Guns and the Depletion of Civic Sanity

A few years ago, I was out camping with some friends. One evening, we were sitting around a campfire, sharing a little single malt and telling stories and cracking jokes. Conversation drifted from songs to movies to what the hell is going on in the world? Amidst this banter, one of the campers made a point that has intrigued me to this day.

He noted that resource depletion leads to wars and to oppressive governments. And with many resources in our world dwindling, major political upheavals and social disintegration are like to become the norm. Such resources include clean water and air, arable land, rare minerals used in manufacturing, fossil fuels and building materials. “I would add one other resource to that list,” he said. “Civic sanity.”

I asked him what he meant by civic sanity and he explained that it meant the expectation that people around you will act rationally—or at least not in a manner that will heedlessly endanger others. “When you are diving a car, you expect all other drivers to stay on their side of the road and not run into you. When you walk down the street in a city, you expect people will not come up behind you and whack you over the head with a baseball bat. Things like that. Now once in awhile, people do drive their cars into others, or assault strangers on the street. But currently, in most parts of the United States, this is an aberration. What happens, however, if it becomes the norm? What happens if you can't walk out your door to go to work without fearing a sniper is going to shoot you?”

Like other resources, he suggested, the depletion of civic sanity has a tipping point. After this week's gun massacres, I am wondering, are we approaching that tipping point? Have we gone over it?

The prevalent meme in America is that we value freedom more than security. Individual liberty, not the nanny state. Rather than ban certain types of weapons to keep us safe, just let us all strap on a gun and be able to shoot it out with the bad guy. Is that really how we think? Like most issues in our culture, we are a divided nation. I haven't seen any polls, but I'd venture that most Americans are smart enough to know that firing more guns in a crowded public place is going to result in more casualties, not less.

There are at least 300 million privately owned firearms in the United States—more than one for every adult—but a majority of American adults do not own even one. So most of us think it's unnecessary to own a gun. Many of us understand that households with guns are more likely to suffer gunshot wounds and deaths than households without guns.

Can we ban the kind of guns used in the slaughter of innocent children or people shopping at a mall at Christmas time? Gun advocates say banning these guns won't work because criminals won't respect the laws and will find illegal means of obtaining them. They cite our nation's experiment with Prohibition of alcohol in the early part of the 20^th century. While I certainly wouldn't want to return to the days of speakeasies and bootleggers, the notion that Prohibition failed is debatable. During the 1920s, alcohol consumption declined significantly—initially to 30 percent of the level prior to the Volstead Act, rising to about 60 percent later on. And once Prohibition was repealed, most states instituted strict regulations on it sales and consumption.

Yes, illegal alcohol fueled the rise of organized crime syndicates. It should be noted that these crime syndicates existed well before Prohibition and were the outgrowth of the oppression of late 19^th century immigrant minorities, mainly Italians, Irish and Jews. This was at the height of the last Gilded Age and since the Robber Baron rich were plundering everything in sight, they set an example for the lower classes. And, of course,the same thing is happening now, only the drugs are different.

But perhaps gun control is not the only answer to random slaughter. Given the power of the NRA, it may not be possible. Let's assume that the Second Amendment continues to be interpreted as an inviolable right to own whatever firearms any citizen desires. We keep that freedom. But to do so and yet make us safer in public, we will have to give up other freedoms. We already have.

Many people may not know that there was once a time when anyone could walk into a government building without going through a metal detector. Nowadays, almost all state and federal office buildings—or at least those who have offices for elected officials or other important people--are protected by some kind of security moat. The same applies to other institutions. I started working for The Oregonian in the sports department when I was in high school. At that time, anyone could walk into its building on Southwest Broadway and Jefferson, at any time of day or night. A little later, I worked for a couple of small town daily newspapers that had the same kind of open access. There were times I'd be writing a story and somebody off the street would interrupt me. Usually, the kind of person who bypassed the receptionist and strode straight for my desk was a crank, an annoying and garrulous fellow who would elaborately lay out a conspiracy theory and insist that I write it up. We also would get visited by gladhanding politicians, promoters with free tickets and homeowners angry at their neighbors. But once in awhile, a really good story would walk in the door, a story we might not have gotten if we didn't let the public have open access to our office.

In the late 1970s, I took a break from newspapering and worked a few years for a Congressman in his district office. There were no security checks there, either, and constituents would stream into our offices with tales of woe. These days, not only are your elected representatives hunkered down in their bunkers, but so are their staffs. A few years ago, Portland spent a big chunk of money building an underground parking garage below our courthouse, just so judges could go straight from their cars to their chambers without having to risk being on a street for even a second.

Is it any wonder Americans feel more alienated from their government now? Do we trust any of these big institutions, public or private, that make it virtually impossible to talk to someone in charge, either in person or on the phone? Most Americans have figured out that there is a small elite group of movers and shakers who never have to come in contact with the rest of us, never have to deal with the kind of annoyances and horrors that the rest of us endure every day. Very few, if any, politicians or corporate executives have been strip searched before boarding a plane. It's not necessary when you have your own airplane.

The rest of us shrug, adapt and carry on. It's surprising that there is not more resentment of the elites. Americans idolize success, thus if the privileged flaunt their privileges, it must be because they are better than us, and they must be protected at all costs because they are smarter, stronger, better looking, harder working and above all, irreplaceable. Never mind that most of them got to the top either through inheritance, or by being willing to do things that make the rest of us squeamish.

I keep thinking that one day, instead of mowing down shoppers, movie goers, school children or ex-wives, someone is going to open fire on the banksters at Goldman Sachs or the hate mongers on talk radio, or even the Supreme Court. In the minds of liberals, the world would be a better place without these people. But liberals believe in the sanctity of human life after birth and are not going to shoot anyone. Liberals still cling to the notion that democracy can work, even when all the cards are stacked against them. Liberals don't become suicide bombers. They'd rather talk than fight. Sometimes, liberals are too sane for their own good.

So back to freedom and sanity. Aside from banning certain types of guns, the most common plea since the Newtown massacre has been to increase access to mental health care. Mental health is the neglected stepchild of our health care system. It's true that no sane person would saunter into a public space, shoot as many people as possible and then commit suicide. However, it is also true that most of the shooters, including the last two, had not been diagnosed as being mentally ill, even though it's obvious that almost all of them suffered from clinical depression. People who are depressed normally don't seek out help, at least not explicitly. Many end up ending it all without taking the lives of other people.

It's possible to profile mass killers. Virtually all of them are male, predominantly between ages 15 and 30. They are likely to be depressed and suicidal. In addition, they may feel they have been grossly victimized by someone or something else, be it a school, employer or their fellow students/employees. Finally, they think that going out in a blaze of infamy will gain them posthumous respect and fame. Eric Harris, one of the Columbine killers, had speculated that Quentin Tarrantino would make a movie about him and fellow shooter Dylan Klebold. I'm sure, after in-depth studies have been done of all 62 mass shootings since 1982, that an even more sophisticated profile can be constructed.

But then what? Do we round up every male between 15 and 30 and make them take a comprehensive psychiatric exam? What do we do with the ones who test out as likely candidates to become mass killers? Sequester them and administer drugs? Attempt to reprogram them? Doesn't this remind you a little of what the Soviets did to dissidents in the bleak era of Breznev?

Certainly, counseling would help, especially in middle school and high school, where budget cuts have eliminated a lot of counseling positions.

On the other hand, given how so many crucial issues are captive to capitalism, more mental health services could make matters worse. Pharmaceutical companies drive the mental health field. Overbooked and underpaid counselors often have little time for talk. Unless you are able to pay top dollar, you don't get to lie on a couch for an hour and talk to a shrink. No, you get ten minutes and a prescription. If you are depressed, you get a prescription for Prozac or Zoloft. Unfortunately, anti-depressants backfire with a lot of people, making them even more depressed. Not to mention confused, angry and suicidal. One report I read after the Newtown massacre indicated that several shooters, though evidently not Adam Lanza, had been on anti-depressants.

Neither depression nor any other form of mental illness is unique to the United States. On the same day as the Newtown tragedy, a deranged man in China stabbed 23 school children with a knife. Americans are 12 times more likely to be murdered by a gun than people in other Western countries, but we do not have 12 times more psychologically disturbed people. In fact, rates of depression, bi-polar disorder and schizophrenia in the U.S. are about the same as those in other developed countries. Children and teens play violent video games at the same rate in other countries, too—the Japanese are the world's video game champs. Hardly anyone in Japan, however, dies from a gunshot wound.

In reading the reactions to Newtown—and I've read hundreds of articles in the past week—I'm reminded of the adage, “If you only have a hammer, ever problem becomes a nail.” Everyone reacts according to their own experience and biases. Ardent gun advocates argue that more people should be toting guns to deter the criminals and crazy shooters. Mental health professionals, who believe their field is underfunded, want more counseling and intervention. The religious right wants to bring God back into schools, whatever that means. The radical left links gun violence to the oppressive economic inequality in the U.S., as well as rampant capitalism, thus the solution requires a complete reordering of American society. Second Amendment purists believe these shootings are the price we must pay to keep our country free from tyrants, as if a motley militia armed with semiautomatic weapons would last for very long against a force that has missiles and drones.

If you never want to read another headline about a shooting massacre in America, the facts make it clear what to do: pass legislation that strictly regulates gun ownership and prohibits certain kinds of weapons entirely. A true ban on assault weapons (not the wimpy version that was in force from 1994 to 2004) will greatly reduce mass shootings. So will a ban on large capacity clips. It won't do much to reduce the number of common, more personal gun homicides (about 10,000 per year) or gun suicides (nearly 20,000 per year). Women in particular still will be vulnerable to being shot by ex-husbands, ex-boyfriends or deluded stalkers. Children will also continue be be gunned down gang conflicts or family melt downs (about 2,800 children die from gunshot wounds every year).

To further reduce gun violence, we'll have to adopt measures similar to those in other countries. Set up a licensing procedure that includes both training in gun use and safety and a test. Require that if you want to purchase a gun, two of your friends or family members must vouch for you. Restrict people from buying more than one gun a year. Upgrade the background check database and make it universally accessible. Require that guns be stored in safes or have trigger locks, perhaps even fingerprint locks that would prevent anyone else from firing the owner's guns.

If you look at all of the statistical data on guns and gun violence from all of the countries in the developed world, you are forced to the conclusion that fewer guns equals more safety. Of course the NRA and other pro-gun folks will obscure those facts or cherry pick ones to their advantage. They'll point out that in Norway, which has very strict gun control, a madman killed 77 people in one shooting spree. They won't, however, note that Norway averages about 10 gun homicides a year.

If you were proposing legislation to promote cleaner air or fuel economy, you wouldn't necessarily let the American Petroleum Institute write the bill. If you sought to increase the FDA's oversight of new drugs, you probably would not leave the details up to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. If you were developing a universal health care bill that would also reduce the costs of health care, you wouldn't let insurance companies...well, actually you did and instead of single payer insurance, we ended up with the Rube Goldberg mechanism of Obamacare.

The National Rifle Association tries to pass itself off as a grass roots citizen's organization. In reality, it is a trade organization representing gun manufacturers and dealers. It's overarching goal is not the protection of the Second Amendment, but to expand the market for firearms. A large majority of the NRA's members supports regulations such as criminal background checks for purchases at gun shows, mandating the owners immediately notify the police when their guns are stolen, prohibiting anyone under 21 to have a concealed carry permit and requiring gun safety training for such permits. The NRA leadership opposes all of these rather mild measures. The members pay dues, but the manufacturers call the shots.

And the shots they call result in bullet-riddled little children.

A week after the Newtown tragedy, NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre finally addressed the nation and offered the NRA's solution to school shootings: armed security guards in every school. Ingeniously, the NRA turned the clamor for gun regulation into an opportunity to sell more guns. Unfortunately, LaPierre did not take questions and thus never explained how financially strapped school districts throughout the land would pay for armed guards. Perhaps a hefty tax on every gun sold? I wouldn't bet on it.

The NRA would have us all packing a firearm, because, in LaPierre's words, “only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun.” But then, what about stopping a perceived bad guy who doesn't have a gun? It hasn't been that long since Trayvon Martin was gunned down under the rationale of Florida's “stand your ground” law. What if the person you think is a bad guy isn't threatening you at all, but you think this person is evil? Say you oppose abortion and thus take aim at doctors who perform abortions? Or you think clear cutting is killing the earth and fire shots at loggers? And then they start firing back. Eventually, your home town resembles Baghdad in 2004.

Suddenly, you are in the middle of a Mad Max movie. Civic sanity has evaporated.

And when you trace it back, if you survive to do so, you discover it's not because we have all gone mad or turned into zombies by video games. No, it occurs because of unfettered, insatiable capitalistic gun manufacturers whose only goal is increasing sales and profits. The gun dealers don't care, or maybe they believe their own lies. They are no different than the oil company executives who deny the existence of climate change.

We're not going to become a rerun of Mad Max, not unless we face real physical resource depletion—not enough food, not enough water, not enough energy. That all could happen, of course. And if it does, it will affect our mental health and our culture drastically. But as for now, American is not overrun by crazy people. The vast majority of us still are repelled by the thought of taking another person's life. It's just that we are, as usual, complacent until it gets personal, until something bad happens to us.

For better or worse, maybe it;s gotten personal to enough of us to make a difference.

Further reading:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fareed-zakaria-the-solution-to-gun-violence-is-clear/2012/12/19/110a6f82-4a15-11e2-b6f0-e851e741d196_story.html

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/12/the-simple-truth-about-gun-control.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/20/opinion/kristof-looking-for-lessons-in-newtown.html?_r=0

Slouching from Tucson

I’m thinking I can no longer call myself a liberal, or progressive. Perhaps I never was, anyway. Liberals tend to believe that people can learn to live peacefully with one another. They believe the human race can make progress towards justice and equality. They think we can learn from our mistakes.

I used to think that way, even as late as 2008, maybe 2009. Not any more.

It’s not the madman’s mayhem in Tucson that brings me to this conclusion. Whether—and to what extent--that sick individual was influenced by the rabid right into attempting to murder Democratic Rep. Gabriel Gifford is something we’ll find out in time. Certainly, the American culture of violence was culpable.

No, what gets me is the hope that liberals profess that maybe this time, we’ll all change for the better, we’ll all put the muffler on runaway rhetoric, we’ll get Congress and state legislatures to pass rational gun control.

Don’t hold your breath.

We live in a plutocracy now, a country where money doesn’t merely talk, but swears (my apologies to Dylan). And those with money are telling us to go fuck ourselves, because nothing’s going to change.

Sure it’s a damn shame that Jared Lee Loughner, by all accounts so psychotic that he scared the bejesus out of his teachers and fellow students, was able to buy a Glock and kill six people, including a nine-year old girl. But as the NRA says, guns don’t kill people, people kill people. He could just as easily have beheaded all those people, and diced up a bag of carrots to boot, with a sharp samurai sword. He could have converted an old hash pipe into a blow gun and strafed them with curare-tipped darts. He could have strapped dynamite around his body and…nah, that’s not the American way.

And as for any other means of killing people, not very likely either. Nothing kills like a high-capacity 33-round hand gun. Unless, maybe, it’s an AK-47.

A sensible thing to do would be to ban assault weapons. Another sensible thing would be to require background checks at gun shows. But none of these proposals will get through any state or federal legislative body because the NRA opposes them. The NRA cites the Second Amendment, but really, it’s policies are based on unfettered free enterprise. Any law that hinders the purchase of firearms cuts down on the profits of gun manufacturers and dealers. That’s what it’s all about, making another buck, or another billion.

Far more people have been killed in our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but then, there’s been far more money to be made by the American war industry. After all, we gotta keep the economy rolling.

I have a fantasy—and just an abstract fantasy, please—that some day, some guy who’s hearing voices coming through the fillings in his teeth will start firing a gun-show-bought semi-automatic weapon at someone like this guy:

Nice, friendly looking fellow, isn’t he? His name is Ron Schmeits and he’s a small-town banker in New Mexico. Was a mayor of a small town in Minnesota years ago. Today, he’s the president of the NRA. Not quite as studly as Charlton Heston, but just as gun crazy. Just like the premature death of anyone, it would be a shame if someone capped him…but also, deliciously ironic.

By the way, most of the political leaders assassinated in the past 50 years have been Democrats.

So short of evening the score, what can we do? First, recognize that this kind of tragedy is just a more dramatic rendition of the collateral damage wreaked daily by our economic system and the vast inequality of wealth and income in our country. Death just is another externalized cost of doing business in the U.S. The solution isn’t state socialism, but simply the kind of strong regulation found in Europe and most of the rest of the developed world.

Second, people have to put their lives on the line. That means way, way more than starting a Facebook issue page and getting a million people to put some slogan in their status update. Even more than volunteering at the food co-op or homeless shelter, as worthy as those deeds are.

No, it will take active resistance and pro-active organizing. Massing thousands of people at the next NRA convention, for a start. Or organizing a boycott of companies that contribute to the NRA. Perhaps moling inside a large nefarious organization or corporation and causing all sorts of havoc. I don’t think it requires violence, but it does require personal risk.

And that’s the catch. Even as we get picked off one-by-one by the economy, by the housing crisis, by unaffordable health care, by hazardous working conditions, by deadly pharmaceuticals, by random gunfire, we remain all too comfortable, so long as we have our I-Diversions. In a few days, we’ll still be talking about the Auburn-Oregon football game and barely remember who Gabriel Giffords is.

I have to admit, I’m pretty comfortable, too. I haven’t found a cause that I would die for. But if the right cause came along under the right circumstances, I might kill for one.

Dead Men Don't Wear Birkenstocks

As you may have noticed, people in Portland live a little differently than people elsewhere. They die a little differently, too.

One annual piece of good news for our fair city is that not that many people are murdered in Portland. Last year, there were 29 homicides, up from 21 the year before. Still well below the rate of most major U.S. cities.

If you want to live more dangerously, move to New Orleans, which has a murder rate of 52 per 100,000 residents. Portland’s rate is just a tenth of that. Other high-murder cities include Detroit, St. Louis, Baltimore and Chicago. These cities average more murders per month than Portland has in an entire year.

Now for the less rosy picture: in 2010, 13% of Portland’s homicides were committed by our police force—and that figure goes up to 22% of the African-Americans killed. Nothing surprising there. We all know that Portland cops have a penchant for shooting people, especially black people. Or mentally disturbed people. They’ll shoot your in your car, they’ll shoot you where you live, they’ll shoot you on the street or when you are in the park.

Best thing to do is avoid the police, because they’ve been getting away with murder for decades and nobody at City Hall has the brains or guts to do something about it.

Nevertheless, in Portland, you have a .00005% chance of getting murdered. About the same as winning at Powerball.

If, however, you want to reduce those odds even further, there are several things that could work in your favor (other than being polite to the police).

1. Take your meds and don’t hang around people who won’t take theirs. Two of the people shot be the cops were, according to witnesses, behaving in a mentally unstable manner and four other victims were killed by mentally disturbed assailants.
2. Be white. Forty percent of the homicides were committed against people of color, usually by people of color (except for those shot by cops).
3. Learn knife defenses, which are taught in many martial arts schools and self-defense classes. Seven victims—about a quarter of the total—died from knife wounds. Portland’s rate is far higher than the national average of 14%. On the other hand, just over half of Portland’s murders were committed by firearms, while the national average is 70%.
4. If you are a woman, don’t get involved with an angry, obsessive or jealous man—and if you do and want to leave him, you may want to spike his cocktails with a few drops of methyl alcohol. The reason for this precaution is that of the seven women murdered last year, five were killed by their husbands or boyfriends (two after they had become estranged).

This last factoid is a recurring nightmare, worse even than cops killing black folks. In previous years, the number of women murdered by crazed ex-boyfriends or husbands has approached massacre levels. I can only guess at why it happens so much. Some men have a “master” complex and when a man sees his slave leave him, his ego is humbled. He can’t let it go and get on with his life, because a big part of his life is mastery over another human being. So he tries to bring her back home. And if that fails, he kills her.

Restraining orders are futile against crazy men. I propose a law that says that whenever a woman takes out a restraining order against a man, the man has to wear a GPS bracelet for a sufficient period of time, which would allow the police to make sure the ex is not getting too close to the object of his desire, or if he is, to warn her.

Either that, or methyl alcohol (methanol). If administered in just the right amount (about 10 mL), it will lead to blindness, but not kill him.

Free is a very good price

The ticket to better health care

So here’s the solution to our health care crisis: send all the uninsured sick people to another country that has socialized medicine.

This idea springs from a guest column in The Oregonian by David Lister, a genuinely nice and reasonable guy who also is a political conservative. Lister opposes the single-payer health care systems in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, and probably also the public option proposed and possibly abandoned by President Obama.

Yet he recounts his own experience with Britain’s nationalized health care and comes away begrudgingly satisfied:

“Last April, during a trip to Scotland, I had my own encounter with a "socialized" health system. The day before our scheduled return I experienced severe chest pains and labored breathing. Our hosts insisted that I allow them to call the health service. After some discussion with a screener, I was told I should come in to be examined. In less than an hour, I was sitting in an exam room with a Scottish physician. A rapid examination satisfied him that I was not in cardiac distress, but merely suffering from acute indigestion.”

Lister mentions that his attending physician said he would move to American “in a hot minute,” presumably because of better pay, but also notes that his trip to the doctor cost him nothing.

If a doctrinaire conservative can experience socialized medicine first hand and not launch into a voluminous rant about how awful it is, think about how ordinary, non-ideological Americans would react. It seems that Americans are afraid of health care reform because they view it as the devil they don't know. So introduce them to the single-payer system and see how they like it.

This would have two positive effects:

1. In the short run, it would save us billions of dollars. Buying a plane ticket for an uninsured American would be a lot less expensive than providing health insurance for that person, or treating the illness. Of course, there would have to be some kind of screening to make sure the sick person was actually sick and not trying to finagle a free trip abroad.

2. After awhile, Britain, France and all the other countries with socialized medicine would catch on and start denying care to American tourists, but by that time, enough Americans would have been treated overseas—or in Canada—to greatly expand the movement for publicly-financed universal health care here. These people would then start showing up at town hall meetings demanding that their representatives pass the legislation that recently was getting shouted down.

In addition, if more people spent time abroad, they might develop an appreciation for such European things as fast and reliable public transit, walking, eating food in small portions and five-week vacations—all of which are good for one's health.

Where there's smoke, there's ire

Ah, the Great Indoors

Last night I went to Laurelhurst Park and watched “Singing in the Rain” along with a few hundred other Portlanders. I'm not sure there is a better way to enjoy a balmy summer evening that doesn't involve taking off all one's clothes or imbibing tall drinks with Spanish names. There were snow cones for sale at a tropical-themed cart, though most people brought their own picnics. The movie, which I hadn't seen in years, is one delightful song and dance routine after another, including the famous eponymous scene, plus the songs “Make 'Em Laugh,” “Good Mornin'.” and the incomparable “Gotta Dance.”

But this is a somewhat political blog, so for me, it's “Gotta Kvetch.”

It was the cigarette smoke. Enough people were smoking in the crowd that at times I grew a bit nauseous. At the least, it was irritating. And that brings me to my point: cigarette smoking must be prohibited in outdoor public places.

I applauded the extension of cigarette bans to bars, although it went into effect about a year and a half too late. Now I can go into even the most divey (and therefore most interesting) bars in town and inhale comfortably. It's great to be able to walk to my neighborhood pub and have a beer and dinner without suffocating from tobacco smoke.

Unfortunately, by implementing this ban on smoking in bars, we have ceded the outdoors to smokers. It's great indoors now. But it's virtually impossible to sit on at a sidewalk table, or on the patio of a restaurant or bar, without wondering if a tremendous fire is consuming Mt. Hood National Forest—except that forest fires, as devastating as they are, smell better than the incineration of tobacco.

So let's just ban outdoor smoking. Let the smokers puff away in a closet or a car with the windows rolled up. Or their own home, if they own it themselves, since very few landlords want to rent to smokers anymore.

Not that I'm totally unsympathetic. I did make this suggestion last winter when the bar ban took effect:

But don't cry to me about smokers' rights. Those of you who smoke should have no rights. You are drug addicts. You suck on an extremely lethal drug that is more addictive than heroin. Like meth tweaking, your addiction harms the people around you. And the weird thing is, it doesn't even get you high.

In any sane society, tobacco would be illegal. Only the largess and lobbying power of the tobacco companies keeps it legal. So that's not going to happen, but the non-addicted public is going to keep making it more difficult to feed your addiction. Get used to it.

Dagnab gummint burrocrats

If the DMV did health care

One of the main points in the argument against a single payer, government-sponsored health care system is that it would be run by heartless gummint burrocrats. One line I’ve heard several times is: “Do you want to trust your health care to the kind of people who run the DMV?”

A week ago, I got a letter from the Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles. This letter informed me that a vehicle registered to my name was not insured and that I had to procure auto insurance for it unless I had sold it or if it had been wrecked and thus taken out of circulation. In my case, however, the vehicle in question, a 1960s vintage Ford stepside pickup, was in a friend’s garage, not going anywhere until a loving restoration was completed.

There was a phone number at the bottom of the letter. I called it. A person answered. Yes, a real human being answered. No tedious menu of numbers to push or things to say to eventually get to a point where you are on hold long enough to watch Schindler’s List. A woman just answered the phone, said her name and asked how she could help me.

When was the last time that happened when you called your insurance company?

She was very helpful and told me to write my explanation at the bottom of the slip that I was supposed to return and all would be fine.

Again, when did that ever happen when you inquired about something from a health insurance company?

Fact is, the DMV Express center at Lloyd Center has always given me better service than I get from any other commercial interaction, with the possible exception of my favorite coffee house. The people there are friendly, courteous and extremely helpful. And most of the time, you get right in and out, with a minimum of waiting.

So, as to whether I want to have my health care administered by the same people who work at the DMV, I’m saying, “Hell, yes!”

Our sick economy

Nothing Pencils Out

Nothing pencils out anymore. Maybe nothing ever did, but it seems flagrantly more obvious today that virtually all business activities are entropic. Unsustainable. Oh yes, businesses survive, even thrive, but only by begging, borrowing, stealing, cheating or government subsidy.

No business seems to make it on its own. No business can operate profitably without either cutting corners or receiving unearned revenue.

You know the big names, the ones who got the billions and hundreds of billions from the feds. So you know:

--Banking doesn't pencil out. Banks need large infusions of your tax dollars to stay afloat.

--Ditto for insurance companies. In addition, insurance companies have to aggressively deny benefits to their customers to stay in business.

--American auto companies haven't penciled out for decades and now need not only government money but supervision.

Certainly, the failed economy doesn't help matters, but this thought came to me awhile ago, before millions of jobs went up in smoke.

--Big agribusiness doesn't pencil out. The corporate farms are totally dependent on the pork-laden agriculture bill that Congress passes every few years.

--Small farms haven't penciled out for nearly a century.

--Food product manufacturing doesn't pencil out unless the product is loaded with heavily subsidized commodities such as corn and soybeans.

--Most other kinds of manufacturing doesn't pencil out in the U.S., which is why it's done in China and elsewhere.

In Portland, however, it's no different, just perhaps more bungled up than many other places, but definitely not alone.

--Major league sports franchises, though universally owned by billionaires, evidently can't make it unless taxpayers pay for their stadiums and arenas.

--The hotel industry doesn't pencil out, since it needs to hire illegal aliens to clean the rooms. And it needs subsidies from local governments to build new hotels.

--Restaurants, too, need illegals in the kitchen to pencil out.

--Bars evidently will go bust if they don't get revenue from video poker.

--Newspapers aren't penciling out and thus are near extinction.

--Radio and television news doesn't really pencil out either, because these media really don't report news, just gossip and opinion.

--The construction of buildings no longer pencils out, because there's no buyers anymore. Unless a builder wins a contract from the government, at which point taxpayers foot the bill.

--Pharmaceuticals don't pencil out. Yes, the drug companies make obscene profits, but only by convincing people to take lots of drugs they don't need—and then the government or the insurance companies pay for those drugs.

--Health care in general doesn't pencil out, even though prices are escalating at three times the general inflation rate. Hospitals can't make money treating the sick, but instead have to seek profits treating the vain.

--A lot of little boutiques in trendy areas may appear to pencil out, and do so in the short run, but wait a couple of years and see how many are still around.

--Small business in general hardly ever pencils out. Either the employers or the owners make pitiful wages for what they do, and never have good health plans.

--Big business doesn't pencil out either, because it doesn't have to. Big business is too big to fail, so the government keeps it alive.

I can come up with a handful of business activities—coffee, sex, IPhones—that seem to pencil out. Maye I haven't examined them closely enough. Maybe there are more. There definitely are more that don't. Give me your list.

Keillor gets it right

Potato Salad is NOT Ice Cream

Garrison Keillor's latest commentary is on potato salad and he nails it. I, too, went to a July 4 potluck and found, among the chips and guacamole, crackers and cheese, carrots and celery sticks, pork and beans and fried spring rolls, buckets of over-mayonnaised goop containing finely diced potatoes and some other stuff mostly added for color. This stuff passes for potato salad in grocery stores and delis these days.

Keillor observes:

The eerie-yellow store-bought stuff in the tubs was manufactured at Amalgamated Salad in Houston by undocumented 12-year-olds from the hills of Michoacan. Worse, it is teaching our children that accomplishment doesn't matter.

A child served yellow slop from a bucket is being told that it's OK to plagiarize a term paper off the Internet just so long as it's poorly written.

He then gives the basics for real potato salad: "Take half an hour away from your Facebook page and do the job right. Boil some eggs, chop the celery and chives and green onions, boil the potatoes, make your mayonnaise, maybe toss in a little sour cream, use plenty of dill, and sprinkle paprika on top." To that I would add some dill pickle and a dollop of mustard (dijon or spicy brown), and probably take out the chives.

Myriad reasons exist for the promulgation of crappy potato salad, not the least of which is at most Americans will put up with anything that has too much mayonnaise in it. But one culprit is the ice cream scoop. Old fashioned potato salad is chunky and you have to use a big spoon to get it out of the bowl and a small spoon or fork to pull it off the big spoon and onto the plate. But sometime in, I think, the 70s, though maybe earlier, deli counters figured out they could more efficiently transfer potato salad from one container to another with an ice cream scoop, if the salad was modified to something with the consistency of rocky road ice cream. And out went the big chunks of potato and the halves of hard boiled eggs and celery slices big enough to crunch. Thus potato salad became tasteless and bland.

So you ask, why didn't I bring real potato salad to this potluck? I guess I should have, but I decided there would be plenty of starchy salads (potato and pasta), and opted to bring real cole slaw instead. Not the ice cream scoop variety, but slaw with coarse cut cabbage, chunks of apple and onion and a few diced pepperoncini tossed in for spice.

Rule of thumb: other than ice cream, food should not be dishable with an ice cream scoop.

Embracing Chavez Blvd.

Naming Rites

If you were asked to prioritize all of the issues that can be appropriately addressed by the Portland City Council, where would you place renaming a street after Cesar Chavez?

Yeah, me too. It definitely wouldn’t crack the top ten. I suspect a significant number of Latinos actually feel the same way, considering the unemployment rate, high cost of housing, decreased funding for public schools and shabby state of public parks. Nevertheless, the issue is not only on the table, it’s jumping up and down and demanding attention like a four-year-old who didn’t get dessert.

Not that I’m opposed to renaming a street after Cesar Chavez. In fact, I have the perfect street in mind. It’s not 39^th Ave., nor Broadway, nor Grand Ave. all of which have been suggested. No, it’s Glisan Street. Glisan is one of the longest and most culturally diverse streets in all of Portland—and even stretches out to the eastern edge of the city where most Latinos live.

Besides that, no one pronounces Glisan correctly. Named after Rodney Glisan, an early Oregon physician who married into wealth, it is supposed to be pronounced like “glisten.” Instead, it’s commonly pronounced “glee-son.” No one knows why, exactly, though many believe this pronunciation emerged after World War II when a James Gleason was a prominent politician in Portland.

The right way to do it would be to keep it Glisan St. on the west side of the Willamette, because the streets go in alphabetical order in Northwest Portland. (The one that starts with “C” is Couch, named after the famous naval captain who owned much of that part of town—and whose daughter Glisan married). But on the east side of the river, name it Chavez. It’s certainly not unusual for streets to vanish at the banks of the river. For example, from the west, you approach the Morrison Bridge on Alder St., but come off it on Belmont St., which is only on the east side.

No matter which street is renamed, people are going to protest it. Businesses particularly get upset with street renaming, citing the cost of changing stationary, business cards and advertising. That’s small change compared to the gain businesses could see were their street to become Chavez Boulevard.

With the economy scraping bottom, businesses need to take advantage of every opportunity. The Latino community in Portland is growing—and also growing more affluent. For the most part, this is a culture with strong family values that also aspires to own all the trappings of the American middle class. It’s a market that is ignored only by the smug and foolish.

Savvy merchants, restaurateurs and barkeeps should lobby for the name change, and then post banners and signs saying “We are proud to be part of the street honoring Cesar Chavez.”

And then make sure they can speak Spanish.

Fauna Chauvinism

The Fly

There was a rumor buzzing around the Internet for a few days that Jeff Goldblum had died, joining Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon. Fortunately for all us Goldblum geeks, it wasn’t true. Hope still abounds that he will live on to make films as great as The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai Across the Eight Dimension and Earth Girls Are Easy.

The preceding week, President Obama committed the most famous assassination of a common house fly since The Karate Kid. The swift and sudden hand clap executed by Obama was quite impressive. Yeah, no more Mr. Nice Guy.

So along comes PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) complaining that instead of killing the fly, Obama should have gently caught it and released it later—all the meanwhile carrying on an interview about foreign policy. PETA’s protest generated the usual guffaws among the late night talk show comics, yet the true nature of this insidious organization still needs to be exposed.

While asserting the sanctity of all life, PETA neglects to protect at least half of it. Do you ever hear PETA screaming about the hellacious juggernaut of agricultural machinery mowing down defenseless little soybeans so that you may have your tofu? Does PETA ever protest the plucking and slicing of tomatoes? Or condemn uprooting the heads of onions from their cozy refuge in the earth? Of course not. It looks the other way when fruits and vegetables are slaughtered mercilessly. In fact, PETA encourages such carnage.

PETA is a fauna chauvinist front. As such, it has no moral authority. Is a fly more important than, say, an apple tree? I think not.

Therefore, I really don’t get too upset when people kill flies. All I ask is that first, they look to make sure that Jeff Goldblum’s tiny head is not affixed to the fly’s body.

While I was out

For just $1 a day...


My long hiatus from this blog doesn’t signal its (or my) death—just taxes. As usual, I waited until the last few days and then furiously scoured my records for deductions. I used to think it was a national myth that people who file their taxes on the last day are the least likely to get audited, but evidently it’s true. So that’s what I do.

Then I had to take another few days to catch up on all the things I put off while doing taxes. And then the NBA playoffs started and who can ignore that insane scene now that Blazermania has uprisen from the dead? (Does anyone else think the current Blazer ad slogan is as awkward as a pimpled teenage boy asking a girl to the prom?) So the Blazers lost, but the Celtics won a thrilling seven-game series and L.A. is always there to root against.

In the past few weeks since my last post, our world has encountered the likes of Susan Boyle, a new swine flu, a new Arlen Specter, a new-old venue for baseball in Portland, a smashing start of the baseball season for ex-Mariner Raul Ibanez, the resurrection of Wall Street executive pay and the continued decimation of state budgets, particularly those funding education. Not to mention the ongoing sagas of the bridge to oblivion, the dual bush-league stadia and the convention center hovel, er, hotel..

What follows, then, is not my usual wonky and erudite analysis (aka, "rant") of a specific issue, but quick takes on some actually relevant issues:

Education funding: Portland is still haunted by the Doonesbury lampoon of several years ago about being so woefully short of funds that school had to end over a month early. The prospects for the coming year make that scenario look rosy. And yet most of what I see from Salem concerns sharpening the axe and chopping off a chunk of what's left of our education system.

The state is a billion dollars short of what it takes to almost adequately fund public education. According to the Portland Public Schools web site, PPS is $57 million short, though others think these projections are too optimistic. Whatever the case, it's just stupid to cut education budgets. Really, there's enough wealth in this state and city to put that money back into the budget.

Let's put it in the terms used by public broadcasting appeals: $1 billion is just $1 per day every day for every adult in Oregon. And $57 million is a measly 35 cents a day for every adult living in Portland. Sure, for the 12.5% of Oregonians who are unemployed, that $1 a day may be crucial to their own lives—and to be realistic, it's very likely at least 20% of the population isn't employed. On the other hand, the other day on the MAX, I saw one grizzled homeless guy round up $5 and give it to an obviously newly-homeless family. If the homeless can come up with spare change to help each other out, I'm sure we all can chip in.

The legislature should implement a temporary surtax—for just this biennium—that hits each taxpayer's gross income with a percentage charge sufficient to recoup that $1 billion, or however much is needed.

Wall Street Salaries: Yup, the top dawgs on the Street were down for a few months, but then they manipulated their banks' earning statements for the first quarter and as a result, their compensation is as high as ever.

Conservatives like to point out that the wealthiest five percent pay more than half of U.S. income taxes. There's a simple reason for this: they have all the money. (And actually, when you factor in FICA, state and local property taxes and sales taxes, the fat cats don't pay nearly that high a percentage.

Income inequality is at its highest level since the 1920s, perhaps, according to some studies, the highest ever. Either pay scales need to level out or the tax code should be set back to Eisenhower era levels. Under that Republican president, the top rate on incomes over $400,000 was 91 percent. High time to bring those rates back. If Congress won't do it, the Oregon legislature should. After all, the top tax rate in Oregon is 9 percent, which is paid by anyone who earns over $6,500 a year. That's ridiculous. Bump up the tax rate for wealthier people and put the money into education.

Arlen Specter: Sure, he weaseled out of the Republican Party to rescue his sorry butt from defeat at the polls next year, but Specter's defection just shows how irrelevant the GOP has become. Everybody knows that except the lunatics still running the Republican asylum. After all, just 20 percent of all voters are registered in the party.

As Bobby Kennedy once said, “Twenty percent of the people are against everything.” So that percentage is about as low as you can go.

The intriguing question here is how American politics will realign. For the past three decades, since the Age of Reagan, America has only had a far right party (the Republicans) and a centrist party (the Democrats). Liberals have been out of power since the early 1970s. Both presidents Carter and Clinton were centrists, neither of them any more liberal than Richard Nixon.

Obama has succeeded in appealing to liberals, moderates and even some conservatives. The political pendulum swung so far to the right during the Bush era that virtually every thinking person has joined Obama in bringing things back to normal. The cultists in the Republican Party have labeled him a socialist when all he is doing is returning to economic policies that were mainstream under Eisenhower.

Eventually, once these corrections are made, there's going to be discord. It may be delayed until after Obama leaves office, or it may emerge sooner. The Democrats tent has ballooned to include a lot of people who don't necessarily get along with one another. Already, the administration's kid gloves approach to Wall Street has drawn jeers from liberal economists and labor union chiefs.

It makes sense that political parties stand for something, and it's not enough to just stand for sanity and responsibility in government, just because the Republicans seemed to oppose these values. I therefore expect a party shakeout. There will emerge an enlightened pro-business faction that embraces free market approaches while admitting the need for basic government oversight, and a more welfare state faction that demands heavier regulation and government intervention. One of these factions may get to be called Democrats and the other will be named something else. Either that, or as in Europe. there will be splinter parties, such as Labor Democrats, Christian Democrats or just a Liberal party. Or maybe all of the above.

Blazers: On the sports blogs, there's lots of talk about trades and doing things to strengthen the team and take it to the next level. My gut feeling is the less messing around, the better. This is a team that won 54 games and kicked the Lakers' butts this season. The NBA is all about match ups and the Blazers had a hard time matching up with Houston this season. If they had been seeded against Utah, Dallas, San Antonio, New Orleans or Denver, they would still be playing. They might even have had better luck against L.A.

Fans want to dump Steve Blake and find a better point guard. Newsflash: that guy is not going to come from the Blazers' current roster, unless you switch Roy to point guard. And let's take a look at the league's premier point guards: Chris Paul, Deron Williams, Steve Nash, Tony Parker are all on vacation as of now, too. Meanwhile Derek Fisher of the Lakers is still playing, and he's no better than Blake at this point in his career. Neither, really, is Jason Kidd.

So let's keep Blake and then pick either Sergio Rodriguez or Jered Bayless as the back up and develop him. We all know that Rudy Fernandez is a rising star who can play in big games. Nicholas Batum also has the potential to be another Tayshaun Prince and should be all the Blazers need at small forward. Oden, if he stays healthy, will emerge as a strong, though probably not dominant, center. For next year, I'd still give Joel Przybilla the bulk of the minutes—the 'Zilla earned them by become one of the most reliable defensive forces in the league this year.

So it comes down to this: trade Travis Outlaw, who despite being a relatively good streak shooter can't learn his defensive assignments and doesn't rebound well for his size. He's a nice kid, but he gets way too many minutes as it is. I'd give up on Martell Webster, too—he's not as good as Batum. My ideal move for the off-year is to sign Grant Hill to a two-year deal. Hill has been physically sound the past two years and played marvelously for Phoenix last year. He is a solid citizen and a great team player and he could tutor Batum in the nuances of the game. He signed a two-year contract with the Suns in 2007 and that means he should be a free agent now. The big problem is that he will command a salary higher than what the Blazers can afford under the cap this year.

White elephant in the room

A beautiful day for a protest

I wanted to work in my yard on this glorious spring day—get some flowers planted along the front walk, weed and till the raised beds, maybe even spread out some compost. Really, I did. Instead, I went for a bike ride down to Waterfront Park. It was my civic duty.

There was a rally down there at noon to stop the $4 billion white elephant known as the Columbia River Crossing (CRC). This is the proposal for a new I-5 bridge of 12 lanes, plus bike lanes and a light rail line. Something for everybody, but mostly, a lot of new capacity for cars and trucks to fill up—or not.

I commented on the CRC several months ago. No information has surfaced since then to change my mind. If anything, it’s even more crucial to stop this bridge and use that $4 billion for something else, given the state of our economy.

Most of the speakers cited global warming and other environmental and health hazards as a key reason why the bridge should not be built. Roadway expansion generally is a function of Parkinson’s Law—stuff expands to fill the space allotted for it. It certainly has been true for freeways; building them only increases traffic and thus never mitigates congestion.

My own take on this project, however, is that by the time it gets built nine years from now (if it does get built) traffic volume will have dropped due to rising gas prices. In addition, the tolls necessary for covering half the cost of the bridge—around $2 billion—will also reduce demand. So we will have spent $4 billion (and likely a lot more than that) for something that isn’t needed.

By the way, the current I-5 bridges are in no danger of falling down, according to recent engineer’s studies. The Marquam Bridge over the Willamette River is in worse shape, as is the poor stepchild of government discord, the Sellwood Bridge.

All of the speakers referred to the historic public uprising against the Mt. Hood freeway that was proposed to run through Southeast Portland in the 1970s. Waterfront Park was a handy venue for the rally, as the speakers could point towards the end of the Marquam Bridge where there is a span that was supposed to link to that freeway. That ill-conceived mega-highway got shot down by tremendous grass roots movement. A good thing, too, as it would have run right through my favorite coffee house on Southeast 26^th Ave. and Clinton St.

But the repeated references to the successful anti-freeway campaign of the 70s reveals a bit of desperation in this current movement. There were maybe 300 people at the rally, the vast majority of whom arrived by bike and, like me, were mixing politics with pleasure. Perhaps we live in different times, or that the circumstances are different. The Mt. Hood freeway provoked extreme outrage, since it threatened to destroy many fine Portland neighborhoods.

The CRC, on the other hand, replaces an existing bridge and adds freeway lanes and ramps in that sort of empty area south of the river. Not so much to get worked up about.

But we should. It’s an enormous expense. At the rally, I talked with a representative from the Association of Oregon Rail and Transit Advocates. He told me that for a measly $100 million, all of the track between Portland and Seattle could be upgraded to allow Amtrak’s Talgo trains to maintain their top speed of 125 mph, which would cut train travel between the cities to less than two hours. Right now, Horizon Air has planes leaving PDX for SEATAC every half hour. If we had trains leaving every half hour—or even every hour—they would offer a faster and greener way to go. If we also switched more freight from trucks to trains, there would be considerably less congestion on I-5.

Shouldn’t we get some of Obama’s stimulus money for this? I know Amtrak improvements are slated for the Eastern seaboard, but not out here. So start writing and calling your representatives, local as well as congressional. Especially those of you who didn’t attend the rally and got your garden in ahead of me.

Go to the Council for a Livable Future for ways that you can help stop the bridge.

City Councilor Amanda Fritz speaks at rally.

Greening the Urban Jungle

The future was 42 years ago

Michelle Obama is getting a vegetable garden going in what was once part of the White House lawn. Good for her. I hope her example has a profound effect on the 49 other states and the District of Columbia.

In Oregon, of course, we don’t need that encouragement. To be a true Oregonian, you have to get your fingernails dirty. You have to dig in the dirt , starting right about now (See Ketzel Levine over in the left column). Sure you can wear work gloves, but it’s just not the same. Wearing work gloves for gardening is like using an umbrella when it rains. It’s for wusses—aka, transplants.

I usually wait until the middle of May to plant my veggie garden, because we all know the sun won’t shine and make crops grow until probably July. I do get the flowers going and plant some seeds in pots and mess around with the compost. Last year, I dug up all the lawn in the front yard and converted it to vegetable garden, though I left the strip between the sidewalk and the street. This year, that's going, too. My back yard is really small and too shaded by neighboring trees, but it provides plenty of ranging room for my hens.

At least I have a yard. A lot of people don't. I suppose the folks who purchased condos in the Pearl made a conscious choice to live without a yard (and thus, without yard work). Thousands of others, however, live in apartment complexes where the only things growing are the ficus trees in the lobby and the intermittent shrubs amidst yards of barkdust on the berm between the parking lot and the street.

Portland's propensity for density has left some parts of the city barren of arable land. This became a sore subject over at BlueOregon a while back, with the usual anti-planning stalwarts citing the lack of garden space as another reason why there should be no urban growth boundary, so that vast suburban tracts of single family homes can spring up across the countryside and let a million gardens bloom. Some people just hate the idea of real cities and they will use any straw man argument that comes along to dispute the notion of growing a city up rather than out, never mind that growing out means replacing honest agriculture on our best soils with faux agriculture, aka well-manicured lawns.

Hate to say it, but they do have a point. With today's urban design, it's awfully hard to grow your own tomatoes in a high rise apartment complex. Some apartment dwellers are lucky enough to have space in a community garden, and they are going to cling to those little plots like a New Yorker with a rent-controlled tenement.

So let's redesign the way apartments are built. A number of small measure can be implemented and some already have. For example, the city has financial incentives for developers to install “eco-roofs” on their buildings. The primary reason for this is to reduce rain runoff and thus not overload the sewer system, but these green roofs could also support high rise tenant or community gardens. Unfortunately, most of them look as if someone threw a few bags of wildflower seeds around and walked away.

I'm not sure the city should mandate greener green roofs, but the incentives ought to go further and encourage the growing of food. The city also should mandate proper balconies on all new apartment buildings, and not those fenced in ledges like you see on the Belmont Dairy.

Useless landscaping and excessive parking can also be transformed into garden space. Recently, a very ordinary suburban-style apartment complex was turned into an “ecovillage” by Ole and Maitri Ersson The Kailash Ecovillage boasts a huge garden space in what formerly was part of the parking lot, Formerly the low-rent, often troubled Cabana apartments, the Kailash is now appreciated by its tenants and neighbors.

But even the Kailash is small potatoes compared to what could be designed from the ground up. For one thing, people with families usually prefer to live in their own houses and have their own yards. And yet, single family homes are at a premium in most parts of Portland, even in this down economy. It's a little easier to find an affordable house now than a year ago, but not necessarily in the vicinity of a good elementary school or easy access to mass transportation.

Creating houses with yards, however, will take up too much of our precious space, won't it? Maybe not. The answer may come from a 42-year-old development in Montreal, known as Habitat 67.

Picture McCormick Pier on steroids. It's a condo development with the difference that one person's roof is another person's back yard, and so on. Designed for the Montreal Expo in 1967 by the architect Moshe Safdie, Habitat aspires to be a hill town built on a flat surface.

"Safdie's dwelling complex 'Habitat' was designed to give 'privacy, fresh air, sunlight and suburban amenities in an urban location.' It was designed as a permanent settlement and consists of 158 dwellings, although originally it was intended to provide 1,000 units. The resulting ziggurat was made up of independent prefabricated boxes with fifteen different plan types."

• Dennis Sharp. Twentieth Century Architecture: a Visual History.

Not all of the units in Habitat have gardens, though many do and some actually have trees growing on those roof/balconies. I don't know if anyone planted a lawn but there definitely are vegetable gardens there.

Safdie envisioned Habitat as a way of building low cost housing for families. Ironically, the uniqueness of this concept has made the units highly desirable and they now are among the highest priced real estate in Montreal. Neither he nor anyone else has built anything like it since. A big reason why Habitat never reached the 900 units that were originally planned is that it cost far more to build this structure than he thought.

Yet now, with land prices being a major cost of development, one would think someone would try to improve on Safdie's design. Certainly, there must have been improvements in building materials that would lower costs, and the way the thing is so strangely configured could be loosened up a bit by departing from the cube-only scheme. For my money, the places could be built so that there's more yard in one place, perhaps by stacking just enough of each unit on the top of the other and supporting the rest of it in another manner.

So anyway, what's the deal? Does anyone have an answer as to why this concept has never been tried again?

Won't you help?

Don't let the AIG bigshots fail

I know the recession is pinching every pocketbook, but please take time to consider the plight of the poor, besieged AIG executive. Not only are these lost souls being maligned in ever corner of America, from the halls of Congress to the local barbershop, but it appears they are going to lose their hard-earned bonuses. Either they will have to give them back, or else their bonus booty will be taxed right out of their Cayman Island bank accounts. Even Oregon is getting in on the action.

How would you feel if you were the target of an entire nation's wrath over our economic meltdown? Pretty depressed, I'd bet. These execs were, after all, just doing their job. In fact, they did their job too well. If they hadn't put in all those 80-hour weeks swapping credit defaults and diddling with derivatives, if they had slacked for the past several years, they might not have found themselves in the middle of this mess.

And so what is their reward for all this hard work and making money out of thin air? They stand to lose their bonuses—er, retention pay. What is going to motivate them? What will make them want to stay on the job? That is other than the fact that probably no one else will ever want to hire them?

They stand to lose their second or third house, or at least that nice condo in St. Lucia. They may have to sell off their Bugatti Veyron and downsize to a totally inadequate BMW Z8. And after cultivating a taste for well-aged scotch, can you expect them to live on Dewar's?

Won't you help? Won't you please help?

For a donation of just $100,000—that's a mere 20 cents per minute—you can keep one broker in Talisker 30-year single malt scotch for one year. (Assuming a fifth a day is enough.)

Please act today to end their pain and humiliation. Send your blank check or credit card (yes, the card itself) to:

Too Big To Fail Foundation

P.O. Box 31337

Georgetown, Grand Cayman Island

KY1 -1209

Your donation is not tax deductible. But then, unlike the poor AIG wretch, you probably won't make enough money this year to need to pay taxes.

Feeling S.A.D.?

The Oregon Blue Sky Law

I did a fat lot of nothing today. The sun was shining bright, so I took the day off, as is my right under the Oregon blue sky law.

Most states have blue sky laws that regulate the sale of securities to protect the public from fraud. The term comes from the earliest efforts to pass such a law, in Kansas of all places:

The name that is given to the law indicates the evil at which it is aimed, that is, to use the language of a cited case, "speculative schemes which have no more basis than so many feet of 'blue sky'"; or, as stated by counsel in another case, "to stop the sale of stock in fly-by-night concerns, visionary oil wells, distant gold mines and other like fraudulent exploitations."

As you can see from the likes of Bernie Madoff and others, these laws have loopholes big enough to let a python slither through unscathed.

The Oregon blue sky law addresses a more serious subject, however—Seasonal Affective Disorder. It states: “On any day between the first day of November and the last day of April in the following year, when the sky is entirely blue over a community in Oregon, employees in that community may cease their work with impunity.” Meaning, the sun is out, go out and play.

Exceptions are made for those who work in public safety and emergency services, those who work outdoors anyway, and political pundits and bloggers, who could become severely disoriented if they ever saw the light of day.

Tomorrow is supposed to be another sunny, beautiful day (followed by more rain the next few days), so make sure you take off work for at least awhile and get outside. Don’t worry, the law is on your side. You could look it up.

Buses AND Beer

One more for the road


The other night an empty bar stool was a precious commodity at a favorite neighborhood tavern. This is a friendly little joint owned by some people who escaped to Portland several years ago from Cleveland. It's said that taverns are one business that does well in a recession. If that's true, we're in one hell of a recession, because this tavern was hopping, and it wasn't a weekend.

Shortly after I finally claimed a stool at the bar, I saw a TriMet bus rumble down the street in front of the tavern. The man to my right saluted it with his beer mug and said, “Say farewell to the old Number 41.”

Actually, I didn't say anything, but he went on to explain that this particular bus line is headed for extinction due to TriMet's budget shortfall. The transit agency has to cut expenses by 5% and is doing that by totally axing some lines and reducing service on others, even as ridership has increased on many lines. Overall, riders only pay for 20% of TriMet's operating costs. Most of the remainder comes from payroll taxes and when unemployment increases, payrolls plummet. Of course, the general consensus of the sages gathered around their beers was that TriMet is totally incompetent.

That may be true, but it's possibly no more incompetent than any other large bureaucracy. And like most bureaucracies, TriMet's larger problem is that it's unimaginative.

Or maybe its managers don't get out to bars very often, because sitting there in that pub, I came up with a solution to TriMet's budget crisis in less time than it takes to quaff three beers. And this is it:

Buses with beer.

People don’t like riding the bus and only do it as a last resort. Oh, there’s usually one person on every bus who is having a thoroughly good time. That person sits right across from the bus driver and talks incessantly. Many of the rest of the passengers either do not own a functioning automobile or are not allowed to drive one. And at certain hours, commuters crowd the buses--unperky commuters who do not have the perk of their own parking space at work.

Buses are not only slow and inconvenient, but boring. There needs to be something to do other than twitch to the sounds of your I-Pod or stare blankly at the pages of a Steven King novel. Though often crowded, buses are not social places--except for the gaggle of women who sit in the back discussing the relative merits of their lovers’ prison sentences. Because buses are seen only as conveyances, they are nothing more than horizontal elevators.

Now envision what they could be. First, take out all the bench seats and put in those swivel chairs like you find in RVs. And between them put in little cocktail tables. Put a mini bar at one end, like the ones on Amtrak club cars. Serve coffee and scones in the morning, beer and wine for the commute home. The after work drink is a common ritual among may high-stress occupations--think about how much safer it will be if these commuters did their drinking on the bus home rather than before they get into their cars.


There could be market segmentation as well. Instead of mass transit, it will be class transit. On buses going to Lake Oswego, Dunthorpe or East Moreland, one might be able to order an aged malt scotch. Those running up Mississippi or down Belmont might serve absinthe and PBR. The rigs headed to the working class areas of the east side could have sawdust on the floor and a pool table in the back. You could have sports bar buses, piano bar buses, maybe even leather bar buses.

Obviously, a lot of people wouldn’t want to board a perambulatory pub, or wouldn’t be old enough. But the possibilities are endless. There could be rolling boutiques, motorized music stores, double decker discos bringing back the bump and hustle. A lot of people like to work out either before or after work, so line up sets of rowing machines and stair steppers on a bus and tie them into the drive drain, reducing fuel costs

All these buses, of course, would have Wifi.

The best thing about this idea is that rather than increasing fares every year, TriMet could actually reduce fares. Maybe even make the whole system fareless so long as one purchased a beverage upon boarding.

Jeez, Tri-Met could actually make money. Wouldn't that be a novel idea?

California Dreamin"

As the economy goes to pot

In the post below, I advocate taxing television to save Oregon's public schools during the recession. But Oregon is sitting in high clover compared to California, which faces a $40 billion budget shortfall. Forty billion bucks--that's a lot of money. Why, it's almost as much as we are still spending in Iraq every three months.

The chronically clever Mark Morford, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, has a different solution.