STRONG Salem is for everyone who wants to help and participate in getting Salem, Oregon, to quit chasing Growth Ponzi Scheme plans and instead become a resilient, fiscally responsible place that lives by the wisdom that "Communities exist for the health and enjoyment of those who live in them, not for the convenience of those who drive through them, fly over them, or exploit their real estate for profit."
"Stay Calm and Go to the Top of the Foodchain"
Here's her full post:Fellow Citizens, we're not crazy and we're not stupid. There's always something we can do to disrupt the patterns of secrecy that create an unhealthy balance of power, especially now that we can network through social media. When you get that yucky feeling in the pit of your stomach about what's going on, dig in your heals and refuse to go away. Because that's what they count on. Not because our public officials and administrators are bad people. They're just like the rest of us, always slightly over-whelmed and trying their best to do some very complicated jobs – so, of course, it would be easier for them if we Citizens would trust their judgement and not worry our pretty little heads about these complicated political issues.
Ask questions. Get angry. Pick up a pen. Talk to each other. We are powerful, Citizens, and nobody is more important.
Stay Calm and Go to the Top of the Foodchain
Anger can be a very productive emotion if you learn how to use it properly. But it requires a conscious effort. Let's take a look at my most recent bout when I was being given the run-around by the Port Authority regarding Western & Southern's equity participation in Queen City Square. (See the blog post, Now I'm Pi$$ed)
1. Their Associate Counsel sent me a 63-page document that did not answer my question and told me to hire a lawyer to read it for me.
2. Since I had copied the specific employee who negotiated the original deal for the city on my request, this was very frustrating and I did not feel they were making a good-faith effort to supply the information. Grrrrrrrrr. The implication that I was too stupid to understand a legal contract did not help my mood and I started using terms like "that little pip squeak." Double grrrrrrrr. "Stupid" is the worst thing anybody can imply since I try very hard to do more homework than anybody else in any room. My poor husband – who really doesn't understand why I don't just mind my own business – had to pretend like he was listening to a lot of complicated real estate jargon that doesn't directly impact his life.
3. Then I slept on it.
4. And when I woke up this morning, I wasn't mad anymore and knew from the bottom of my heart that I was not a powerless, little insect that the Port Authority could flick-off at will, a mere annoyance on a list of much more important considerations. I am a Citizen and there's nothing more important.
Still in my nightgown, I created a multi-pronged plan to march towards change. And the change I'm looking for is increased transparency, a better educated electorate, and more meaningful community conversation. None of it requires casts of thousands or any money. It is a commitment of time, will, and faith in the intelligent goodness of my fellow citizens. I believe in us.
The first item on my action-list was to go back to the Port Authority and ask for the intervention of the woman who runs the show, Executive Director, Laura Brunner.
Hello, Laura. Christopher Recht has been very responsive in my recent requests for public documents regarding the Queen City Square project. But we seem to have reached an impasse on the question of any retained equity ownership of the building by Western & Southern Life Insurance or any of their affiliates. Since the building is currently on the market two years after completion and the Lessee can terminate the lease on or after October 1, 2015 this is important for the citizens of Cincinnati to understand.
Christopher's first response to my query was a one-page summation of the project financing and it clearly included no discussion of division of proceeds should the building be sold. When I told him that this was not the information I needed he sent the 63 page Lease Agreement and suggested I consult an attorney for interpretation of the document.I have seen a 15% percent retained ownership mentioned in other sources, so I am puzzled as to why I don't see any reference to such an arrangement in documents provided by the Port Authority. Susan Thomas negotiated the terms of the project for the City and I was hoping this would be a fairly simple question for her to answer.As Christopher implied in his most recent email, perhaps I don't have sufficient expertise to read and understand legal contracts without going to the expense of paying an attorney. But if that is the case, then I would suggest we need a uniform executive summary of the most important financial facts regarding each of the Port Authority's projects that is accessible on your website. I'm sure this improvement in communication would save a lot of valuable time for your staff in responding to inquiries such as mine. Currently there is no standardization and the information on Queen City Square appears to have been written by a public relations professional, seriously lacking in financial detail. Your biggest project to date by ten-fold, it deserves far greater transparency and I would be happy to volunteer my time to help the Port Authority develop a standardized format for use by elected public officials, citizens, the press, and commission members.In the meantime, I would very much appreciate it if Christopher could supply me with a reference to the particular section and page numbers in the Lease Agreement that pertain to division of proceeds on sale of Queen City Square. If my other source is wrong in regard to equity participation, that would also end our conversation and I could feel comfortable in my understanding of the relationship of the city to this project, but I would like somebody to say it out loud.Thank-you for your help,Kathy Holwadel
Fellow Citizens, we're not crazy and we're not stupid. There's always something we can do to disrupt the patterns of secrecy that create an unhealthy balance of power, especially now that we can network through social media. When you get that yucky feeling in the pit of your stomach about what's going on, dig in your heals and refuse to go away. Because that's what they count on. Not because our public officials and administrators are bad people. They're just like the rest of us, always slightly over-whelmed and trying their best to do some very complicated jobs – so, of course, it would be easier for them if we Citizens would trust their judgement and not worry our pretty little heads about these complicated political issues.
Ask questions. Get angry. Pick up a pen. Talk to each other. We are powerful, Citizens, and nobody is more important.
spirit of america / Shutterstock.com
August 8, 2014; Charlotte Observer
In a 2012 report, "Dental Therapists: Expanding Care to Every Community," the Kellogg Foundation reported that "roughly 83 million Americans face barriers to dental care." Dental care is critically important to people's health and well-being but it is often either priced out of sight or just not accessible so not only are community health centers offering the services more often but also free health clinics are popping up across the United States – as here in the Carolinas
...
Mission of Mercy also offers free clinics in many other states including Oregon where at dawn on July 14th, there were already about 300 people lined up, some having waited for 24 hours. The first two in line were Kory Brown who needed a root canal and his wife Leslie Bowers who was hoping for a removable partial denture, to replace a dead tooth.
According to the same Kellogg report there are good financial reasons why access to dental care should be a priority issue. "In 2006, Americans made more than 330,000 trips to hospital emergency rooms primarily due to tooth pain or other preventable dental problems. These ER visits cost nearly $110 million.For states, the financial penalty is severe. A study of Medicaid enrollees found that in-patient ER treatment for dental problems cost nearly 10 times more per patient than preventive care in a dentist's office."
August 12, 2014, 06:00 am
Who rules America?
By Allan J. Lichtman, contributor
"The public be damned!"
— William H. Vanderbilt, railroad magnate, 1882
A shattering new study by two political science professors has found that ordinary Americans have virtually no impact whatsoever on the making of national policy in our country. The analysts found that rich individuals and business-controlled interest groups largely shape policy outcomes in the United States.
This study should be a loud wake-up call to the vast majority of Americans who are bypassed by their government. To reclaim the promise of American democracy, ordinary citizens must act positively to change the relationship between the people and our government
The new study, with the jaw-clenching title of "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens," is forthcoming in the fall 2014 edition of Perspectives on Politics. Its authors, Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University, examined survey data on 1,779 national policy issues for which they could gauge the preferences of average citizens, economic elites, mass-based interest groups and business-dominated interest groups. They used statistical methods to determine the influence of each of these four groups on policy outcomes, including both policies that are adopted and rejected.
The analysts found that when controlling for the power of economic elites and organized interest groups, the influence of ordinary Americans registers at a "non-significant, near-zero level." The analysts further discovered that rich individuals and business-dominated interest groups dominate the policymaking process. The mass-based interest groups had minimal influence compared to the business-based interest groups.
The study also debunks the notion that the policy preferences of business and the rich reflect the views of common citizens. They found to the contrary that such preferences often sharply diverge and when they do, the economic elites and business interests almost always win and the ordinary Americans lose.
The authors also say that given limitations to tapping into the full power elite in America and their policy preferences, "the real world impact of elites upon public policy may be still greater" than their findings indicate.
Ultimately, Gilens and Page conclude from their work, "economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."
Rich individuals and business interests have the capacity to hire the lobbyists that shadow legislators in Washington and to fill the campaign coffers of political candidates. Ordinary citizens are themselves partly to blame, however, because they do not choose to vote.
America's turnout rate places us near the bottom of industrialized democracies. More than 90 million eligible Americans did not vote in the presidential election of 2012 and more than 120 million did not vote in the midterm elections of 2010.
Electoral turnout in the United States is highly correlated with economic standing: The more affluent Americans vote in much higher proportion than the less affluent. A study by Ellen Shearer of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern found that 59 percent of 2012 voters earned $50,000 or more per year, compared to 39 percent of non-voters. Only 12 percent of non-voters earned more than $75,000, compared to 31 percent of voters.
Ordinary citizens in recent decades have largely abandoned their participation in grassroots movements. Politicians respond to the mass mobilization of everyday Americans as proven by the civil rights and women's movements of the 1960s and 1970s. But no comparable movements exist today. Without a substantial presence on the ground, people-oriented interest groups cannot compete against their wealthy adversaries.
Average Americans also have failed to deploy the political techniques used by elites. Political Action Committees (PACs) and super-PACs, for example, raise large sums of money to sway the outcome of any election in the United States. Although average Americans cannot match the economic power of the rich, large numbers of modest contributions can still finance PACs and super-PACs that advance our common interests.
If only they vote and organize, ordinary Americans can reclaim American democracy and challenge the politicians who still echo the view of old Vanderbilt that the public should be damned.
Lichtman is distinguished professor of history at American University in Washington.
Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/civil-rights/214857-who-rules-america#ixzz3ACQfuVnA
Kevin Drum, who's been doing Pulitzer-quality science and policy reporting on the behavioral effects of environmental lead, has yet another item today, once again reporting a new paper by Jessica Wolpaw Reyes of Amherst, who's been doing the fancy number-crunching on the topic. No real surprise: in addition to greatly increasing rates of criminal behavior, lead exposure also increase the risk of other consequences of poor self-command, such as early pregnancy. Kevin draws one of the right morals of the story: that biology matters, while liberals and conservatives tend to unite in blaming everything on society, economics, and culture:
It's a funny thing. For years conservatives bemoaned the problem of risky and violent behavior among children and teens of the post-60s era, mostly blaming it on the breakdown of the family and a general decline in discipline. Liberals tended to take this less seriously, and in any case mostly blamed it on societal problems. In the end, though, it turned out that conservatives were right. It wasn't just a bunch of oldsters complaining about the kids these days. Crime was up, drug use was up, and teen pregnancy was up. It was a genuine phenomenon and a genuine problem.
But liberals were right that it wasn't related to the disintegration of the family or lower rates of churchgoing or any of that. After all, families didn't suddenly start getting back together in the 90s and churchgoing didn't suddenly rise. But teenage crime, drug use, and pregnancy rates all went down. And down. And down. Most likely, there was a real problem, but it was a problem no one had a clue about. We were poisoning our children with a well-known neurotoxin, and this toxin lowered their IQs, made them into fidgety kids, wrecked their educations, and then turned them into juvenile delinquents, teen mothers, and violent criminals. When we got rid of the toxin, all of these problems magically started to decline. This doesn't mean that lead was 100 percent of the problem. There probably were other things going on too, and we can continue to argue about them. But the volume of the argument really ought to be lowered a lot. Maybe poverty makes a difference, maybe single parenting makes a difference, and maybe evolving societal attitudes toward child-rearing make a difference. But they probably don't make nearly as much difference as we all thought. In the end, we've learned a valuable lesson: don't poison your kids. That makes more difference than all the other stuff put together.
We might begin this process by trying to understand diet as a psycho-socioeconomic phenomenon rather than as a matter of food access. There's a critically important aspect to McMillan's story that's essential to this shift in perspective: the people she profiles live lives defined by persistent scarcity—not necessarily food scarcity, but a generalized and even traumatizing kind of material instability. Absolutely nothing about their lives is secure.
Critics of McMillan's piece complained about how the low-income cohort she profiled possessed houses, cell phones, decent clothing, and televisions. Nobody mentioned how precariously close these people were to losing those things, much less the anguish such anxiety entails. One unexpected medical bill, one glitch with the car, one minor brush with the law, one argument with your shift manager—all these events could have sent the entire edifice of material life crumbling. And that's terrifying. The subjects pictured and videotaped in McMillan's story are not just overweight. They're scared out of their minds.
And being scared out of your mind affects how you eat. In their book Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir write that "scarcity captures the mind." Scarcity, they note, "has its own logic." It doesn't take much imagination to hypothesize that, if your entire material existence teetered on the edge of loss—that is, if you were obsessed with scarcity because you had to be—that you'd likely blow your limited food budget on a bag of cookies and fried gizzards rather than a peck of apples and sweet potatoes. Nobody's saying such a choice would be advisable in terms of maximizing personal or public health. To the contrary, buying crap over carrots means that you are driven to eat by a scarcity-induced craving for the most immediate and gratifying satiation—the kind that sugar, salt, and fat excel at providing. But you remain, in fact, a victim.
Of what? Critics of the American diet frequently note that obesity rates have spiked over the last 30 years. They tend, as they should, to excoriate food companies churning out obesity-inducing processed junk. But do note: The problem is much bigger than our sinister food corporations. Consider the political economy of the United States in the 30 years before our waistline started to expand epidemically. Between 1945 and 1975, wages increased in proportion to worker productivity, the federal government maintained progressive taxes and expanded social service programs, and—while not all Americans had everything they wanted—a majority of us lived lives in the middle class, mercifully free from the distorting logic of scarcity.
Payday lenders are like giant leeches on the neck of low-income working Americans. This corrosive product, that drains the resources of so many people until they have nothing left, survives because the industry spends crazy amounts of money on political influence and is able to convince consumers of a bunch of false premises.
Kudos to John Oliver for shining light on this problem in such an incredibly effective way. - See more at:
http://www.publicjustice.net/content/comedian-john-oliver-produces-remarkably-strong-piece-journalism-albeit-completely-profane-p#sthash.NUbyUKTv.dpuf
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