Splitsville: Another cost of commuting

Image via WikipediaSalem suffers more from auto commuting than any place I've lived in a life filled with new addresses. There are two principal problems from the practice for Salem:

1) The people who live in Salem and work elsewhere drop out of participation in our community almost entirely. They don't serve on boards and committees or any of the other things we need from adults -- they wave off any suggestion of that by pointing to their grinding commutes up and down I-5.

2) Similarly, the many people --- like a certain Governor --- who take a Salem job but consider themselves too refined or hip to live here wind up sucking up resources and contributing nothing to our community. Basically, the only thing inbound commuters want from Salem is free parking. They don't shop here, join here, recreate here or do anything but take money out of the community and impose the costs of their auto-dominated view of the world, where the only thing that matters is how quickly they can get in and out with their gelt.

They also impose higher costs on the state as a whole, because children of divorce are unhealthier and cause a lot more problems:

Indicators: Costs of Commuting

Slate - This week, researchers at Umea University in Sweden released a startling finding: Couples in which one partner commutes for longer than 45 minutes are 40 percent likelier to divorce.

A survey conducted last year for the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, for instance, found that 40 percent of employees who spend more than 90 minutes getting home from work "experienced worry for much of the previous day." That number falls to 28 percent for those with "negligible" commutes of 10 minutes or less. Workers with very long commutes feel less rested and experience less "enjoyment," as well.

Long commutes also make us feel lonely. Robert Putnam, the famed Harvard political scientist and author of Bowling Alone, names long commuting times as one of the most robust predictors of social isolation. He posits that every 10 minutes spent commuting results in 10 percent fewer "social connections." Those social connections tend to make us feel happy and fulfilled. . . .

One of Salem's gems: A message from One Fair World (474 Court St.)

Another unsolicited plug for one of Salem's unique treasures:

The sun has arrived, and our garden pots and other outdoor items will help you make the most of it. We have kites, mats, windchimes, and more. Come visit us to find that perfect addition to your summer.

Pottery from Cameroon

Through our friends at Ten Thousand Villages we can offer this charming pot from Cameroon, with a pair of friendly, terra cotta chameleons pearched on its lip. These pots are made at the PRESCRAFT pottery center in Bamessing-Nsei, which provides a sustainable living for more than 70 artisans, while running a reforestation project with local farmers. You can learn more about this project at the PRESCRAFT and Ten Thousand Villages websites.

Another great idea from Sam Smith

Image by takomabibelot via FlickrSmith, author of "The Great American Political Repair Manual" and other gems, provides this:

Now that a federal judge has ruled that corporations can make campaign contributions directly, how about a national organization for those who will refuse to vote for any candidate who accepts such contributions? - Sam

We should get on it!

Coming soon to Oregon

Like Michigan, Oregon is bankrupting itself with "tuff on crime" sentencing policies that take discretion away from judges and give it all to prosecutors, who seek to shinny up the greasy pole by collecting as many scalps as possible, all the better to run for higher office with.

This is where this kind of thing leads -- a state gutting schools to pay for more prisons:

School superintendent asks governor to make school a prison

Dear Governor Snyder,

In these tough economic times, schools are hurting. And yes, everyone in Michigan is hurting right now financially, but why aren’t we protecting schools? Schools are the one place on Earth that people look to to “fix” what is wrong with society by educating our youth and preparing them to take on the issues that society has created.

One solution I believe we must do is take a look at our corrections system in Michigan. We rank nationally at the top in the number of people we incarcerate. We also spend the most money per prisoner annually than any other state in the union. Now, I like to be at the top of lists, but this is one ranking that I don’t believe Michigan wants to be on top of.

Consider the life of a Michigan prisoner. They get three square meals a day. Access to free health care. Internet. Cable television. Access to a library. A weight room. Computer lab. They can earn a degree. A roof over their heads. Clothing. Everything we just listed we DO NOT provide to our school children.

This is why I’m proposing to make my school a prison. The State of Michigan spends annually somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000 per prisoner, yet we are struggling to provide schools with $7,000 per student. I guess we need to treat our students like they are prisoners, with equal funding. Please give my students three meals a day. Please give my children access to free health care. Please provide my school district Internet access and computers. Please put books in my library. Please give my students a weight room so we can be big and strong. We provide all of these things to prisoners because they have constitutional rights. What about the rights of youth, our future?!

Please provide for my students in my school district the same way we provide for a prisoner. It’s the least we can do to prepare our students for the future...by giving our schools the resources necessary to keep our students OUT of prison.

Respectfully submitted,

Nathan Bootz, Superintendent, Ithaca Public Schools

The evil of the "Health Insurance" mafiosi

There are no words to fully capture the evil of the health insurance gangsters who have worked tirelessly to line their pockets at the expense of the rest of us, producing things like this: forcing people to hold bake sales and benefits to help pay for the medical costs of accident victims.

Two things to note:

1) Cars are deadly weapons. Inattention, fatigue, zoning out, cell phone conversations (hands free or not) -- all these things can make you a murderer or a person guilty of disfiguring and maiming someone else.

2) The suits in the insurance industry, every last one, should tremble at the thought that there might be a just God in Heaven. For, if so, they will all fry in Hell for eternity for conspiring feverishly to preserve our "free market" health care financing system, where the only "free market" is for those with the cash to pay their bills.

As on the Columbia, so too here in Salem on the Willamette

Image via WikipediaThe Highway Lobby just never met a huge boondoggle it didn't love. Everything described above in that story to the tune of around $4 billion (liar's budget before overruns start) is proposed for Salem's new third auto bridge too, liar's budget about $600 million.

They're sure hoping you won't mind paying tolls even as gas prices are peaking over $4 and will never drop again for any sustained period (unless the economy collapses even further due to high gas prices) -- and they also hope you won't notice that people are driving less, not more. And that fewer and fewer young people bother with cars in the first place.

Why we must amend the Constitution to abolish Judicially Invented Corporate Personhood

Image by vj_pdx via FlickrThe Right in this country loves to whine about "judicial activism" whenever there's a decision that they don't like -- forgetting entirely that, in the whole history of the United States, nothing compares to the judicial activism of a former railroad president who was serving as chief clerk for the US Supreme Court and who, with the issue never briefed or argued, inserted a "headnote" (a shorthand synopsis of a point of law) into a case where the point of law in question --- whether corporations had the rights guaranteed to persons under the 14th Amendment --- was never even discussed, much less decided.

This cataclysmic and radically destabilizing notion wildly metastasized throughout the 20th Century, to the point where now, the US high court is best described as the "Supreme Court, Inc." -- happily willing to see even fully innocent people executed, but ever solicitous for the needs of corporations.

This is why we need a pro-human movement all over America, to amend the Constitution to reject the bizarre concept that a corporation . . . a fictitious legal being that consists, essentially, of nothing but a pile of money . . . has the rights of real persons.

Sam Smith nails it:

Judge puts another nail in constitutional coffin

Alternet - Reagan-appointed federal Judge James Cacheris just ruled that corporations have a constitutional right to contribute money directly to political candidates.

Today’s decision extends beyond the egregious Citizen United decision because Citizens United only permits corporations to run their own ads supporting a candidate or otherwise act independently of a candidate’s campaign. Cacheris’ opinion would also allow the Chamber of Commerce and Koch Industries, for instance, to contribute directly to political campaigns.

If today’s decision is upheld on appeal, it could be the end of any meaningful restrictions on campaign finance ­ including limits on the amount of money wealthy individuals and corporations can give to a candidate. In most states, all that is necessary to form a new corporation is to file the right paperwork in the appropriate government office. Moreover, nothing prevents one corporation from owning another corporation. Thus, under Cacheris’ decision, a cap on overall contributions becomes meaningless, because corporate donors can simply create a series of shell corporations for the purpose of evading such caps.

Although the corporate media will deny this, assuming the Supreme Court backs this decision, it will be absolutely accurate to describe America now as a semi-fascist state.

Sam Smith, 1990 - The S&L solution has the hidden goal of moving America towards increasing financial oligopoly. The government is prepared to guide, assist, regulate and tax to accomplish this goal. This sort of economic policy has been seen before in fully developed form and it has a name: fascism, described by Mussolini biographer Adrian Lyttelton as "the product of the transition from the market capitalism of the independent producer to the organized capitalism of the oligopoly." As Italian fascist economic theorist Alfredo Rocco put it, such an economy "is organized by the producers themselves, under the supreme direction and control of the state."

A must-read on "higher ed"

Image via WikipediaWord is beginning to get out about the higher ed bubble ... first there's this great piece by a community college prof who laments the absurd idea that we need to give everyone a college degree to do the kind of jobs that make up most real work.

Then there's the welcome and long-overdue news that Illinois Senator Dick Durbin is actually proposing to cut off the fuel to the five-alarm blaze of destruction by allowing student loan debts to be discharged in bankruptcy. In my practice, I don't go a week and often not a day without a call from students or even from people who should be doing everything possible to save for a soon-to-arrive retirement but who are being eaten alive by student loan debt, debt that they can never, ever earn enough to repay, because that's what the Ed bubble means, just like the real estate bubble before it -- you bought high and can only sell low, if at all

Meet Marion-Polk Food Share's New Community Garden Coordinator

Image via Wikipedia

Hi folks.

It’s my pleasure to introduce Ingrid Evjen-Elias, the new Gardens Resource Coordinator with the Marion-Polk Food Share Community Gardens Program. Ingrid comes to us with a depth of gardening and horticultural knowledge, as well as experience with community organizing and coordination. Aside from working with Food Share, she runs the Heartwheel Farm CSA in Sublimity, Oregon.

-Ian

To reach Ingrid:
503-798-0457
ievjenelias@marionpolkfoodshare.org

See below for an intro from Ingrid herself.

Greetings Fellow Gardeners!

My name is Ingrid Evjen-Elias and this is my first week here at the Marion-Polk Food Share. I’ll be joining Ian this summer as Garden Resources Coordinator, and I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself.

My principle job is to assist YOU, the community gardeners who make it all happen, in your endeavors. (Ian will continue to be available of course, but part of my role is to free him up to work on more big-picture aspects of our program such as food systems development and demonstration sites). Much of what I do will involve getting you the supplies, volunteers, starts and seeds you need for your garden. I also am available to help with garden consultation and troubleshooting. So if you need something, please email or give me a call! Together we just may come up with a solution…

Please know that I consider it an enormous privilege to be able to join you and MPFS in the local food-growing revolution here in Marion-Polk counties. This week I had a chance to tour quite a few of the community gardens blossoming in the Salem area, and WOW! Your dedication to cultivating these lovely oases of sustainability and food production is awe-inspiring.

Please feel free to contact me at 503-798-0457. In general I’m available to assist you Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays.

“Let the beauty we love be what we do,” says the poet Rumi. “There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” Thank you so very much for your efforts to grow wholesome, life-infused food. I look forward to meeting you, and to a season of working and playing in the gardens!

Blessings and solidarity,

Ingrid

Ian Dixon-McDonald
Community Gardens Director
Marion-Polk Food Share

T: 503-581-3855 x329
C: 503-798-0339
F: 503-581-3862
E: imcdonald@marionpolkfoodshare.org
1660 Salem Industrial Drive NE
Salem OR 97301-0374
www.marionpolkfoodshare.org/
www.marionpolkgardens.ning.com

Tell Council to Stop Junk Littervertising! Weak proposed ban that would only make it harder to stop Junk Littervertising

The Salem City Council is being seriously misled on the effort to stop junk littervertising, the means by which local businesses grab private advertising profits but shove higher costs onto city taxpayers by making us pay to pick up and dispose of their littervertising.

The city staff has refused to recommend that the city create an opt-out directory that would let you put your address on a "Don't Littervertise Here" list (or, even better, an opt-in list where they would only be allowed to littervertise to people who specifically request it). Rather, the lame-o ordinance currently being discussed would actually have the effect of legalizing the littervertising if it was placed on your front porch or tied to the doorknob.

In other words, what started as a reasonable effort to let residents stop a nuisance has been twisted into an overly bureaucratic and costly proposal (complete with complaint form that puts the burden on the littering victims instead of the junk littervertisers).

But there's still time to get your comments in:

April 25, 2011 City Council minutes read:

Ordinance Bill No. 15-11 Relating to Solid Waste; Creating New Provisions; Amending SRC 47.245 (Unsolicited Written Materials) (CD)

Persons Testifying: Support: Cherie Bennett, Ward 1 Leslie Polson, Ward 1 Richard Pine, 1630 Summer Street SE
Oppose: Neutral:

Organizations: Support: Alan Scott, Chair, NEN
Oppose: Rich Ottensmeyer, Controller of Operations, Statesman Journal Don Robinson, Delivery Manager, Statesman Journal
Neutral:

Evidence Received From: Support: Alan Scott, Chair, NEN Leslie Polson, Ward 1 Oppose: Neutral:

Questions or Comments by: Mayor Peterson, Councilors Clem, Dickey, Thomas, Cannon, Tesler, and Guest Councilor Nanke.

Motion: Move to close the hearing and keep the written record open for 90 days. Motion by: Councilor Bennett Seconded by: Councilor Cannon

----

So Email the whole council with one click here. Tell them that you are sick and tired of junk littervertising, tired of paying to recycle or haul away junk ads you didn't ask for and don't want, and that you are tired of seeing the damn things laying all over, unrequested, and letting criminals know which houses are unoccupied.

If San Francisco and Seattle can pass strong anti-littervertising ordinances, so can Salem!