Disaster Capitalism.

Though Klein's book provides much evidence of the Shock Doctrine, the Disaster Capitalists rarely come out and acknowledge their strategy.   That's why Watkins' outburst of candor, buried in this front-page New York Times article yesterday, is so important:  It shows that the recession and its corresponding shock to school budgets is being  used by corporations to maximize revenues, all under the gauzy banner of "reform." . . .

WORD: Occupy Bankruptcy!

Bankruptcy -- a debtor's ability to escape permanent shackles of debt -- is so fundamental to our system that it is specifically provided for in the US Constitution.

Unlike, say, corporate personhood, an invention of the railroad lawyers who ran the country during the Gilded Age (as their heirs do today in the guise of "textualist" Supreme Court justices who are expert at reading the invisible text that only they can see, the text that elevates piles of money -- which is all a corporation is -- into supercitizens).

Related articles

• Judges Are for Sale--and Special Interests Are Buying (ideas.time.com)

Probably a good idea then

The foreclosure solution banks hate 

Ann Brenoff, Real Estate AOL - The loan modification programs have been a joke. You have a house that has tanked in value and the best the banks can come up with is: a plan where they sort of delay what you owe long enough for you to get back on your financial feet -- if that -- based on the flawed logic that the housing market is certain to improve in just a matter of months.

The real answer for what ails us is a Third Rail solution that banks don't want to touch: Erase some of the amount we borrowed, a process known as a principal reduction. To do so would share the burden of the housing crash with the lenders who helped create it. It would also allow us to get on with our lives, and, according to The New Bottom Line, save the economy in the process.

Banks would rather poke out their proverbial eyes with sharp sticks than offer principal reductions. Only 2.8 percent of all loan modifications in the first quarter of 2011 involved any actual sort of principal reduction, according to the ratings agency DBRS. And that number is actually up a full percentage point from the same time last year.

But some analysts believe that the industry-wide reluctance to perform principal reductions on a wide scale is actually what is holding back the housing recovery. . . .

OCCUPY SALEM TODAY: You say you want a revolution, well, you know ...

Image by Goldiefexify via Flickr

This crap keeps up and you might see some heads on poles soon.

Then there's this summary of our woes.

Combine those two pieces with the other recent reports showing banks and mortgage servicers have changed NOTHING and continue to fabricate documentation and commit frauds on courts when foreclosing people out of their homes and you wonder just how clueless these people are.

I am certain that the elites of Bourbon France sniffed that the message from the masses nearing the Bastille was incoherent.  Given Americans' propensity for violence and extremely well stocked gun racks, I pray that the elites here understand something about history, such as what happens to a society when the middle class is destroyed and impoverished.

High tech information processing and the globalization of trade, with the concomitant insecurity for all but the elites creates conditions conducive to tremendous and self- reinforcing inequality, like the positive feedback cycle that drives a microphone into a painful squawk of noise. The destruction of communities by the banksters and the corporate chieftains who insist that Henry Ford was misguided to care whether the people who built his cars could afford them is at the point where even relatively or apparently well-off folks are without any resiliency and cannot withstand any reversals, such as a serious illness or job loss.

Given that most people of a certain age played Monopoly as children (a game created during the Great Depression before this one), it's a wonder that more people don't remember that the game is a lot more fun when all the players have enough money to make deals and exchanges interesting and beneficial to both sides. Once someone establishes enough dominance to make the outcome a foregone conclusion, the fun stops and the grinding down starts, often right before people quit, often by turning over the table and scattering the game pieces to hell and gone.  It's not fun when it's a board game, much less when it happens in real life.

Surprise! Mitt Romney's favorite kinds of "people" are winning over the real ones

Any surprise that, with corporate owned media dominating nearly all avenues of public information, this is almost entirely unknown in America?

Don't be a sucker. Stay away from Payday loans.

Image via Wikipedia The only way to avoid being bled by payday loan outfits is to stay the hell away from them. Evidence here.

You should never be in a position where you have to pay money to cash your paycheck, or to accept a huge interest rate because you need a couple hundred bucks to get to next payday.

If you are financially strapped and don't know how to get on your feet or get ahead, then you need to do one thing first, ahead of anything else:

JOIN A CREDIT UNION.

Salem has a number of them, no matter who you are you can join one or more of them.

When you're ready to stop being sick about the Supreme Court hackivist justices giving corporations free reign over America

Image via WikipediaJoin and support POCLAD: The Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy.

Related articles

• The Supreme Court shows corporate America how to screw over its customers and employees without breaking the law. - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine (wpvins.wordpress.com)