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Governor * Democrats -- Bev Stein, Jim Hill, Peter DeFazio, Earl Blumenauer, Teddy Kulongowski, Bill Bradbury, Peter Courtney, Mike Thorne? If DeFazio decides to run, he's the odds-on favorite. Seniors and labor love DeFazio, but some of the PDX high tech folks are nervous about his stance on power deregulation and NAFTA, GATT, and WTO & which is exactly why labor and the rest of us love him. U.S. Senate
For example, Bill Morrisette might move over to join Al King's district (HD42 and 44). If that happens, Vicki Walker and Bill Morrisette won't run against each other for Lee Beyer's expiring Senate seat. That might leave Floyd Prozanski, Phil Barnhart, and Walker vying for Susan Castillo's seat (HD40 and 41), and Bob Ackerman or Kitty Piercy to run against Cedric Hayden in a HD39/43 combo. You can let your voice be heard on redistricting at 2:30 pm April 12 at the Eugene City Council Chambers.
I don't often lose on a 29-1 vote, as I did on the Labor and Industries budget last week. But I voted against the budget to make a point. Earlier in the week, Roberts testified in our Senate Business, Labor and Economic Development Committee on his bill to eliminate his Bureau of Labor and Industries (BOLI) and his job (he's termed out); he wants to fold the bureau into DCBS, the Department of Consumer and Business Services. Organized labor is opposed to this move. BOLI enforces state laws dealing with workplace discrimination and wage and hour disputes, as well as apprenticeship programs. Oregon's working families need a place to turn when their rights as workers are threatened. For six years Jack ran on a platform to eliminate his bureau, and he cut field offices in Pendleton and Bend. Now he claims that his bureau no longer can subsist on its own because it's too small. I said in my "vote explanation" that this was like a child who murders his parents and then asks for mercy from the court because he's an orphan! Labor legislators will meet with the governor this week. Reps. Leonard, Gardner, Monnes Anderson, Hansen, March, Ackerman, Rosenbaum and I will talk to John about the issues we face this session. As union members, we are firefighters, electricians, nurses, plumbers, teachers, meatcutters, telecommunications workers and public employees. Among the issues we'll discuss are third-tier PERS, eliminating binding arbitration, and extending unemployment and training benefits to dislocated workers. We've lost 7,000 family-wage jobs in Oregon recently due to the energy crisis and the downturn in the timber industry, high tech and agriculture. Tony Corcoran of Cottage Grove is minority whip in the Senate and represents portions of Lane and Douglas counties in Senate District 22. He can be reached in Salem at (503) 986-1722 or e-mail corcoran.sen@state.or.us Back to Top  Breasts I didn't want anyone to look at me. Someone is playing a conga drum. Women dance in an open field, whooping and laughing under the afternoon sun. Everyone has their shirts off. Albuquerque, 1975. I'm 25 years old and attending my first women's festival. Cauldrons of hot water simmer over small fires in preparation for a tie-dye workshop. Scattered blankets under a big palo verde tree await a session on guided meditation. Desert creosote sweetens the warm air. The drums beat an inviting rhythm but I linger at my little dome tent, unsure of the energy I'll attract if I bare my breasts. When I was 7 my parents sent me to stay with my grandmother for the summer. My grandparents, who we always called Mama and Papa, just like my mother did, lived in Los Angeles until Papa died. Max was my grandmother's second husband and now lived in her apartment at the beach. I liked to play with Mama's wooden nesting dolls and the collection of miniature glass shoes she called "chotchkes." She'd gather me up onto her soft lap and tell me magnificent and frightening stories of the old country and life under the czar. Mama left Max in charge when she made her monthly trek to the beauty shop to get her hair dyed. (As far as she was concerned, blue was always in -- Mama was way ahead of her time.) Unlike Papa's familiar bald head, Max had thick white hair that he carefully styled, one hand smoothing the white waves behind the comb. His fingers were thick, not slender and delicate like Papas. He never cupped my face in his hands and pulled a quarter out of my ear like Papa used to do. Sometimes Max would take out the heavy ceramic mixing bowls and I would help him make poppyseed cookies with sweet prune filling. When the cookies were in the oven, he'd sit in his overstuffed chair and read magazines. Once I climbed onto the fuzzy arm of Max's chair and looked over his shoulder. Max didn't smell friendly and clean like Papa had. Max smelled strange, like cologne and stale cigarettes and moth balls. Max stared at one picture of a lady for a long time. In the picture the lady was outdoors, under a big tree. Her arms reached over her head and her hands held a low branch. Max rubbed his wrinkly thumb over the picture, his yellowed thumbnail sliding back and forth across the lady's bare chest. "See how nice they stand up?" His voice was low and gruff, different from the cheery playful voice he had when Mama was around. I walked into the kitchen and didn't say anything. I wished Mama would come home. It would be OK if she didn't stop for ice cream this time. Poppyseed cookies are fine with plain milk. I pressed my face to the cool glass of the kitchen window to see if she was coming up the walk. I could hear Max in the living room. He sounded like he wasn't feeling well. I waited for Mama at the kitchen door and crossed my arms over my chest. My breasts hadn't started to develop. I hoped they never would. I didn't want anyone to look at me like Max looked at those magazines. The conga drums boom louder. Women dance through the camp area right by my tent. I see every kind of breast imaginable with nipples of every color from the palest pink to the darkest brown. The variety is amazing. Inverted nipples, protruding nipples, hairy aureolas, scars, stretch marks, different-sized pairs of breasts, huge breasts, tiny breasts, full, flat and in between. Some even look like mine. None look like the pictures in men's magazines. The women clap along with the drum rhythm, singing, laughing, dancing in a circle. I take off my shirt. Sally Sheklow has been a part of the Eugene community since 1972 and is a member of the WYMPROV! comedy troupe. Her column, which began at EW, also runs in several other newspapers around the country.
I thought of that today after coming indoors from three hours of digging in the garden. A mist had been falling, the dogwood was leafing out and geese were heading north. Comfortable, and comforting. I picked up an article and saw a photo of a seal pup. It was traveling across sand, holding its head up expectantly, like any youngster. But it was starving. Its flank was ribs, not fat, and its shoulders were bony knobs. It wasn't comfortable. The article said, "Two years ago, hikers found hundreds of seal pups dying of starvation on the beaches of northern California. Investigators concluded the pups were starving because the fish on which they feed were driven to depths beyond the range of the young seals by warming surface waters." Meanwhile, President Bush, who is only distantly related to seals, is un-signing the U.S. from the International Global Warming treaty. Next Tuesday, a friend is coming over for dinner. Less than two weeks ago, his partner, Kathie Madsen, 44, died of breast cancer. She was not one of the comfortable people when she had a mastectomy at age 38, nor during the last two and a half years as breast cancer invaded her brain and she endured radiation and chemotherapy. President Bush, who will likely never suffer from breast cancer, has just nominated a dioxin apologist, John Graham, to be his "regulatory czar." The position Graham will have is director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Thanks to unconscionable powers given to that position by Presidents Nixon, Carter, Reagan (especially), Bush Senior, and Congress, Graham will essentially stop, gut, or interminably delay agency regulations that are necessary to implement the occasional congressional law that calls on Americans and corporations to act with some degree of environmental or public health responsibility. Until now, Graham has headed the corporate-funded Harvard Center for Risk Analysis (the funding AMOUNTS are kept secret). Upon hearing that the Environmental Protection Agency estimates dioxin may be causing cancer in one of every HUNDRED Americans, economist Graham responded that dioxin's cancer risk is not "out of the norm" for Americans, as it is comparable to their chance of dying in a car crash. Meanwhile, Graham opposes regulating use of a cell phone while driving, which results in drivers being four times more likely to get in a car crash. Graham's reasoning? Driving with cell phones benefits corporate productivity. It's impossible to put one's heart and brain simultaneously around comfortable professionals, starving seal pups, oil presidents, 38-year-old women with breast cancer, and one Harvard economist with appalling power to make sure corporate profits aren't touched. Bush will feel self-righteous and smug for the next four years while he wreaks local, national, and worldwide suffering. But we can't afford to spend those four years breathlessly recounting to each other the latest Bush outrage. Bush is merely the logical outcome of the ideology that rich people, corporations, and nations getting richer matters more than responsibility, democracy, air, water, climate, community, well-being, common sense, decency, or the future of all our relations. He is the inevitable result of our having given corporations the legal status of "persons," and obscenely huge campaign donations the legal status of "free speech." For the next four years, those who believe in democracy and decency have to be political. We must restore and advance the health of public lands, air, water, education, responsibility, science and law. We need to challenge deceitful language, such as referring to an air polluter as a "private" company, or justifying murder and ecological devastation as "jobs." Just thinking hard about what is going wrong in the world doesn't
constitute doing something about it; and merely working hard to do something about
it doesn't constitute being effective. Politically effective action requires organizations
and coalitions; visionary thinking linked to practical action; and strategies for
years-long campaigns. We are bigger in number, wisdom, and heart than Bush and his
comfortable cronies. Now we have to ACT bigger. Mary O'Brien is a co-organizer of "Spirited Work," an April 7 gathering about the spirit within activism, in honor of Wanda Ballentine, a former Eugene activist. For information and to sign up (free), contact Mary at mob@efn.org Back to Top If drive-by traffic was a key to business, why isn't there a road through the middle of Gateway Mall, or the Valley River Center? Instead, let the Downtown Pedestrian Mall function successfully like others all over Europe; put a glass roof over Broadway, perhaps with open-air domes above the Olive and Willamette intersections for dry entertainment all year around. Shopping downtown would be as rain-free and comfortable as Gateway in May. Doors could close the Mall after hours and a "Main Street" décor facelift could rejuvenate the nostalgia for friendly local stores, tasty restaurants and interesting art galleries. The only real problem the Downtown Mall ever had was the lack of a roof, every business in Oregon needs one after all. Mark Murphy
1) If cruelty towards bees was the real concern, we would all be vegans and leave them alone. Because we depend on bees (primarily for pollination), this won't be happening. No matter how careful one is, bees can get squished or left behind (for example, in transporting). Even colonies that are treated with miticides can die. These realities could be considered cruel. 2) Chuck's assertion that miticides "are not present in the hive" is incorrect. Analytical Chemical Services, Inc., among others, has found miticides, including pyrethyroids (fluvalinate), amitraz, and chlordimeform, in honey and wax. 3) Fluvalinate-resistant mites surfaced in the U.S. in the late 1990s. The EPA then granted emergency exemption status to coumaphos (a neuro toxin) for use on honeybees. Originally, no residues were allowed in honey or wax; however, this changed in August 2000, after a large honey corporation found coumaphos in their honey. The EPA then established tolerances for this pesticide in honey and wax. 4) The use of essential oils is legal, according to the Oregon Department of Agriculture and EPA (40 CFR 152:25). We understand why large-scale beekeepers, faced with massive losses to mites and the resulting agricultural disaster, have chosen to use toxic chemicals. However, practical alternatives exist that are legal, tested, and effective. Some beekeepers are successfully using non-chemical methods to control mites. You can find more information on this subject at www.beesource.com Philip Smith
As you reported (Insider Baseball, 3/8), about 500 R-G subscribers late last month temporarily stopped home delivery. They took a break from the paper in support of a fair contract for the Eugene Newspaper Guild. I was part of the 500. How many of us share my dismay and alarm? I am dismayed that the R-G management shows such anti-union, anti-worker feeling. I feel for the employees. At the same time, I wonder how the R-G can continue to editorialize and advise its readers when its own house is in decay, while the paper remains a bad example for the whole community of workers and managers? I am alarmed by the R-G blackout on its own newsworthy negotiations. Sure they have been pointless and inexcusably abrasive, so far, but with touches of humor (Tony Baker elected Grinch, the R-G offices serenaded, the wrap on hundreds of newspapers). Such a process in Seattle, leading to a strike of Guild workers there, was covered by the R-G. Then what is news? The R-G holds downtown properties, so how should I take its coverage of city center planning and development? Anti-union tactics and muzzling local news make for distrust. Might a longer break from the R-G be in order? Erik Muller
He dissolved the AIDS Department and the race relations department, made laws weakening the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act), did away with the new ergonomic rules enacted by President Clinton, decided no carbon dioxide regulation rules were needed and no arsenic levels in drinking water rules were needed either -- and he's trying to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to his oil buddies. This administration has been very busy and we best get busy while there is still something left to save. Moon Rainbow
The bureaucrat involved is Kym Hall of the NPS at 1849 C Street, Room 7413, in Washington, D.C. Despite my sympathy for the way Native Americans have been treated in this country, this kind of pandering in inexcusable and must be stopped. All bird lovers of whatever political persuasion would appreciate your help in stopping this indecency. Please write to the NPS and to your congressmen. Harry Ehrmantraut
The separation of church from state requires clear accountability. Churches are essentially evangelical and are subsidized by a tax-free corporate status. Most faith-based groups promote overbreeding with a casual disregard to the inevitable exacerbation of poverty that comes with larger populations. The confabulation and emotionalism of religion should not be confused with the social services they may perform. The schools, buildings, and services offered by faith-based religions for the privilege of government subsidies are misguided. Formula grants to groups that feed the poor as well as reforms in tax codes to allow limited charitable choice deductions are more sensible ways to include religious organizations in the social service net. Toby Grant
Several years ago, I read a book by M. J. Levitt titled Confessions of a Union Buster. Levitt chronicles his role in one of the U.S.'s first union-busting firms. He explains how these firms teach companies how to destroy unions at any cost. It was one of the most frightening accounts I have ever read. I can't really relate the process in the space available, but I encourage anyone to read the book. Many things I have heard about R-G tactics during the Guild's struggle echo Levitt's book, from reports of union-bashing literature sent to R-G workers to the hiring of a union-busting attorney from Tennessee to negotiate for the owners. This attorney, an outsider, has absolutely no vested interest in the Guild, the Guard, or in this community. I ask the owners of the R-G to abandon their attempt to destroy the Guild, beginning with the firing of their outsider negotiator, and returning to face-to-face negotiations with the Guild -- a longstanding tradition of the Baker family. If the R-G continues to bargain in what I see as bad faith, as a subscriber of over 20 years, I shall find it necessary to permanently cancel my subscription. Gary Jarvis
Enrollments at Lane Community College will continue to grow, and funding from the state will not keep pace. We will have to make difficult decisions in the future. As we face those decisions, I will always try to do what is best for students and the people of the Community College District. Board members are your elected representatives. If you have questions or concerns, please contact me, or any other board member. We need to know what issues are important to you and how we can improve the services Lane provides. Again, thank you for punching out that chad and sending in your votes. Kathleen Shelley
Luckily, there is a relatively easy answer to our ongoing municipal angst. Most of the progressives live in south and east Eugene. Most of the "silent majority" live north of the Willamette River or west of Chambers Street. All we need to do to solve a multitude of problems is to divide Eugene in two! North and west Eugene can become a separate city (with City Hall in the Montgomery Ward space at Valley River?) or could choose to annex itself to Springfield if the voters wished to save taxes and duplicating administrative costs. In political philosophy these parts of town are very close to Springfield right now. Why keep the endless fight going? This would leave slow growing or no growing south and east Eugene to fulfill a different urban vision from the sprawling strip-malled remainder of the urban area. We could ban cars, or certainly tax them so heavily people would realize how much better for them and the environment it is if they walked, biked or used mass transit. We could raise taxes to provide for our unmet needs. In particular, we could impose a "commuter tax" on all the wealthy who earn their keep in Eugene and retreat to their McMansions in the slurbs. Eugene, without the drag of the regressive voters who replicate the outliers, could become the envy of Berkeley and Boulder! Dean S. Kaufman
First of all, the late great paleontologist Dr. L. Leakey stated that the chimpanzee is man, and Dr. Jane Goodall, ethologist, observed and wrote in her book In The Shadow Of Man, the chimpanzee has intelligence, the ability to develop and utilize tools. Therefore, one may ask is that what it takes to perform the duties as U.S. president, or is there more required than just being a man or woman with intelligence. Well, the current U.S. President George W. Bush, who (given a lot more body hair) does resemble an overgrown chimpanzee, has resigned himself to let others perform the job as U.S. president while he goes about spouting themes. A very similar practice was utilized by President Ronald Reagan. Yeah, a chimpanzee can be taught to delegate duties as Bush and Reagan were taught and to spout themes; however, the one difference in the chimpanzee's favor is that chimpanzees do not defecate where they sleep, something Bush and Reagan apparently never learned (Bush's Texas and Reagan's presidency). In conclusion, it appears the U.S. presidency is a job that can be performed by a homosapien but just as well by a chimpanzee. Jack H. Myreng
Ill portents notwithstanding, the restoration of this once proud nation and the reinstitution of its highest values are not only worthwhile and desirable, but possibly within our impending grasp 3 if the Democrats in Washington can hold their ground for the next four years and fight as if (because) our lives depend on them! Sadly, from what I've gathered in the news media through the past few weeks, it would appear that the heretofore heralded "party of the common person" has already caved in, complacently accepting much of Bush's welfare-for-the-rich tax cut. I am sickened by the substance of this debate. What should have been a discussion of how we might best provide jobs, housing, health care, education and cultural opportunities for one and all, has instead decayed into bickering over how to divide the spoils of surplus among the privileged class. Time is short, and the liberal-minded movers and shakers on The Hill may still avert this tragedy -- by filibuster if necessary -- and they need to be encouraged to do so. We should all phone, e-mail and write to our elected officials, especially Senator Wyden, Rep. DeFazio, Senate Democratic Leader Thomas Daschle and House Democratic Leader Richard Gebhardt -- expressing opposition to the bushwhacking of America via this unconscionable proposal. John Granacki
Stupidity Crisis First , regarding the schools funding issue. Last year a bi-partisan Congress passed into law the Secure Rural Schools and Communities Act which would lock in federal funds for Oregon schools. But Gov. Kitzhaber decides to cut Oregon's school funding budget the exact amount that would have been granted by the feds. Thus Oregon schools receive not one extra dollar. To add, the Oregon Transportation Department is telling us that they have a few hundred million dollars to burn on the I-5/Beltline and Parkway Projects. The "energy crisis" that various bureaucracies are clamoring about, could easily be avoided if state and federal agencies as well as the utilities were willing to let loose of their strangle-hold on customers by promoting fuel switching (electric to natural gas-solar) for home space and water heating. Instead they tell us that we need to build hundreds of new electric generating plants (gas turbine, coal, and even nuclear) and kill salmon. If a few million Southwestern homes (and a few thousand Northwest homes) installed solar water heating systems, there would be no electricity shortage. Finally, George Bush is pushing to give $1 trillion back to the richest Americans while schools are crumbling, the worlds ecosystems are on the brink of collapse and teenagers are killing one another. This is the just a "short list." Shannon Wilson
Where was Torrey when Eugene's sole downtown hospital planned its move out of town? Where has Torrey been when local schools are shutting down? Where was he when the sole downtown theater closed, consigning moviegoers to the malls? (The small Bijou Theater being the only exception.) But Torrey is right before us when it comes to serving the federal government or large companies. Just ask Hyundai or Symantec. Our development-hungry mayor seems especially gracious to local contractors, like Chambers Construction, Wildish, and Eugene Sand $ Gravel. "Tear it down (no matter how functional to the community), and build something new," seems to be the city's answer to everything. If you are worried about maintaining hospitals, schools or culture, however, Torrey and most of the City Council are nowhere to be found. No wonder downtown decays while the mall parking lots are full. No wonder the city has little money left over for parks, libraries and programs that encourage a healthy, vibrant downtown atmosphere for everyone, not just for the business owners. Jim Flynn
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