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Reader Participation Post: Send link to this post to your Legislators

Pretty covers, but lacks a lot in the way of consumer protections. Image via Wikipedia

Sometimes I emerge from LOVESalem HQ and head over to Legal Aid to volunteer in the ELVIS program (Elder Law Volunteers in Service . . . cute, no?). And one thing I've learned as a result is that Oregon has really, really, really weak consumer protection laws, and very few chances for a regular person to hold their own against the corporate bullies.

One of the worst scams I've seen is people who fall for the "teaser" rates offered in service contracts --- such as for cell phones, home alarm systems, gym memberships, etc. The way the scam works is that smiling, blow-dried young person gets unsophisticated older person to sign on the dotted line by hiding the total cost of the package. Nowhere is the mark (the sucker) ever told what they're actually going to pay each month and they are never, ever told how much they'll have to pay in total to avoid the harsh penalties for trying to wriggle off the hook once it's been set.

Thus, a proposal: A new section in the Oregon Revised Statutes chapter on Trade Practices (ORS 646) --- a proposal to require full-cost disclosure in any consumer service contract, meaning that the seller has to actually tell you

(a) the full cost, with all taxes and fees, that you'll have to pay every month;

(b) the total you'll have to pay over time to avoid any penalty for early cancellation;

(c) the total remaining each month that you'll have to pay to avoid a penalty, and the amount of the penalty.

In other words, this is simply a straight disclosure law that would be easy for any reputable business to satisfy. Here's a first shot at the text, but that's subject to change.

YOUR PART: Send a link to this post to your state senator and representative and ask them to introduce a bill to put this statute into the books ASAP.

Here's the link! Just copy it into an email and send it to your Legislators with a short note explaining that you live in their districts and want better consumer protections for Oregonians:
http://lovesalem.blogspot.com/2010/04/reader-participation-post-send-link-to.html

Chapter 646 — Trade Practices and Antitrust Regulation

646.190 Full-Cost Disclosure on Service Contracts.

1. No consumer services contract may impose any fee, charge, or penalty (including loss of otherwise-available discount) against the buyer for early service termination unless, when the contract was signed, the offeror disclosed and the buyer acknowledged in writing a disclosure the same or substantially the same as follows, with the specific amounts included:

   “OREGON FULL-COST INITIAL DISCLOSURE: This contract includes a penalty provision for early termination of $________. The total of payments, including taxes and incidental charges required to avoid any early termination fee or penalty under this offer is $________.”

2. Every invoice under such a service contract must include updated information to advise the consumer any remaining amount owed under the contract to avoid a fee, charge, or penalty and the amount of the fee, charge, or penalty that would be imposed if the service contract was cancelled before the invoice is paid.

“OREGON FULL-COST BILLING DISCLOSURE: As of the date of this statement, the total of payments, including taxes and incidental charges, required to avoid any early termination fee or penalty under this contract is $________.” The penalty for early termination as of the date of this statement is $________.

3. Any person or entity that offers a service contract or issues an invoice on a service contract without properly and accurately disclosing the remaining total of payments needed to avoid a penalty and the amount of the penalty shall not be allowed to collect any penalties under those contracts or to retain any penalties, fees, or charges collected in violation of this section.


4. The Attorney General or any consumer who enters into a service agreement but who is not given the required Oregon full-cost disclosure or who receives an invoice without an accurate Oregon full-cost billing disclosure shall have standing to bring a civil action to recover court costs, attorney fees, and the greater of $500 or treble the amount of the penalty improperly imposed or not properly disclosed.

To the Oregon GOP: More like this, please

Image via Wikipedia

The Oregon GOP has suffered from such a severe case of advanced delusional paranoia for so long now that it's teetering on the edge of total irrelevancy, which isn't really a good thing.

At LOVESalem HQ, we're no fans of the "two party system" -- we'd all be much better off with a healthy system of MANY parties, but that's not going to happen as long as we are afflicted with the winner-take-all rules that the two major parties have written into law to abet their takeover and to exclude any alternatives to the duopoly.

But, given what we're stuck with for now, it would be helpful if the GOP would stay on the good side of the sane/insane divide and offer more candidates like this more often.

(And Hall of Shame nomination for the SJ headline writer who casts Castillo and Maurer as "foes" -- two candidates running for the same office aren't necessarily or even usually "foes" or even opponents ... sometimes they're just two people who are seeking a job that only one gets.)

Tell the Candidates: Fix the Kicker, Build a Rainy Day Fund

Go here to sign the petition.

WATER IN OREGON: Not a Drop to Waste (LWV Study Report)

Image via Wikipedia

Water in Oregon: Not a Drop to Waste

Great observation on corporate personhood

From The Reality-Based Community

Step towards resolving Salem's budget woes: Privatize the Airport

One of the costliest things we do -- make roads to serve our huge, low-density city. Image via Wikipedia

Salem is in a sad state, budget-wise, and there's no solution in sight. We've built up a permanent structural deficit by sprawling into such a large, low-density suburb around a tiny lightly-populated urban "downtown" core that we will struggle increasingly harder and harder just to remain in place in years to come, as our money keeps flowing out of town to line the pockets of the asphalt makers and the oil companies that we've made essential by creating a place where a car is not just helpful but absolutely required. We've let the bus system collapse, for example, eliminating weekend and late-night service, so people are trapped if they don't have access to a car.

One thing we can do, though, is to stop pretending that Salem needs a publicly-owned airport to call its own. Because it's publicly owned, the airport property pays no taxes; instead, it is a tax sink, and an opportunity for contracting boondoggles like the recent $5 million upgrade to the "passenger" terminal -- a sort of local "Bridge to Nowhere," since the airport had already lost its last subsidy queen airline at that point.

There's no reason that the folks who keep their planes and who want to fly in and out of Salem can't buy the airport and operate it as a private, taxpaying venture -- plenty of airports are privately owned. Then they can be efficient and not have to deal with the city government overhead and the vagaries of having hangar lease rates set at cit council meetings.

Just a bit of what you miss if you aren't a Friend of Salem Saturday Market

Image via Wikipedia

Two nice members-only tours coming up for Friends of the Salem Saturday Market (FSSM):

We received your RSVP to the Hamblin Nursery tour! The tour will be on Sunday, April 25, at 1 p.m.

Thanks for your RSVP to the Fairvew Farm Dairy tour! The tour is scheduled for Sunday, May 16, at 10 a.m.

If you want to get in on nice things like this, go over to the Friends of the Salem Saturday Market website and join in -- help bolster one of Salem's nicest attractions.

Nice article: Why backyard hens matter

Image by cafemama via Flickr

Here for the whole thing. Excerpt:

When we somehow have a hand in its creation, and locate food production within our cities and suburbs, food can bind us together. . . . Signs of the ongoing re-localization are easily found in such things as the increasing popularity of farmers markets, and the locavore movement. But even these signs, although positive, prove the need for further effort; most who sell at farmers markets drive miles to get there. And while real communal bonds form between food producers and their customers at the local market, at the end of the day, farmers return to their own community rather than being a part of the one where they sold their goods. The locavore movement has therefore moved the locus of food production closer for many, but not made it truly local, not put it at the center of where we live. Nor have food movements currently underway spurred true participation in the production process--like, for example, the raising of chickens in the backyard.

With civic agriculture, growing fruits and vegetables within communities, and keeping chickens, can come to be seen as something vital--a way to build bonds between neighbors, like my own mother would in walking around her neighborhood, handing out the overflow of her tomato-production, and freshly baked loaves of zucchini bread and carrot cake. The one story told at her memorial service that I will never forget is a joyful reminiscence, shared by a former neighbor, telling of how my mother taught them how to grow bountiful crops of tomatoes, how to prune for maximum fruit production, and what other vegetables grew well in the micro-climate of their neighborhood. He also recalled, again with great joy, all the cookies and cakes that my mother would bake and share with anyone who wanted one or two or three or more. "She fed the whole neighborhood, and loved doing it," he said.

I thought about my mother reading a recent essay in the New York Times magazine that discussed the growing phenomena of stay-at-home mothers taking up gardening, tomato-canning, and the raising of backyard chickens. The title of the essay is The Femivore's Dilemma, and I definitely recommend the essay in its entirety.[13] . . .

There is even an economic argument for choosing a literal nest egg over a figurative one. Conventional feminist wisdom held that two incomes were necessary to provide a family's basic needs--not to mention to guard against job loss, catastrophic illness, divorce or the death of a spouse. Femivores suggest that knowing how to feed and clothe yourself regardless of circumstance, to turn paucity into plenty, is an equal--possibly greater--safety net. After all, who is better equipped to weather this economy, the high-earning woman who loses her job or the frugal homemaker who can count her chickens?

I am not sure that my mother (or I) would agree with the idea that a woman growing her own vegetables is a source of "legitimacy"--as if not doing so would make one illegitimate, at least in the eyes of some. But there is no question that there is value in growing your own vegetables, a value that extends beyond the gardener, and the family, to the greater community. There is also a value in recognizing that it was not that long ago that families had no choice but to raise their own vegetables, and keep chickens for eggs and meat, and raise other livestock too. As Lyson helpfully reminds us about our country:

Less than 100 years ago most rural households in the United States sustained themselves by farming. While some agricultural products were sold for money on the open market, others were produced solely for household consumption or for bartering with neighbors.[14]

Thus, it was not for gaining a sense of legitimacy or personal fulfillment that households produced their own food; it was so as to not starve to death; it was to survive. Still, even in battling starvation, food was not "mere sustenance"--which is what the food is that lines the shelves of supermarkets, and the fast food we purchase at the drive-thru and gulp down on our way to whatever our next destination happens to be.

When people raise and make food to eat, and barter it in exchange for that which others made, true community ends up being built. To barter means also to share, and to interact with neighbors in a way that generates meaning and trust. You do not cheat someone with whom you will need to barter again. Such barter-exchange cannot be treated as a zero-sum game, it is something that requires that all participants benefit, and that no one lose. This is the sometimes overlooked moral of William Faulkner's Snopes novels and short stories, which chart the rise and fall of the Snopes family, a rise and fall both caused by cheating their neighbors. Such cheating variously harmed and helped many; however, its ultimate consequence was the destruction of a community, Frenchman's Bend. Where the exchange of goods does not engender trust, where you are as apt to be cheated by your neighbor as helped, there can be no bonds of loyalty, and thus no sense of community at all.

Well into the modern era, communities and villages throughout Europe were centered around not only local agriculture, but such things as community hearths where once a week or so local residents would bring bread to bake. One of the most memorable scenes in Jacques Pepin's excellent autobiography, The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen, was one that involved him being "loaned" by his mother during the summer to a farmer and his family to assist the area's communal efforts to keep everyone fed during World War II. Here is how he describes it:

Like every other household in Montvernier, the Merciers lacked an oven large enough to bake the dough Mme. Mercier had laboriously prepared. Instead, the people of the town share a massive common baking oven with the residents of a nearby village called Montbrunal. Bread-baking day had all the excitement of a carnival. Villagers greeted each other loudly and gossiped in small clusters. Kids ran about and played....

The oven seemed as large as a house, and...I watched the baker-farmer feed it with the pile of wood needed to bring it to the proper temperature. The smell of so much baking bread was enthralling. We stood there for hours. One after the other, farmers arrived with their loaves, two dozen or so each, and the baker would take over. At the end of the day, some farmers brought casserole dishes, containing anything from beans to cabbage, to be cooked overnight in the heat retained by the oven.

* * * *

Montvernier offered plenty of experiences for a young city boy...But for me the most impressive thing...was that wood-fired bread oven and the way it not only nourished but also brought together the people of two remote mountain communities.[15]

Word: "Now or Never" by Tim Flannery

Subtitle: "Why we must act now to end climate change and create a sustainable future"

A very short, fast read, with a surprising degree of optimism -- IF we act fast.

Should be available in Salem from Tea Party Bookshop, or Joanne will order it for you.