"We'll give you something to cry about now, buddy"

So, some interesting responses after a post about Salem's bizarre system of mailing expensive printed-on-expensive-paper and expensively mailed (at nearly 7/9ths full first-class postage) non-bills to those of us who are paying our water and sewer bills via auto-debit every month.

First, the day after that post, LOVESalem HQ got another bill, for seemingly the very same ending date but stretching back into April -- no reason given for a second bill, the overlap, the different amounts on each, or even a note to say that I will not be getting charged twice. Nothing but "here, we'll be taking this." Naturally it also came with another wasted #10 reply envelope to throw away, along with the waste envelope it came in and the bill itself.

Maybe I'll get one for $70 after this post . . .

And then there's this from the assistant city manager, Sean O'Day, who is a very nice guy but who seems to have been listening to the IT Dept. whinge about "It's too haaaaaaaaaaard" for too long:

Thanks for sharing your views. By law we are required to provide a billing statement (even for those with automatic payment) and I understand your point to be that we should do so electronically. We agree, and this is something that staff has been working towards. Although electronic billing sounds easy, it is not as simple as it might seem given our current billing infrastructure. Nonetheless, we continue to work towards electronic billing because the City is indeed committed to both sustainable practices as well as keeping our operating costs as low as we possibly can for our residents.

Sorry, Sean, not good enough. Governments all over the world have been singing that song about why this and that stupid thing has to remain stupid because fixing it would require a massive overhaul of the computer system forever, and it doesn't fly any more.

In this day of Mac Minis more powerful than the mainframes of yore, telling me your computer is too stupid to print a bill to a pdf file and email that to a citizen's email address is the same as telling me that you have way too much deadwood in the IT dept and you need to clean house there and hire some high-schoolers.

If necessary, hold a contest to get it done. Go to Borderlands, tell the first five geeks you see that winner gets a case of beer, a case of Twinkies, and three decks of "Magic" cards for the first one to write an app that would allow any Salem citizen to manage the format of all their city communications using their cell phones. The law says you have to provide a billing statement. The law does not say you have to waste my money to do it.

Mark your calendar for Rythm at the Mill, Sunday afternoons

Looks like a very nice concert series coming up at Mission Mill starting July 24 and continuing July 31, August 7 and 28, and wrapping up Sept. 11, with all shows starting at 2 p.m., just $5 for Willamette Heritage Center members, $10 for non-members.

It's good to see these dates at that lovely venue -- it's difficult to keep a place fixed in an earlier time without making it a place people forget to make time for. Come check them out. They'll let you bring your comfy lawn chair and sell you some good local brews -- what better way to while away a summer Sunday afternoon?

No city actually serious about sustainability would do this

Salem's official flirtation with sustainability -- or at least the language of sustainability -- is one of those mixed bags.

On the one hand, it's basically at least a micro-step in the right direction. Anyone who really engages with the concept of what it means to be sustainable -- living so that the life chances and choices of people in the future are not degraded as a result of your own choices -- quickly recognizes how vastly different that would be from our automobile-dominated world and our foolish thoughts that we can continue "growth" forever.

The downside is that, once you start stamping a corporate style logo about sustainability everywhere and congratulating yourself for merely having gassed about it in enough big meetings, you make people who are actually concerned about it crazy when you do things like:

• Allowing corporations to spam doorsteps with littervertising, like the weekly coupon dump that the Statesman-Journal spews out each week, and the tons and tons and tons of worthless "yellow pages" that get vomited all over town each year, only to go directly into recycle bins;
  
  
• Willfully acting irrationally and wastefully as a government, showing that you really have no clue about sustainability or even smart governance.
  
  Case in point:
  
  Each month for three years now, the City of Salem has spent 34 cents to send me
  
  (A) a paper bill every month that is marked "DO NOT PAY" (because I have my water and sewer/stormwater bill automatically debited from my checking account)
  
  (B) Another piece of blue paper begging me to give a little extra money for people who have problems with their bills,
  
  (C) AND a spanking new return envelope.
  
  (D) In a business envelope.
  
  Every month, the entire thing goes straight into the recycling.
  
  In other words, even as budget troubles force Salem to cut back on essential services, there is apparently nobody in the entire city bureaucracy who both cares enough and is sentient enough to ask "Hey, if we're going to be all hot for sustainability, why don't we stop wasting money by letting the people who auto-pay their utility bills to opt-out of the paper bill?"

The real trouble with this kind of nonsense isn't just the huge wastes it represents.

It's also that it absolutely demolishes your credibility as far as concern for the environment, concern for smart use of the taxpayers' money, and concern for organization credibility.

That's a lot of damage from a single, stupid mailing each month, but there it is.

On the other hand, once in a while, when I'm in full rant mode about this, someone says "Hey, ease up, it's just a stupid little thing, don't get so upset."

Naturally, this about doubles my rpm, because if it's such a little thing, then why isn't it fixed yet? Why do I have to keep posting this same damn rant every year? There are so many easy ways this could be fixed, and the fact that it isn't just says volumes about Salem's priorities. We have a whole city agency devoted to the fantasy of bringing airlines to Salem, but we're not even smart enough not to pour money down the drain mailing non-bills to people who don't want them and don't need them. Pitiful.

A second, urgently needed Declaration of Independence for a new time

The Unanimous Declaration
of the Human Beings of the United States of America

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for humans to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all humans are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

• That to secure these rights, humans institute governments among themselves, which derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.

• That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
  
  Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
  
  
• Such has been the patient sufferance of the humans living in the nation born of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present United States, Inc. is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny of corporations over the humans in these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

• The Corporations have refused to suffer the passage of critical laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

• The Corporations have has forbidden governors and would-be human overseers to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till corporate lobbyists' can eviscerate them them entirely; and when unable to defeat such laws through outright bribery in campaign finance, have utterly neglected to attend to them.

• The Corporations have refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

• The Corporations have called together legislative and judicial bodies at places unusual, fantastically opulent and comfortable, and exceedingly distant from the media who might create public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into complete ignorance about their measures.

• The Corporations have improved their methods over the clumsy ones used by prior tyrants, for instead of dissolving representative houses repeatedly, the corporations permit them to exist, while drowning any authentic human representatives in campaign contributions, negative advertising, and phony "Astro-Turf" psuedo-grassroots campaigns, all designed to further invasions on the rights of the people.

• The Corporations have refused for a long time, to permit any but corporate vassals to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have been captured by the Corporations and used against the people at large; the state remaining thus exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

• The Corporations have endeavored to prevent the creation of unions by the human population of these states; for that purpose shipping entire factories overseas to destroy the livelihood of the humans here, while obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of work that would create jobs.

• The Corporations have obstructed the administration of justice, by a decades-long campaign to gut the independent judiciary and to appoint only those judges and justices who will not question the Corporation's capture of the judiciary powers.

• The Corporations have wielded campaign funds in the billions to make judges dependent on their will alone, for their ability to hold any tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

• The Corporations have erected a multitude of new "public-private partnerships," and sent hither swarms of semi-private police forces and prison companies to harass our people, and eat out their substance through public subsidies.

• The Corporations have kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of humans, by buying Congress.

• The Corporations have affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power through such criminal conspiracies in corporate form as Xe (formerly Blackwater) and other monstrosities.

• The Corporations have combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws known as the World Trade Organization, devoted to the immiseration of humans and the enshrinement of corporate control throughout the world; giving their assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

• For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us and in thousands of bases overseas, turning actual Americans into corporate mercenaries:

• For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states (see, Xe/Blackwater, Halliburton/KBR, and the entire CIA):

• For cutting off our human right to travel to and meet with people in all parts of the world:

• For imposing taxes on us without our consent by ruthlessly and criminally evading taxes while demanding unceasing public subsidies:

• For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury by turning the former Supreme Court into Supreme Court, Inc., hostile to all but corporate interests:

• For countenancing the practice transporting humans suspected of terrorism beyond seas to hell-holes like Bagram and Guantanamo be tried or not:

• For abolishing the free system of American laws throughout the nation, establishing therein an arbitrary government:

• For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments:

• For usurping the power of our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

The Corporations have abdicated government here, by declaring us second class citizens to themselves and waging war against us.

The Corporations have plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, destroyed our environment, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

The Corporations are at this time contracting for the funding, training, and equipping large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy of a civilized nation. (See, bin-Ladin, Osama, & the CIA)

The Corporations have promoted the impoverishment of the people such that they fight against unions and become the executioners of their friends and brethren.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attention to our corporate brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their boards of directors and CEOs to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common human kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

We, therefore, the representatives of the humans of these United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people, solemnly publish and declare, that we humans are, and of right ought to be free and independent of corporate control over our institutions; that we are absolved from all allegiance to absurd and abominable doctrine of corporate personhood, and that all political power residing in corporations, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent humans, we again have full power to govern ourselves as free peoples, free of interference from the fictional persons known as corporations, who must and shall be returned to their rightful status as legal conveniences for managing property only, with limited charters and without any of the rights of persons to participate in political affairs.

And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

Clean out your old linens and head to Marion-Polk Food Share this Saturday!

Maybe the most-important nonprofit organization in Salem, Marion-Polk Food Share, has teamed up with Sunnyside Organics and Women Ending Hunger to bring us a plant sale this coming Saturday, July 9, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Go find those old sheets and fabric odds and ends you're saving for "someday" and turn them into something useful now by bringing them with you to the sale, where you'll not only see beautiful plants that are perfect for transplanting, you'll also be rewarded with a free 4" herb start.

A great Sunday experience: Thompson's Mills State Heritage Site

Image by Koocheekoo via FlickrI'm kinda partial to entertainments that you can walk or bike to from within Salem, but there are times I'll make an exception, such as the always amazing Oregon Garden. And this one. Here's what I wrote to a friend after our visit last Sunday to "Thompson's Mills," in what was (briefly) Boston, Oregon.

Went to above named state park yesterday just south of Tangent, Oregon (near the booming metropolis of Shedd, formerly Shedd's Station, named after the station built after the railroad bypassed Boston, causing most of the town to be moved about a mile west to straddle the tracks, leaving nothing but the Mills behind, necessarily unable to move while dependent on water power).

Fascinating tour of the world made by hand. Mill established in 1858, run to produce human food (flour from local wheat) until about 1940 or so (unclear date) then they shifted to making animal feed mixtures and pellets (which uses steam, I forgot to ask what they made steam with). They were processing soy at the end, when in 1986, they converted to making just electricity (100 kW) for 20 years under contract to Pacificorps. The state bought it in 2004 and has made it a park.

They employed 12 men at peak. They first electrified in 1906, when the owner put a generator on the mill so he could run power to his house. The land originally was bought for $50 and the water rights for $75, and those rights essentially made them kings of the valley and enemy of the neighbors during summer months of no rain. It had to have been a hellish place to work in some respects, pleasant at other times. I imagine they were all deaf as posts after a few years.

The millstones were from France, the machines from Chicago and Saginaw and such places. You get the idea that we will soon be looking at those machines the way the south sea natives looked at airplanes, wondering how they worked and what magic we could call on to get them to work again.

With some money, the mill could be rebuilt to work, but the state is selling the water rights to ensure more water for salmon in the Calapooia River, which I didn't even know salmon could reach, since it ties into the Willamette above Oregon City, and I didn't think salmon got above the falls there.

Anyway, next time you come down, you should come down to Salem and we can go see it. It's worth a trip.

Doubtless there is no amount of money you could pay to get the Amtrak Cascades to stop in Shedd -- too bad, it would make a great day trip if you could buy an Amtrak ticket, go up and down the valley and walk from Shedd to Thompson's Mills with your lunch.

Saturday is chore day -- need a tool? Why not borrow one?

Image by takomabibelot via FlickrSalem Public Library has taken the first step in this direction, offering the "Kill-a-Watt" home energy consumption devices for loan. Now it's time to ramp up the offerings.

Our Finite World -- another must-read post

Image by -Mandie- via Flickr"Gail the Actuary" writes some of the smartest, easiest-to-read, plain-English explanations of why we're in for a world of hurt in her blog, "Our Finite World," which is mainly about our collective failure to recognize that finite nature. Another must-read is here.

A momentary ray of sunshine or an aberration?

Image by sroemerm via FlickrFinally, some great news. We're going to stop subsidizing the insane process of turning 40% of America's corn crop into 3% of our motor fuel supply (while making the climate much worse off).

Not that we're going to stop doing the insanity, but at least we won't be both hanging ourselves AND paying a juicy subsidy to those selling us the rope.

Comment from Friends of the Earth, one of the few major enviro groups to beam onto the disaster that is ethanol early:

We scored a victory this afternoon! Senators voted by a margin of 73-27 to end a major giveaway for dirty corn ethanol.

This vote is major progress in our fight to end subsidies for environmentally harmful industries -- progress that the pundits, as well as the powerful biofuels and agribusiness lobbies, would have called impossible just two years ago. But Friends of the Earth has been working with a diverse coalition of environmental groups, fiscal conservatives, agricultural interests, food producers and anti-hunger advocates to amass congressional support for ending ethanol giveaways -- and today we won bipartisan support from every corner of the country except the Corn Belt.

You -- Friends of the Earth members and activists -- own a big piece of this victory. Over the past two years, nearly 30,000 Friends of the Earth activists have taken action to educate policymakers about the environmental costs of corn ethanol and to call on Congress to end these subsidies.

Today, our voices were heard -- and senators sent a decisive message that the days of the biofuels industry living high off the taxpayers' hog have come to a close.

There is still more work to do -- the House still needs to vote to end the ethanol giveaway -- but today, join me in celebrating this win for the public and the environment.

WORD: The only way forward is by rebuilding the middle class