Lest we forget

Image via Wikipedia 71% of national debt happened during GOP presidencies; 28% under Dem presidents
By John Aravosis

GOP Presidents Dem Presidents
$9.5 trillion $3.8 trillion

Total debt is $14.3 trillion.

$1 trillion of debt comes from before Reagan; $13.3 trillion accumulated from Reagan to Obama.

71% of the $13.3 trillion was under GOP presidents; 28% of the $13.3 trillion was under Dem presidents.

Dump George W. Obama, draft Bernie

Surprise! Mitt Romney's favorite kinds of "people" are winning over the real ones

Any surprise that, with corporate owned media dominating nearly all avenues of public information, this is almost entirely unknown in America?

What the press's obsession with Sarah Palin drives into obscurity

A for-profit media made up of corporate chains is not without a terrible cost. Salem suffers from a growing gang problem, and it's only likely to get worse, as the police and citizens adopt the same "war fighting" strategies that keep failing elsewhere. The Long Emergency now underway (an explosive sum of economic contraction + peak oil + climate disruption + zero-sum politics) means that all problems unwisely managed will become ever more frightening and expensive.

Imagine if the press cared more about helping the country -- meaning the ordinary people in it -- than it did about currying favor and lavishing attention on phonies like Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, and Michelle Bachmann. We'd probably know lots more about things like this:

Alternative ways to deal with juvenile offenders (h/t Reason, via Sam Smith)

Irene Sullivan, Reason - While researching a book about my nine years of service as a juvenile judge in the St. Petersburg/Clearwater area of Florida, I met dedicated people all over the country who have had success deterring juveniles from crime. I reviewed the data. I found that diverting kids from criminal careers could save billions of dollars a year in prison costs while helping to create law-abiding, productive citizens, thus enhancing public safety. Here are a few evidence-based programs that work:

Civil citations for first-time offenders. - Wansley Walters earned worldwide recognition as director of Miami-Dade County’s juvenile services division by working with law enforcement and social service agencies to help nonviolent first-time juvenile offenders avoid arrest. Instead they are given a civil citation and assigned to a program that matches their needs, such as drug counseling or shoplifting prevention. Without an arrest record, it is much easier to get a job, obtain a scholarship, or enter military service. Walters diverted thousands of kids in Miami, saving taxpayers millions of dollars that otherwise would have been spent on prosecuting and detaining them. From 1998 to 2008, arrests fell by 46 percent, re-arrests by 80 percent.

Redirection - Administered by Evidence-Based Associates, a project management company in Summerville, South Carolina, Redirection focuses on more serious juvenile offenders, those who are not eligible for civil citations. By providing in-home family therapy tailored to the needs of the youth and his family, Redirection seeks to prevent institutional commitment. In four years of operation in Florida, Redirection saved the state $36.4 million in juvenile commitment costs while “significantly” lowering recidivism, according to the Florida Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability. Why spend $45,000 a year committing a kid, sometimes just to give the family a much-needed break, when we can order the youth and family to cooperate with much less expensive in-home therapy that produces results?

Parenting with Love and Limits. - This nationwide re-entry program, designed by Scott P. Sells, an associate professor of social work at Savannah State University, is aimed at preparing juvenile offenders and their families for the transition from a residential commitment program back to home. In Florida, where Parenting with Love and Limits began as a re-entry program in the Tampa Bay area, PLL counselors engage the family in weekly “wound-healing” sessions while the youth is in a secure, locked-down, highly structured setting. PLL counselors continue to work with the family for weeks after the youth’s return home to ease the transition.

While early results with PLL in Florida are promising, Indiana’s PLL statistics, compiled by the Justice Research Center in Tallahassee under contract with PLL, are compelling. The one-year recidivism rate for the 189 Indiana youth served by PLL was just 16 percent, less than half the rate reported by the U.S. Justice Department based on data from eight states.

More wisdom from Sam Smith

A way under-appreciated national resource who ponders and comments from Casco Bay, Maine, but often delivers truths needed in Salem too -- like this great skewering of the corporate hack appointed to run the US Department of Education, the one federal cabinet department that really should be abolished entirely.

Yes, abolished. Not because education isn't important, but because it is, and the feds not only have no constitutional mandate to run it, but they also have no particular expertise and an abysmal record of accomplishment. The US Department of Education is doing to education what the Bureau of Indian Affairs has been doing to the first Americans for a hundred years or more, and what the US Department of Forestry does to forests.

What we need for education is not a cabinet department where gladhandlers and cheese merchants like Duncan can roost and find jobs for their buttkissing friends but an agency modeled on the National Institutes of Health or the National Academy of Sciences --- a non-partisan, non-political body with actual expertise, created to develop, test, and promote techniques that work and to debunk nonsense ... the kind of nonsense that underlays nearly every federal initiative in education, which have been pretty uniformly bad.

Eternal fundamentals of leadership (Rev. 8/14/11)

Sam Smith

I have been trying to understand the new eternal fundamentals of leadership according to the likes of Michelle Rhee, Arne Duncan and others who see government and non-profits as badly in need of corporate principles. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far. Please copy it promptly as I may be laid off later today with this post removed.

• Fire, don't inspire
  
  
• Test, don’t teach
  
  
• Statistics are just another form of adjective. Use them at will
  
  
• Treat everyone – including citizens, patients, students, teachers, and volunteers – as corporate employees.
  
  
• With enough public relations, personal relations aren’t necessary.
  
  
• Internal organization is far more important than external programs
  
  
• Statistical margins of error don’t apply when numbers improve. Acceptable progress need only be a decimal point away.
  
  
• Dismantle, don’t build
  
  
• Civility reflects inability
  
  
• Reserve all creativity for budgets and annual reports.

Best bet for today: Move to Amend Open House, 3 pm

The national campaign to Abolish Corporate Personhood and Defend Democracy.
Sign the Petition

* * *

Sunday, August 21, 2011 from 3:00pm-5:00pm

1285 Waller St SE, SALEM, OR 97302
See map: Google Maps

Come out to see our accomplishments and plans! We have completed language for a ballot
initiative and are ready to involve others in helping to spread the word about ending
corporate personhood.

Please feel free to bring a bring a friend!

Kerry Topel
707-337-7424

Move to Amend

P.O. Box 260217, Madison, WI 53726-0217

End Corporate Rule. Legalize Democracy. Move to Amend.

Sandra Steingraber speaks in Portland, October 20

Image via WikipediaSandra Steingraber is a true hero, a fearless voice on a terribly fearsome topic.

If you missed the great documentary about her work, "Living Downstream," as part of the Salem Film Festival 2010 at Salem Cinema, make sure to find it on Netflix, and you might want to go see her in October in Portland. There are only a tiny few speakers I'd post a notice about two months early, that's how good she is. Mark your calendars now.

Sandra Steingraber Speaks on Toxic Pollution

By:

Press Release

August 3, 2011 -- The Northwest Center for Alternatives to Pesticides (NCAP) is hosting a free public lecture with renowned ecologist, writer and cancer survivor, Sandra Steingraber, PhD. The event will be held from 7 - 9 pm on Thursday, October 20 at The Old Church, 1422 S.W. 11th Avenue in Portland. This event is free and open to the public.

As an authority on the interplay between pollution and human health, Steingraber will address the link connecting toxic pollution to illnesses like cancer.

Her seminal book, Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment compared data on toxic pollution and data from U.S. cancer registries to demonstrate a correlation. The book won praise from The Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, The Lancet, and The London Times, and was recently adapted as a documentary film by The People’s Picture Company of Toronto.

Steingraber’s other works, including the recent, Raising Elijah: Protecting Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis have won considerable acclaim for their exploration of the challenges and responsibilities communities face in a world that is increasingly polluted.

She’s won numerous awards, including Chatham College’s biennial Rachel Carson Leadership Award, the Hero Award from the Breast Cancer Fund, and the Environmental Health Champion Award from Physicians for Social Responsibility, Los Angeles. She has served as an advisor to the California Breast Cancer Research Program, provided Congressional briefings, and lectured on many college campuses.

A columnist for Orion magazine, Steingraber is a scholar in residence at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York.

NCAP is a non-profit organization that works to protect community health and the environment through research, organizing and advocacy to promote alternatives to pesticides. They are based in the Northwest and have been active in pesticide reform efforts for over 30 years.

Think climate change is a hoax?

Sure wish you were right.

On the information superhighway, City of Salem is badly lost

Image via WikipediaAt the neighborhood meeting tonight, a neighbor --- a woman who has been a stalwart volunteer for Salem for decades --- complained that the city had revised the historic district review process to streamline approvals for "non-significant projects" to such a point that very significant projects were being sent through the process intended for the kinds of things where you can't even tell which of two pictures is the "before" and which is the "after."

The troubling issue is that this woman, who has worked really hard on behalf of the historic districts and for Salem's valuable but threatened identity as a city that has preserved important pieces of its past, was learning of these fast-track applications only after it was too late to raise a red flag about them, to warn the bureaucrat reviewing the application that the applicant was maybe trying to get a major change through in the guise of a non-significant application.

The underlying issue is how well Salem's public involvement and information machinery works.
And that is easy to summarize:

It sucks.

Bigtime.

After much prodding, Salem finally put out a lame RSS (real simple syndication) feed that is so rarely updated that it might as well not exist. Not only is it only rarely updated, but it appears to be almost entirely unknown by city staff and certainly by city council. Anyone relying on the City's RSS feed to stay up on what's going on with Salem would be lost without a map.

Nor does Salem provide a nice menu of listservs for citizens who want to track certain issues, or committees, or property development or historic district changes, nor for those who want to keep track of things like chicken-keeping ordinances and rules, or even planning committee functioning.

Despite the wealth of absolutely free or very low-cost information sharing tools, Salem is about as open to its residents as The Forbidden Temple was to the average person in China in 1600.

There are two key tools for helping tackle this sorry state of affairs: RSS and listservs. Not fancy. But cheap and effective.

1) If you don't know what an RSS reader is, you should -- it's a tool that can make it possible for you to follow a number of websites efficiently and effectively. Even more important, it could make true transparency in government easy and, most important, very, very cheap.

In a nutshell, RSS is a tool that lets you keep an eye on websites at all times so that, if something new is posted on a site you are following (that you have "subscribed" to), you see the update in your reader. It's the difference between having to drive all over town to visit different newsstands to find the things you're interested in and having a butler offer you a fresh copy of the things you might be interested in the second they become available.

So instead of having to bookmark and laboriously visit those sites to see what is new (or, in Salem's case, to see how long it has been since the darn thing was updated, and how long the incorrect information will hang around) you just open your reader and browse your subscriptions, like browsing a table of contents in a magazine. You can aggregate various subscriptions into folders so that sites that all relate to the same general topics show up together. The screenshot above is the LOVESalem HQ Salem feed on my RSS reader -- it lets me know at a glance when there is a new post I might be interested in concerning Salem, so I can open that headline, click on the link, and be taken to the target website immediately, without having to even know where the site is these days.

Salem is not using this valuable tool to notify even the most interested people of things, such as the Boards and Commissions vacancies (Did you know that there is a planning commission spot open right now?)

2) Likewise, just as Salem has failed to use the vast power of the web to make it easy for people to stay up to date on the goings-on in city government, they have also failed to make it easy for people to use email to stay informed.

As a rule, every single distinct office at the lowest level in Salem city government (and every one above them) should offer one or more email subscription options so that residents who want to stay on top of a subject automatically get all the emails that the office sends out intended for the public. Instead of "broadcasting" using citywide newsletters, we should be using the great power of the net to let people selectively sign up for narrowcasts that are perfectly suited to their own particular interests.

For example, LOVESalem HQ is in the Northeast Neighborhood (NEN). When we started our little urban homestead here, I should have been able to go to the City of Salem website and see a lengthy menu of listserv options that I could have signed up for, as a way to start learning what's going on and staying informed efficiently. I should have had the choice of subscription to get an email on NEN, Salem water and sewer, planning commission meetings and agendas, city council meetings and agendas, zoning codes, ordinance changes, Parks and Rec, bicycling, solid waste management, etc. etc. etc. (I know, I'm weird -- but the point is that what interests me isn't what interests you, and sometimes our interests change over time.)

Every time a land use application or zoning change goes into the city for an area that I'm interested in, boom, it should show up in my email because I subscribed to the listserv for that neighborhood. Every time the city thinks about buying something that I sell, I should get an email, because I subscribed to the listserv for that product group with the city procurement department. And so on. It's not about doing more work for city staff, it's about getting the maximum of transparency and public information benefit from the work the city staff is already doing.

Summary:

Salem spends a lot of money on public information right now . . . while, basically, failing to communicate very effectively. So it needs to change. The city needs to completely overhaul its whole public information and involvement strategy by starting with some basic first principles:

1) Everything is to be released to the public -- except for those few things that are exempt from the Public Records Act disclosure requirements.

That is, instead of operating the way it does today (like the Kremlin, only disclosing information when requested and when it feels like it), the basic rule would be that ALL city information is disseminated to the public as quickly as possible, except what needs to be protected.

What this means is that all staff reports, audits, research, etc. would all automatically be sent to the public information division, whose job would be to figure out how many ways to usefully provide that information to anyone who might want it for whatever reason, whether to run their business or for idle curiosity.

2) Duplicate channels when communicating with the public -- a bunch of listservs could be thought of as redundant to the city website. After all, why send out a bunch of emails when you can just post things on the website? Answer: Because the city needs to stop thinking of giving information as a chore or a burden and start thinking of it as the essence of democracy --- which means giving people as many options for getting the information as make sense from a cost and ease of use perspective. A city that really wanted to communicate with its residents would always be sure to overcommunicate, using the web, listservs, regular mail, CCTV and UTube, and, yes, posters on kiosks in neighborhood and city centers. Yes, the law requires posted signs when there is a land-use application -- but there should also be a PHOTO of the sign posted on the city website AND an automatic email that goes to anyone who has signed up to get the land-use application notices for that area.

3) Management must let go of the illusion of control -- The job of a manager in an enlightened information sharing regime is to make sure that only those things that should not be disclosed are not disclosed. That means private personnel files, information about litigation, etc.

Other than that, it should be a regular part of all departments and sections to share information with the public, without the filtering and massaging of management trying to CYA. Staff should NOT have to send public information items up a chain of command for approval, which causes delay and creates information filters.

Instead, staff should be trained in a very simple rule: If the public paid for it or their government used it or looked at it, it's a public record, and should be provided to the public as quickly as possible, in whatever formats (plural) make the most sense.

That is, all information that is created or used by any part of city government should be presumptively made available to the public immediately, as part of the ongoing transparency. Only those few things that would not be released in response to a public records request (because of a valid exception) should be exempt from this proactive, unprompted disclosure.

Bottom line: there should never be a need for a public records request, because the public should never have to ask a city staffer for information that they are entitled to have. If we're entitled to it and the city has it, there shouldn't be a delay of more than a day or so to get it distributed (posted on the web, sent to the various listservs, etc.). All releasable records that the city holds should be organized and made available to anyone with a web browser automatically, as soon as possible.

This will require that city council direct staff to reverse the assumption of today, which is that it's OK if staff operates behind a curtain of secrecy, only emitting whatever information they are forced to (meanwhile wasting money gathering and reviewing record requests).

Thus, city managers need to train staff on how to be as transparent as possible, show them how to recognize what things should NOT be shared, and reward them for sharing everything else (and organizing it in a way that helps residents find it).

Ashland carsharing co-op folds

Image via WikipediaAlas, a great idea is not enough.