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."
On both sides of the Atlantic, grumpy is good in politics. Outsider is good. Plain talk is good. Trump's "Deal with it," is the phrase du jour.
Sanders wants to expand Social Security, take America to a single-payer European-style national health system, invest massively to restore America's crumbling infrastructure, make public college tuition free, get rid of "starvation wages" for workers, tax Wall Street trading, end America's wars, and break up banks that are too big to fail.
Want Solar Panels on Your Property? D.C. Will Help You Pay for Them.The administration of Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) announced Friday that the city's Property Assessed Energy Act program is officially open for business - and Nikolaev's soon-to-be-retrofitted gas station is its first client. The PACE program, which is tied to legislation the District approved in 2012, allows the city to finance energy upgrades through property tax bills."The solar-panel system always made financial sense, but the absence of financing was a big reason why I couldn't do it before," Nikolaev said. "It's definitely saving me money, and it's beautifying the station." More
IN THE WIN COLUMN
Maryland Redefines Value of Energy Efficiency
CMS is still making rules and could prohibit predispute arb clauses in nursing home contracts.
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/editorials/2015/08/19/editorial-nursing-homes-take-away-right-sue/32033361/
"We have all of the pieces of the puzzle that are needed to create sustainable food systems … we just need to put them together. It isn't a matter of choice, it is a matter of survival."
By Dr. Zahina-Ramos (Dr. Z)
He holds a M.S. degree in the biological sciences and a Ph.D. in geosciences.
Published Jan 2015
Sustainability is an entertaining and enlightening tale of how Dr. Zahina-Ramos turned his urban residential backyard into a research study to measure the many benefits of urban agriculture. This is no dry lecture based on puffed-up rhetoric. Dr. Z has skillfully accomplished one of the most difficult challenges- weaving heartwarming storytelling and scientific facts together in a way that even a novice can appreciate and enjoy.
The first half of the book takes the reader on a thoughtfully told journey through the history of food growing, from ancient times through the 21st century, carefully describing how our food supply has become dominated by an industrialized production system that is dependent on unsustainable practices and harms the environment.
By drawing upon historical fact, his family's experiences and stories told to him by food gardeners around the world, its eloquent message remains fresh right up to the end. The second half of the book gets down to the nitty-gritty of what sustainable urban food growing is and the numerous benefits it can give. Several chapters describe the social, environmental, ecological and economic benefits of urban agriculture in a way that has never been possible before- with hard numbers, rather than broad generalizations.
Even though the current unsustainable food system is fraught with problems, Dr. Z lays out solutions that can provide for the needs of the 21st century. The result is inspirational and empowering. This timeless work is destined to become the foremost book on the benefits from and necessity of urban food growing.
For the last forty years, mind you, America has been moving steadily along an easily defined trajectory. We've moved step by step toward more political and economic inequality, more political corruption, more impoverishment for those outside the narrowing circles of wealth and privilege, more malign neglect toward the national infrastructure, and more environmental disruption, along with a steady decline in literacy and a rolling collapse in public health, among other grim trends. These are the ways in which we've been progressing, and that's the sense in which the GOP counts as America's current progressive party: the policies being proposed by GOP candidates will push those same changes even further than they've already gone, resulting in more inequality, corruption, impoverishment, and so on.
Jan 19, 2008: LOVESalem reaches the web, bringing a vitally needed message to Oregon's capital city: We must Oregon-ize to put the needs of people before the needs of cars. This requires that we live our environmental values -- that we LOVE (Live Our Values Environmentally) Salem -- by working to stop the Sprawl Machine.
The Sprawl Machine is a ravenous beast that feeds on green space, close-in neighborhoods, and property taxes and that excretes monstrous, ugly road projects that pollute the air, increase mortality and morbidity, promote climate change, weaken families and neighborhoods, and help weaken the social fabric and civic participation.
The Sprawl Machine works by constantly luring its prey with promises that the problems created by cars can be addressed by doing more of the same -- building more lanes, more bridges, consuming ever more money. In other words, the Sprawl Machine promises that we can keep doing the same thing over and over, while expecting a different result this time.
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