LOVESalem

Don't Forget: Oregon State Bank forum Weds Evening, Feb 1

2012-01-27T15:19:00.001-08:00

I want to invite you to a forum on using our common financial resources to grow a sustainable economy sponsored by the Working Families Party (WFP) and Occupy Salem next Wednesday, February 1 at the Salem Public Library, 6-7:30 PM.

Latino Business Alliance President Jose Gonzalez and WFP Director Steve Hughes will join me in the discussion Right now, 66% of all bank deposits in Oregon are held by just five big banks. If we want to build a local economy, we are going to have to break our state's dependence on Wall Street.

This forum will discuss how we can best use our common financial resources to grow a sustainable economy. We will examine policy proposals including efforts by Oregon cities to move their money out of big banks, the Oregon State Bank proposal, and the State Treasurer's "Oregon Investment Act," which he will be introducing in the 2012 legislative session.

The address is 585 Liberty Street Southeast.
Call 503-841-7161 for more information and register online.

WORD again

2012-01-25T14:08:00.001-08:00

WORD

2012-01-23T07:00:00.000-08:00

Must-read: why we need to massively overhaul school and public health funding priorities

2012-01-22T07:00:00.000-08:00

This piece from the NY Times (and native Oregonian) Bill Kristof two Sundays ago is a guaranteed finalist as one of the most important op-eds of 2012 already. As the states and cities like Salem find themselves increasingly bankrupted by physical constraints making growth economics a distant memory, never to return, we need to spend more and more (of the less and less we can afford) on kids at the most important years for brain development. Essentially, the sooner the better.

Instead our politics is driving us exactly away from this strategy ... So we kill elementary school librarians and the highest performing elementary schools to preserve the funding for sports at the comprehensive mega high schools, despite the fact that we get a much greater return on the limited dollars the earlier they are spent in helping kids. We employ battalions of people to squander their energies on exhorting the children damaged by poverty to act like the children of the upper middle class. We ignore mounting evidence about the crucial roles of play and physical activity and turn early grades into mini college test prep centers.

Kristof:

Perhaps the most widespread peril children face isn't guns, swimming pools or speeding cars. Rather, scientists are suggesting that it may be "toxic stress" early in life, or even before birth.

This month, the American Academy of Pediatrics is issuing a landmark warning that this toxic stress can harm children for life. I'm as skeptical as anyone of headlines from new medical studies (Coffee is good for you! Coffee is bad for you!), but that's not what this is.

Rather, this is a "policy statement" from the premier association of pediatricians, based on two decades of scientific research. This has revolutionary implications for medicine and for how we can more effectively chip away at poverty and crime.

Toxic stress might arise from parental abuse of alcohol or drugs. It could occur in a home where children are threatened and beaten. It might derive from chronic neglect — a child cries without being cuddled. Affection seems to defuse toxic stress — keep those hugs and lullabies coming! — suggesting that the stress emerges when a child senses persistent threats but no protector.

Cues of a hostile or indifferent environment flood an infant, or even a fetus, with stress hormones like cortisol in ways that can disrupt the body's metabolism or the architecture of the brain.

The upshot is that children are sometimes permanently undermined. Even many years later, as adults, they aremore likely to suffer heart disease, obesity, diabetes and other physical ailments. They are also more likely to struggle in school, have short tempers and tangle with the law.

The crucial period seems to be from conception through early childhood. After that, the brain is less pliable and has trouble being remolded.

"You can modify behavior later, but you can't rewire disrupted brain circuits," notes Jack P. Shonkoff, a Harvard pediatrician who has been a leader in this field. "We're beginning to get a pretty compelling biological model of why kids who have experienced adversity have trouble learning."

This new research addresses an uncomfortable truth: Poverty is difficult to overcome partly because of self-destructive behaviors. Children from poor homes often shine, but others may skip school, abuse narcotics, break the law, and have trouble settling down in a marriage and a job. Then their children may replicate this pattern.

Liberals sometimes ignore these self-destructive pathologies. Conservatives sometimes rely on them to blame poverty on the poor.

The research suggests that the roots of impairment and underachievement are biologically embedded, but preventable. "This is the biology of social class disparities," Dr. Shonkoff said. "Early experiences are literally built into our bodies."

The implication is that the most cost-effective window to bring about change isn't high school or even kindergarten — although much greater efforts are needed in schools as well — but in the early years of life, or even before birth.

"Protecting young children from adversity is a promising, science-based strategy to address many of the most persistent and costly problems facing contemporary society, including limited educational achievement, diminished economic productivity, criminality, and disparities in health," the pediatrics academy said in its policy statement.

One successful example of early intervention is home visitation by childcare experts, like those from the Nurse-Family Partnership. This organization sends nurses to visit poor, vulnerable women who are pregnant for the first time. The nurse warns against smoking and alcohol and drug abuse, and later encourages breast-feeding and good nutrition, while coaxing mothers to cuddle their children and read to them. This program continues until the child is 2.

At age 6, studies have found, these children are only one-third as likely to have behavioral or intellectual problems as others who weren't enrolled. At age 15, the children are less than half as likely to have been arrested.

Evidence of the importance of early experiences has been mounting like snowflakes in a blizzard. For example, several studies examined Dutch men and women who had been in utero during a brief famine at the end of World War II. Decades later, those "famine babies" had more trouble concentrating and more heart disease than those born before or after.

Other scholars examined children who had been badly neglected in Romanian orphanages. Those who spent more time in the orphanages had shorter telomeres, a change in chromosomes that's a marker of accelerated aging. Their brain scans also looked different.

The science is still accumulating. But a compelling message from biology is that if we want to chip away at poverty and improve educational and health outcomes, we have to start earlier. For many children, damage has been suffered before the first day of school.

As Frederick Douglass noted, "It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men."

The end of summer 2011

2012-01-20T07:00:00.001-08:00

Well, our excess solar production from the summer has finally petered out - it made it up through 1-16-12, with a few last lonely kWhs in the tank. Still, pretty good for such a cool, wet year last year. We made 4130 kWh and didn't pay anything for electricity after around April last year -- hoping for a little more production in 2012 (maybe 4300 kWh), which would carry us into February next year.

Reserve some time for Monday night at City Hall!

2012-01-20T07:00:00.000-08:00

Image via WikipediaThanks to VERY hard work by a handful of dedicated folks, Salem finally passed an ordinance allowing very limited amount of henkeeping in residential zones. The results have been as expected, with legal recognition REDUCING the problems caused by people who need to keep hens but won't spend any money on coops and equipment as long as they are banned entirely.

So that's the good part, we have limited legal henkeeping. The bad part is that the city council was so pelted with rocks from fearmongers trying to terrify people about hens that they wound up producing a real hairball of an ordinance that essentially treats hens as bloodthirsty terrors that need to be kept under armed guard at all times (in contrast with the complete absence of rules for keeping dogs, even very aggressive breeds).

Worse, the ordinance makes it outrageously costly to keep hens legally.

So, now that we have experience showing that the more the city acts reasonably, the more conditions improve for hens, henkeepers, and neighbors, it's time to improve the ordinance.

SO, PLEASE ATTEND the Salem City Council for the kickoff of the next round of "bringing sanity to henkeeping in Salem," the longest-running drama in Salem legislative history.

Monday, Jan. 23rd at 6:30 pm - please attend!

Chief petitioner Barb Palermo, founder of CITY (Chickens in the Yard) reports:

For the last three months I've been trying to get Salem's chicken ordinance modified. Based on a positive report from the Code Compliance Office, I thought we could get some changes made administratively, but unfortunately that is not the case. We're going to have to work for it.

While some city councilors support the changes, there is still resistance. City Staff has recommended no changes be considered for at least two more years, despite it's own report stating the number of complaints has decreased and backyard chickens have not created any problems.

At the January 23rd meeting, Councilor Chuck Bennett will make a motion to modify the chicken ordinance. We will need a lot of people at that meeting to support the proposed changes outlined below. If we can convince at least 5 of the 9 council members to support the motion, we could have a less expensive and less restrictive chicken ordinance in effect by spring!

There is only one way to make this happen and it requires a big showing of support at the meeting. You don't have to speak, sign in, or give your name. Just show up and raise your hand when we ask all supporters in the audience to do so. This is very important and very effective so PLEASE attend: Monday, January 23rd at 6:30 pm - Salem City Hall, 555 Liberty St SE, Room 240 (council chambers).

To induce you to come -- as if helping to improve your city greatly isn't enough -- Barb is offering a giveaway, free USDA 2012 poultry calendars. (I wonder if these are like "Playhen" with the hot centerfolds?)

1. Reduce the licensing cost to a one-time $25 fee (not $50/yr [!]).

There are now 57 registered chicken owners in the city of Salem. Each of them had to pay $50 for a chicken license, yet other pets cost little or nothing. Soon, our licenses will have to be renewed and we will have to pay another $50. This is unreasonable and for many, unaffordable. Most other cities do not charge a fee for keeping chickens and of those that do, it is a one-time fee. A one-time fee of $25 would cover the cost of maintaining the city’s online application process.

2. Reduce the inspection burden to one initial inspection (not every three years).

Most cities do not require inspections to keep chickens. If you think an inspection is still necessary, than it should only be required initially to obtain the license. After that, no follow-up inspections should be needed unless there is a valid complaint. Inspections are what cost the city money and by reducing the number of inspections, the city will save money and the cost of the license can be lowered as described above.

3. Drop the rule that forces coops out at least 10’ from the henkeeper's own house.

There is no logical reason for this. The closer the coop is to our own house, the further it will be from neighbors and that’s what matters.

4. Change how coop size is measured to exclude the run/pen.

The 120 square foot requirement should only apply to the portion of the chicken structure with walls and a roof, not the wire run that’s attached to it. A wire pen should not be subjected to the building code requirement because it’s not a building. The pen will still have to be at least 20’ from neighbors’ homes.

5. Increase the number of hens from three to five.

Many cities allow up to six hens and for good reason. Hens lay fewer and fewer eggs as they get older. We don’t want to get rid of older hens because they are pets we’re fond of, and they will continue to provide fertilizer and natural pest control. But we would like to be able to introduce young chicks when our hens get older, so the eggs keep coming. By increasing the number of hens to five, we could add two more chicks to the flock in a couple of years when our current hens get older and produce fewer eggs.

6. Allow chickens at churches, schools, and community gardens.

Marion-Polk Food Share, Pringle Creek Community Garden, and the Oregon Deaf School have all expressed a strong desire to include a chicken coop at their facilities. The Deaf School runs an urban farm program and thinks kids would benefit from learning to raise chickens. People at MPFS want to teach low-income families self-reliance and healthy food choices, and community gardens want fertilizer and natural pest control, and organic eggs to share.

If revised as proposed, these parts of the original ordinance would remain unchanged:

Online permits will still be required. That way, you will know where the chickens are and people will still have to read the rules and agree to them.
Coops and pens will still have to be at least 20’ from neighbors’ houses (not the property line).
The ordinance will remain complaint-driven. If a valid complaint is lodged, an inspection will be conducted and if the complaint proves valid, the chicken owner will be given time to comply or be fined.
Coops will still need to be maintained in a manner that does not create a nuisance.
Selling or slaughtering will continue to be prohibited.
Roosters will remain prohibited.
Escalating fines for non-compliance remain in effect.

No Child Left Behind: Death Star of American Education

2012-01-19T07:00:00.000-08:00

Image via WikipediaNo Child Left Behind is the great exemplar of why the federal Department of Education is such a bad idea.

Cabinet positions have become a way for administrations to pretend to have concern for an issue without actually engaging the issues. Once you create a cabinet bureaucracy, it begins to accumulate all the tendencies, including cultivation of congressional patrons and interest groups, lobbying, etc., and you wind up with garbage like NCLB.

The US Department of Education should never have been created; what we need much more than a Department of Education is a research institute on how to most effectively help people (of any age) acquire the knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary to flourish. Instead of a cabinet department led by a political hack and back-scratcher like Arne Duncan, we need an actual education think-tank, modeled on the National Science Foundation and the National Institute for Health (NIH) -- and Diane Ravitch would be the perfect first head of such a National Education Institute.

No Child Left Behind: The death star of American education
Diane Ravitch, Ed Week - After 10 years of NCLB, we should have seen dramatic progress on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, but we have not. By now, we should be able to point to sharp reductions of the achievement gaps between children of different racial and ethnic groups and children from different income groups, but we cannot. As I said in a recent speech, many children continue to be left behind, and we know who those children are: They are the same children who were left behind 10 years ago.

In my travels over the past two years, I have seen the wreckage caused by NCLB. It has become the Death Star of American education. It is a law that inflicts damage on students, teachers, schools, and communities.

When I spoke at Stanford University, a teacher stood up in the question period and said: "I teach the lettuce-pickers' children in Salinas. They are closing our school because our scores are too low." She couldn't finish her question because she started crying.

When I spoke at UCLA, a group of about 20 young teachers approached me afterwards and told me that their school, Fremont High School, was slated for closure. They asked me to tell Ray Cortines, who was then chancellor of the Los Angeles Unified School District, not to close their school because they were working together as a community to improve it. I took their message to Ray, who is a good friend, but the school was closed anyway. The dispersed teachers of Fremont are still communicating with one another, still mourning the loss of their school.

When I spoke to Citizens for Public Schools in Boston, a young man who works as a chef at a local hotel got up to ask what he could do to stop "them" from closing his children's school. It was the neighborhood school, he said. It was the school he wanted his children to attend. And they were closing it.

In city after city, across the nation, I have heard similar stories from teachers and parents. Why are they closing our school? What can we do about it? How can we stop them? I wish I had better answers. I know that as long as NCLB stays on the books, there is no stopping the destruction of local community institutions. And now with the active support of the Obama administration, the NCLB wrecking ball has become a means of promoting privatization and community fragmentation.

I have often wondered whether there is any other national legislature that has passed a law that had the effect of stigmatizing the nation's public education system. Last year, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that 82 percent of our nation's schools would fail to make "adequate yearly progress." A few weeks ago, the Center for Education Policy reported that the secretary's estimate was overstated, and that it was "only" half the nation's schools that would be considered failing as of this year. Secretary Duncan's judgment may have been off the mark this year, but NCLB guarantees that the number of failing schools will grow every year. If the law remains intact, we can reasonably expect that nearly every public school in the United States will be labeled as a failing school by 2014.

If you take a closer look at the CEP study, you can see how absurd the law is. In Massachusetts, the nation's highest-performing state by far on NAEP, 81 percent of the schools failed to make AYP. But in lower-performing Louisiana, only 22 percent of the schools did not make AYP. Yet, when you compare the same two states on NAEP, 51 percent of 4th graders in Massachusetts are rated proficient, compared with 23 percent in Louisiana. In 8th grade, again, twice as many students in Massachusetts are proficient compared with Louisiana, yet Massachusetts has nearly four times as many allegedly "failing" schools! This is crazy.

More evidence of the invalidity of NCLB. The top-rated high school in the state of Illinois, New Trier High School, failed to make AYP. Its special education students did not make enough progress. When outstanding schools fail, you have to conclude that something is wrong with the measure.

For those wondering why Salem's budget is crunching

2012-01-18T12:47:00.000-08:00

Our Finite World's excellent Gail the Actuary explains:

Economic Expansion vs. Economic Contraction

It is easy to assume that economic contraction is similar to economic expansion, just with the sign reversed, but anyone who has lived through the last few years knows that this is not the case.

     For example, on the way up, it appears that the size of the current economic system easily “scales” upward, as the economy grows. The number of available workers gradually rises, as does the number of job openings, and the amount of goods and services produced. Everything rises together, and the system “works.”

     On the way down, there is a good deal more “stickiness” to the system. There are now seven billion people on the planet, and they all would like to eat on a regular basis. There are perhaps two-thirds as many potential workers, and most of them would like to have jobs, even if the economy is contracting, and their particular job is disappearing.

     Another issue is that we have built millions of miles of electrical transmission, oil and gas pipelines, water and sewer pipelines, and roads. It becomes difficult to abandon parts of these systems, even if total resources for maintaining the system are constricted. If we think of the situation in terms of tax dollars (or charges by utility companies), it becomes increasingly difficult to collect enough tax dollars (or utility charges) to pay for the inflated cost of replacing worn out roads, pipelines, and electrical transmission, as the rising price of oil makes these costs rise much more rapidly than salaries.

Figure 2. Repaying loans is easy in a growing economy, but much more difficult in a shrinking economy.

     Another issue is debt repayment (Figure 2). We are used to an ever-expanding economy, where future goods and services produced will always be greater than those produced this year. As long as this growth pattern persists, our system of long-term financing of major expenditures, even if the expenditures are not really income producing, can continue. For example, we are able to buy homes with 20 or 30 year loans, and governments are able to continue borrowing, claiming that they will have more funds to repay loans (with interest) in the future. Once the situation changes to a shrinking economy, it becomes much more difficult to repay loans, and the financial system quickly reaches the risk of collapsing, due to multiple debt defaults.

     A related issue is that of financing a new or expanding company. If the economy continues to grow, investment in a new company is likely to make sense because the value of the company can be expected to grow as the demand for products of the type it sells continues to grow. But if it becomes clear that the economy is on a path of long-term contraction, the possibility of failure within a few years rises, so new investment makes much less sense. . . .

Print and Post Widely (but only where postings welcome)

2012-01-17T07:00:00.000-08:00

Help stop the senseless waste of water, wood, and the world's diminishing reserves energy -- turn off junk mail and littervertising! Catalogchoice.org can help!

Thursday Night at the Library (Free): How teens experience stereotypes about gender

2012-01-16T07:00:00.000-08:00

Teens, their parents, and others who are interested are invited to experience “Straightlaced: How Gender’s Got Us All Tied Up,” a powerful documentary that examines how stereotypes and gender expectations impact the lives of teens.

6:30 p.m. Thursday, January 19
Loucks Auditorium at Salem Public Library, 585 Liberty St. SE.

The hour-long film gathers perspectives from teens who represent all points of the gender spectrum. This fascinating array of students opens up with brave, intimate honesty, talking about choosing between “male” and “female” deodorant; deciding whether to go along with anti-gay taunts in the locker room; having the courage to take ballet; avoiding the restroom so they won’t get beaten up; and mourning the suicide of a classmate. Their intimate stories point the way toward a more inclusive, empowering culture.

More information and a movie trailer are available at:
www.groundspark.org/our-films-and-campaigns/straightlaced.

This screening is free and open to the public. Those interested are invited to remain after the movie for discussion. More information is available from www.salemlibrary.org or the Teen Scene Desk at 503-588-6364.

Gonna try some corn in the garden this year!

2012-01-15T07:00:00.000-08:00

Dead of winter -- seed catalog time! This little clip has me thinking to try growing a little corn this year, just for fun. It's such a big field crop with low per-plant yield that it doesn't really make sense for small urban gardens like those at LOVESalem HQ. But still, it's fun. The one time we tried before, we got pretty good results from a 4' x 4' square. Tune in next fall and we'll let you know how it went.

Mark Your Calendar: Bring the Money Home - Feb 1

2012-01-14T07:00:00.000-08:00

Oregon Needs to Bring It's Money Home.

Salem, Oregon Banks Local Forum
Salem Public Library - Auditorium
Sponsored by Oregon Working Families Party and Occupy Salem

February 1, 2012 - 6:00pm
RSVP TODAY

Last year, we saw a major shift in the political conversation. The focus changed from cuts and austerity and landed squarely on the 1% and the fact that more and more of the country's wealth is being held by less and less of the population.

Over the past few months, some candidates running for local office around the state have started to address this very issue by proposing we keep our municipal money in local Oregon banks - working for our community, not Wall Street. On top of that, the struggle to create the Oregon State Bank is still alive and well.

Register for the Salem Oregon Banks Local Forum to find out how to get involved.

This event is being sponsored by the Oregon Working Families Party and Occupy Salem.

We'll discuss proposals to positively impact Oregon's small businesses and family farms - helping put people back to work across Oregon and ending our dependance on Wall Street's banking giants.

On February 1st, we’ll be holding a forum at the Salem Public Library to detail the current state of legislative proposals aimed at bringing Oregon's money back to Oregon.

Last legislative session, a proposal to create a State Bank just barely missed a chance for a floor vote - but the momentum behind that campaign continues.

Please click here to sign up for the Salem Oregon Banks Local forum.

We're counting on you to join us on February 1st at the Salem Public Library to discuss next steps and take action headed into the 2012 legislative session. Please help spread the word and invite friends, family and colleagues.

Thanks for all you do,

Steve Hughes, State Director
Oregon Working Families Party

Note: A membership meeting of the Mid-Valley chapter of the WFP will follow directly after this forum. Those who wish to attend this meeting may do so, but decision making will be reserved for WFP members.

Best bet for Saturday, Jan. 14: See the magic of radio, up close and personal!

2012-01-13T09:56:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends,

KMUZ - our new community radio station - is on the air at 88.5 FM and world-wide at www.kmuz.org!

Many of you have been following our progress and contributing in one or many ways.
Please stop by, see the studio and celebrate with us! We are located at the historic Mission Mill (1313 Mill St. SE) in Salem (on the grounds of the Willamette Heritage Center).

Saturday, January 14:
10 am-4 pm - studio tours

5 pm-7 pm - reception and celebration in the Dye House
(beer, wine, treats, music and lots of thank you's)

Friday Food for Thought: On Education

2012-01-13T07:00:00.000-08:00

Great "Museletter" by Richard Heinberg. Just an excerpt to whet your appetite:

The radicals agree with some of Dewey’s ideals—especially the desire for students to develop critical thinking abilities. However, they question whether Dewey, in trying to humanize the American public school system, was working against its original and inherent purposes. The basic idea of the public school was (and is) to apply the routines and discipline of factory work to learning, and thus to train armies of children for service in the industrial system. Dewey was trying to make the institution serve ends other than these, and was therefore bound to fail. The appeal of the conservative agenda is, and has always been, simply that its vision of the public schools’ purpose is closest to the historical reality. For educational radicals, therefore, the critique of schooling is inseparable from a critique of modern industrial, capitalist, corporatist society itself. If the factory system requires us to turn human beings into machines, then should we not question industrial production?

Along the way, radical educationists point out that children, in addition to being taught the hidden curriculum of fragmentation and routinization, are also taught an overt curriculum of lies and half-truths that make real citizenship problematic. Children are taught a Eurocentric rendition of world history, and a sanitized version of American history, both cleansed of any taint of class struggle. Without certain key bits of information it is virtually impossible to understand why the world is the way it is. For example, it is impossible to understand American history unless we begin by acknowledging that the country was founded on genocide and slavery, and that whatever freedoms we enjoy were won by ordinary people organizing themselves and demanding reforms. To regard Columbus as a hero (as is still commonly done in many grade schools) is to ignore the evidence of his own diaries, which clearly portray him as a mass murderer, thief, torturer, extortionist, and conscious initiator of what would grow to become the largest instance of genocide in world history. It is also helpful to know that other American “heroes” like John Adams (the second President) and John Jay (the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) opposed the very idea of democracy and believed that “those who own the country should govern it.” Of course, information like this might encourage some students to question the political and economic status quo, and that is no doubt why it is omitted. But the resulting eviscerated history curriculum is not only misleading and confusing; it is also utterly boring.

Finally, the radicals point out that if any part of the real purpose of formal schooling is to help children learn, then there are much better ways of accomplishing that goal. After recounting how compulsory schooling originated in the State of Massachusetts around 1850 amid much resistance (“the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the 1880s, when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard”), Gatto tells us:

Senator Ted Kennedy’s office released a paper not too long ago claiming that prior to compulsory education the state literacy rate was ninety-eight percent, and after it the figure never exceeded ninety-one percent. Here is another curiosity to think about. The home-schooling movement has quietly grown to a size where one and a half million young people are being educated entirely by their own parents; last month the education press reported the amazing news that children schooled at home seem to be five or even ten years ahead of their formally trained peers in their ability to think.

Gatto recalls the one-room schools common to rural America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where children of all ages learned cooperatively, mostly teaching one another. This, according to the radicals, is an example of how learning could be facilitated. Instead of large, state-run bureaucracies, they say, we need small, local schools organized primarily by parents. Rather than being segregated by age, older children should learn responsibility by teaching younger kids. Rather than learning a state-mandated curriculum, students should pursue their spontaneous interests.

how we learn

It is in the discussion of the learning process that radical educational theory has made its most telling points. At the base of popular support for the very idea of schooling lies the assumption that schools help kids learn. If that assumption turns out to be unfounded, then the entire project is open to question. . . .

Will Cherriots be Around in Five Years? What About 10?

2012-01-12T07:00:00.000-08:00

Image via Wikipedia

Salem-Keizer Transit is asking the public for input on its strategic goals and projects for the upcoming year.

To participate, you are encouraged to fill out a survey online at www.goo.gl/LXxJ5 or at Cherriots Customer Service.

The survey provides an opportunity to rank the importance of specific goals and offer ideas for future strategies and projects. Salem-Keizer Transit will use the survey information to update the Strategic Plan for the fiscal year beginning July 2012.

The Strategic Plan, adopted in July 2011, provides a vision of transportation services for the next twenty years. This high-level document serves as a guide for decision-making, budgeting, and
operations of Salem-Keizer Transit.

The survey will be available through the end of January.

Contact Info: Steve Dickey
503-588-2424

Finally - Littervertisers try something more reasonable

2012-01-11T11:35:00.001-08:00

This is what I got on my doorknob, instead of five pounds of instant-recycling burden.

Props to them, at loooooong-overdue last.

The unintentionally revealing lede

2012-01-10T06:48:00.000-08:00

The lede that says it all explains why the Kroc Center will forever struggle. As the real estate cliche has it, Location, Location, Location. A fitness center located in a bike and pedestrian hellhole is like an AA meeting in a saloon.

"It was a healthy way to spend a part of the day, beginning with a healthy walk from the parking lot."

Post-Constitutional America

2012-01-09T17:34:00.000-08:00

Well, we've finally cleared up any doubt about whether or not mass-murdering Bin-Ladin succeeded: he did, beyond his wildest fantasies.

Not only did he lure the Bush-Cheney Junta into the meatgrinders of Afghanistan and Iraq, but he destroyed America at the same time. So complete has been the cowardly and craven surrender of spineless elected officials been, that even a supposedly liberal (really center-right) administration is delighted to happily junk the Bill of Rights and, among them, the central rationale for the Declaration of Independence, the idea that people had inalienable rights, first among them individual liberty and freedom from detention and imprisonment at the say-so of an autocrat.

"Your Freedom" in Salem, Jan. 23

The Occupy Salem Education Committee presents Willamette Law Professor Susan Smith speaking on the civil liberties implications of the recently-passed National Defense Authorization Act.

This piece of legislation, which recently passed the U.S. Congress overwhelmingly and was subsequently signed by President Obama, despite his earlier vow to veto it, suspends some of our most cherished civil liberties. Learn how it could affect you!

Monday, January 23, 7 p.m. in the Paulus Lecture Hall at Willamette University's Law School (Room E 201). No charge.

This Thursday: Taking on the American uber-fantasy (endless growth)

2012-01-09T07:00:00.000-08:00

Another outstanding offering from the good folks behind the Salem Progressive Film Series.

Thursday, Jan 12, 2012 7 p.m.
How do we become a sustainable civilization? We are addicted to unending growth in a world that has limits. Individual and public policy decisions today are formed by a powerful, pro-growth cultural bias. We worship at the Church of Growth Everlasting. Undeterred by the facts, we’re on a collision course powered by denial and the myth that growth brings prosperity. This film examines the cultural barriers that prevent us from reacting rationally to the evidence that current levels of population and consumption are unsustainable.

Location Grand Theater, 191 High Street NE
Hours Doors open at 6:15p Films begin at 7p
Admission Adults $4 Students $3

Shameless commerce division on a sweet Groupon deal: Up to 53% Off Frozen Pies

2012-01-08T09:45:00.000-08:00

These are really, really good pies from a local Salem company that uses locally grown fruit. Just got my five-pie punchcard for $28. Hard to top that.

If you sign up and buy it these by clicking through the link below, you might earn me some Groupon credit, which will earn you my undying appreciation, or maybe a slice of pie.

Punch Card for Two or Five Frozen Pies at Willamette Valley Fruit Company (Up to 53% Off)

http://www.groupon.com/deals/willamette-valley-fruit-company-1?utm_campaign=UserReferral&utm_medium=email&utm_source=uu3531303

The Growth of Degrowth Economics

2012-01-08T07:00:00.000-08:00

Image by Lights In The Dark via FlickrLong overdue: sensible thinking about growth on a finite planet.

Another Cognitive Benefit for Musicians, Athletes - Miller-McCune

2012-01-07T07:00:00.000-08:00

As Salem-Keizer Schools continues to sacrifice the things that make schools work on the altar of standardized tests:

. . . The researchers speculate that musicians learn to think in terms of spatial relationships “because notes are coded in terms of their spatial positions.” This makes intuitive sense. A musician, like an athlete, instinctively learns to navigate through space: one reads notes on a staff, while another masters the parameters of a tennis court or football field.

While this one small study is hardly conclusive, it provides more evidence of the drawbacks of a basics-only approach to education. Such an approach ignores the ways important mental processes are enhanced by learning that occurs outside the core curriculum. This research suggests, in the words of Pietsch and Jansen, that “playing an instrument or a sport for many years has an enhancing effect on a specific cognitive task” — one that confers real-world benefits.

Question: Since When Is It a Crime to Be Poor?

2012-01-06T07:00:00.000-08:00

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/nickel-and-dimed-afterword

. . . How have the already-poor attempted to cope with their worsening economic situation? One obvious way is to cut back on health care. The New York Times reported in 2009 that one-third of Americans could no longer afford to comply with their prescriptions and that there had been a sizable drop in the use of medical care. Others, including members of my extended family, have given up their health insurance.

Food is another expenditure that has proved vulnerable to hard times, with the rural poor turning increasingly to "food auctions," which offer items that may be past their sell-by dates. And for those who like their meat fresh, there's the option of urban hunting. In Racine, Wisconsin, a 51-year-old laid-off mechanic told me he was supplementing his diet by "shooting squirrels and rabbits and eating them stewed, baked, and grilled." In Detroit, where the wildlife population has mounted as the human population ebbs, a retired truck driver was doing a brisk business in raccoon carcasses, which he recommends marinating with vinegar and spices.

The most common coping strategy, though, is simply to increase the number of paying people per square foot of dwelling space—by doubling up or renting to couch-surfers.
It's hard to get firm numbers on overcrowding, because no one likes to acknowledge it to census-takers, journalists, or anyone else who might be remotely connected to the authorities.

In Los Angeles, housing expert Peter Dreier says that "people who've lost their jobs, or at least their second jobs, cope by doubling or tripling up in overcrowded apartments, or by paying 50 or 60 or even 70 percent of their incomes in rent." According to a community organizer in Alexandria, Virginia, the standard apartment in a complex occupied largely by day laborers has two bedrooms, each containing an entire family of up to five people, plus an additional person laying claim to the couch.

No one could call suicide a "coping strategy," but it is one way some people have responded to job loss and debt. There are no national statistics linking suicide to economic hard times, but the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline reported more than a four-fold increase in call volume between 2007 and 2009, and regions with particularly high unemployment, like Elkhart, Indiana, have seen troubling spikes in their suicide rates. Foreclosure is often the trigger for suicide—or, worse, murder-suicides that destroy entire families. . . .

Word: Capitalism vs. the Climate

2012-01-05T07:00:00.000-08:00

Image via WikipediaThe insightful Naomi Klein.

But the effects of the right-wing climate conspiracies reach far beyond the Republican Party. The Democrats have mostly gone mute on the subject, not wanting to alienate independents. And the media and culture industries have followed suit. Five years ago, celebrities were showing up at the Academy Awards in hybrids, Vanity Fair launched an annual green issue and, in 2007, the three major US networks ran 147 stories on climate change. No longer. In 2010 the networks ran just thirty-two climate change stories; limos are back in style at the Academy Awards; and the “annual” Vanity Fair green issue hasn’t been seen since 2008.

This uneasy silence has persisted through the end of the hottest decade in recorded history and yet another summer of freak natural disasters and record-breaking heat worldwide. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry is rushing to make multibillion-dollar investments in new infrastructure to extract oil, natural gas and coal from some of the dirtiest and highest-risk sources on the continent (the $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline being only the highest-profile example). In the Alberta tar sands, in the Beaufort Sea, in the gas fields of Pennsylvania and the coalfields of Wyoming and Montana, the industry is betting big that the climate movement is as good as dead.

If the carbon these projects are poised to suck out is released into the atmosphere, the chance of triggering catastrophic climate change will increase dramatically (mining the oil in the Alberta tar sands alone, says NASA’s James Hansen, would be “essentially game over” for the climate).

All of this means that the climate movement needs to have one hell of a comeback. For this to happen, the left is going to have to learn from the right. Denialists gained traction by making climate about economics: action will destroy capitalism, they have claimed, killing jobs and sending prices soaring. But at a time when a growing number of people agree with the protesters at Occupy Wall Street, many of whom argue that capitalism-as-usual is itself the cause of lost jobs and debt slavery, there is a unique opportunity to seize the economic terrain from the right. This would require making a persuasive case that the real solutions to the climate crisis are also our best hope of building a much more enlightened economic system—one that closes deep inequalities, strengthens and transforms the public sphere, generates plentiful, dignified work and radically reins in corporate power. It would also require a shift away from the notion that climate action is just one issue on a laundry list of worthy causes vying for progressive attention. Just as climate denialism has become a core identity issue on the right, utterly entwined with defending current systems of power and wealth, the scientific reality of climate change must, for progressives, occupy a central place in a coherent narrative about the perils of unrestrained greed and the need for real alternatives.

Building such a transformative movement may not be as hard as it first appears. Indeed, if you ask the Heartlanders, climate change makes some kind of left-wing revolution virtually inevitable, which is precisely why they are so determined to deny its reality. Perhaps we should listen to their theories more closely—they might just understand something the left still doesn’t get. . . .

Good winter classes on economizing in the kitchen

2012-01-04T11:51:00.000-08:00

Image via WikipediaThe spiffy new community kitchen at Marion-Polk Food Share is offering some good classes:

KITCHEN STRATEGIES TO STRETCH THE FOOD DOLLAR
Wednesday, January 18, 9:30-a.m.-12:30 p.m., $5.00

Join instructor Michelle Priddy for a comprehensive class in good nutrition, smart meal planning, food storage and preservation, and some basic cooking skills that will help you stretch your food dollar to the max. The $5.00 class fee includes class handouts and a simple chicken soup and bread lunch. Michelle’s START CHART recipe booklet, a handy guide to creating your own recipes using what you have on hand, will be available to order for an additional $10.00 fee. Class limited to ten.

Register through Friday, January 13 by calling Kat Daniel at Marion-Polk Food Share, 503-581-3855, ext. 322.

DELICIOUS, NUTRITIOUS MEALS ON A SHOESTRING
Tuesday, January 24, 1:00-2:30 p.m., $5.00

Kitchen Angels Penny Strand and Janet Rogers are developing a series of classes that will focus on healthy, seasonal foods that can be prepared easily and economically by busy cooks. In this first class Penny and Janet will be demonstrating a recipe for Glazed Roasted Root Vegetables as a main dish in a vegetarian menu or a side dish in a menu that includes a protein source. The $5.00 class fee includes suggested menus, recipe handouts, and a sample taste of the featured dish. Class limit 12.

Register by calling Kat Daniel at Marion-Polk Food Share, 503-581-3855, no later than Friday, January 20.

Become a Community Kitchen Angel! Volunteers and guest instructors are always welcome!
For further information, visit us on the Web at www.marionpolkfoodshare.org.

Warning to those who will heed

2012-01-04T07:00:00.000-08:00

By a Brit, but this could just as well be about America and the 1% vs. the rest of us:

Wracked from end to end by riots and looting, the country is now starting to admit the existence of the hidden faultlines that lie quivering beneath the humdrum everyday blandishments of society as we live it.

Underneath the surface chatter about police brutality and parental responsibility is a deeper fear, and a not unfounded one: that a social contract's been torn up. If you accept the possibility that there are many kinds of violence — not merely physical, but emotional, economic, financial, and social, to name just a few, then perhaps the social contract being offered by today's polities goes something like this: "Some kinds of violence are more punishable than others. Blow up the financial system? Here's a state-subsidized bonus. Steal a video game? You're toast." (To be painfully clear, I don't think any form of violence is justifiable, excusable, or acceptable.)

There are many kinds of looting. There's looting your local superstore — and then there's, as Nobel Laureates Akerlof and Romer discussed in a paper now famous among geeks, there's looting a bank, a financial system, a corporation...or an entire economy. (Their paper might be crudely summed up in the pithy line: "The best way to rob a bank is to own one.") The bedrock of an enlightened social contract is, crudely, that rent-seeking is punished, and creating enduring, lasting, shared wealth is rewarded and that those who seek to profit by extraction are chastened rather than lauded. Today's world of bailouts, golden parachutes, sky-high financial-sector salaries — while middle incomes stagnate — seems to be exactly the reverse. Perhaps, then, our societies have reached a natural turning point of built-in self-limitation; and this self-limitation is causing a perfect storm to converge.

An enlightened social contract is not built on subsidies or "handouts" — whether to the impoverished, or to the pitiable welfare junkies formerly known as "the markets." It's built on a calculus of harm and benefit not just accepted by a plurality of its citizens (versus a tiny Chalet-owning, caviar-gobbling minority at the top) — and also a calculus that can be said to meaningful in the sense that it results in real human prosperity. Without such a bargain to set incentives and coordinate economic activity, even the mightiest, proudest societies will find themselves as bent old men on an endless plateau, searching for a lick of shelter as the typhoon bears down.

TV Turn-off Week! Signups start today @ Salem Public Library

2012-01-03T11:32:00.000-08:00

Image by herzogbr via FlickrTV TURNOFF WEEK!

Once again, Salem Public Library is challenging area youth to give up TV and other screens for a week in order to earn a berth at the annual Great Library Camp-In.

The Library’s “No TV/Screen Week” is scheduled for Saturday, January 21-Friday, January 27. Children ages birth -18 are encouraged to make and keep a pledge to turn off their TV and other non-homework screens, filling their time instead with other activities – including reading. Pledges can be made online or at either library location beginning January 3, 2012.

Those who succeed in keeping the pledge are then invited, accompanied by a favorite adult, to enjoy the
“Rock ‘n’ Rhythm” Great Library Camp-In, 6:30 p.m. Friday, January 27 through 8 a.m. Saturday, January 28 top two floors of the Central Library, 585 Liberty St. SE.

Youth Services staff and volunteers will entertain campers and their families with crafts and activities, such as musical chairs, “Name That Tune” Jeopardy, creating one-of-a-kind musical instruments, face painting, and more from 6:30 to 8 p.m.

At 8 p.m., everyone will gather in the Loucks Auditorium for a snack and special performance by Eric Ode, storyteller and musician.

Lights out is at 10 p.m. and campers are served a light breakfast snack in the morning.

Pledges must be returned to the Library by Saturday, January 21 in order to come to the Camp-In. Reservations for the Camp-In are accepted beginning Tuesday, January 24 at the Youth Services Reference Desk in person, online, or by phone at 503-588-6088.

Great Stuff: Ex-cons run airport apiary

2012-01-03T07:00:00.000-08:00

Two things Salem has in abundance: released prisoners needing better skills for productive living and wasted, idle land at an airport. Add the world's desperate need to restore pollinator populations, a dash of creativity and willingness to try something new and we could have something great! Definitely an idea to steal!

The sweet smell of success is in the air at O'Hare International Airport with an unusual collaboration aimed at giving honeybees and their keepers a second chance.

Twenty-three beehives were installed on a vacant piece of property on the airport's east side this spring.

Tending to the hives are carefully screened former convicts enrolled with the nonprofit North Lawndale Employment Network.

The idea is “to create jobs for people who have a difficult time finding them,” said Brenda Palms Barber, executive director of NLEN and CEO of Sweet Beginnings. “There's a stigma and fear about hiring people who've served time in prison.”

Out of this problem grew Sweet Beginnings, an urban honey enterprise that employs people who have served time. Some work as beekeepers, others as landscapers or food processors.

“Bees don't distinguish between weeds and flowers,” Palms Barber said. “They see it all as a source of food and turn whatever they draw from into something sweet and good. That's what we do with these men and women. There is good in them as well.” . . .

Unhappy birthday

2012-01-02T07:00:00.000-08:00

On my birthday last fall, Common Dreams posted this painful but all-too-accurate article about the corporate assault on public schools by David Sirota. Excerpt:

"Let's hope the fiscal crisis doesn't get better too soon. It'll slow down reform." -- Tom Watkins, a consultant, summarizes the corporate education reform movement's current strategy to the Sunday New York Times.(Monkey Business Images via Shutterstock)
The Shock Doctrine, as articulated by journalist Naomi Klein, describes the process by which corporate interests use catastrophes as instruments to maximize their profit. Sometimes the events they use are natural (earthquakes), sometimes they are human-created (the 9/11 attacks) and sometimes they are a bit of both (hurricanes made stronger by human-intensified global climate change). Regardless of the particular cataclysm, though, the Shock Doctrine suggests that in the aftermath of a calamity, there is always corporate method in the smoldering madness - a method based in Disaster Capitalism.

Though Klein's book provides much evidence of the Shock Doctrine, the Disaster Capitalists rarely come out and acknowledge their strategy. That's why Watkins' outburst of candor, buried in this front-page New York Times article yesterday, is so important: It shows that the recession and its corresponding shock to school budgets is being used by corporations to maximize revenues, all under the gauzy banner of "reform." . . .

2011 in Solar Generation @ LOVESalem HQ

2012-01-01T16:10:00.000-08:00

If I can make the magic happen, this will be a plot of the production from the solar electric panels installed at LOVESalem HQ just a few days before the winter solstice in 2010. The plot runs from Solstice 10 to Solstice 11.

Daily Solar Electric Production (kWh)

Some of the statistics for the period 12/21/10 - 12/21/11:

	Lowest output day =	0.5	kWh
	Highest output day =	28	kWh
	Mean daily output =	11.2	kWh/day
	Median daily output =	9.15	kWh/day
2010-11	Solar Yr total production	4099	kWh

System Cap Installed		4338	w
Solar Year
12/21 - 3/21	Q1	488
3/21 - 6/21	Q2	1442
6/21 - 9/21	Q3	1699
9/21-12/21	Q4	465

In 2012, resolve to support full funding for legal aid

2012-01-01T07:00:00.000-08:00

Make it a resolution: tell your elected reps at EVERY level that America desperately needs affordable legal aid services for the poor and middle class - the 99% - who are getting hammered, and who have no resources for responding when someone takes advantage of them illegally.

LAW FOR REAL PEOPLE blog:    There are too many unmet needs for sure, but if we do not preserve a functioning legal aid system, there will be nothing there. Like many other attorneys, I do a lot more pro bono work than I should reasonably do, mainly because it pains me to see people unable to get any help just because they are unable to afford a lawyer. But as a society, we cannot expect attorneys in private practice to meet the needs of the poor any more than we expect doctors and dentists to meet all the health care needs of the poor with pro bono work. . . .

     Oregon desperately needs a solid, stable, and AMPLE funding stream for civil legal representation, one that doesn't tank when interest rates fluctuate (the way the interest-on-lawyer-trust-accounts revenue stream has) or impose punitive filing fees on people unlucky enough to have a case arise when the state is slashing funding for legal services.

     We need to recognize legal aid as a kind of community public health resource, like a free vaccination clinic -- because when we ignore the legal needs of the poor, they don't just magically disappear, they get worse and become far more difficult and expensive to deal with. When society doesn't fund vaccines for the poor, it's not just the poor who suffer. Same with civil law. Sure we can shave a few bucks off the legal aid budget every year after year after year -- but then we wonder why we, to take just one example, have to spend so much more to try to educate kids who change schools five and six times in two years (because the parent's inability to defend themselves against an abusive debt collector caused wage garnishment and loss of housing, leading to a vicious downward spiral of unemployment and underemployment, which causes housing and food insecurity, which raises the likelihood of student failure, dropping out, and other social maladaptations).

     The bottom line: Even if you think that you or anyone you love will never need good legal services through a publicly funded legal aid system, you are better off with an amply funded legal aid system, because your community will be far better off, and you will spend far less in taxes and social services.

     Please, tell your elected representatives that you support full funding for legal aid programs in your community.

A big Salem highlight for 2011: KMUZ Community Radio

2011-12-31T07:00:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to the hearty and determined band of community-minded stalwarts who insisted, despite some pretty substantial evidence, that they could make a community radio station go here in "greater Salem." Here are the heroes now:

KMUZ Board members, left to right, front row first: Karen McFarlane Holman (Chief Visionary and President), Dangerous Dave Hammock (Chief Cook, Bottlewasher, and Treasurer), Jeanine ("Sparkplug") Renne, Coy Alexander, Vicki Darden, Bill Smaldone, Melanie Zermer (Secretary), and Tim Patterson. Superimposed on Coy’s T-shirt: Max Lindholm. Photo by Co Ho Graphics.

KMUZ's low-power license and Turner tower location means that it's not always reliably available at 88.5 fm throughout Salem, but it's easy and rewarding to pick it up anywhere in the world via webstreaming at KMUZ.org.

On Memory

2011-12-30T07:00:00.000-08:00

Image via WikipediaAs we think back over our so-called exit from Iraq (tens of thousands of mercenaries remaining behind, paid for by taxpayers who know own the largest "embassy" in history) and eventual departure (we can hope) from Afghanistan, and the crime that was somehow turned into a pretext for that invasion.

Less Work, More Living | Common Dreams

2011-12-29T07:00:00.000-08:00

The Wealth We Make Ourselves
Earn less, spend less, emit and degrade less. That’s the formula.

The more time a person has, the better his or her quality of life, and the easier it is to live sustainably. A study by David Rosnick and Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research estimated that if the United States were to shift to the working patterns of Western European countries, where workers spend on average 255 fewer hours per year at their jobs, energy consumption would decline about 20 percent. New research I have conducted with Kyle Knight and Gene Rosa of Washington State University, looking at all industrialized countries over the last 50 years, finds that nations with shorter working hours have considerably smaller ecological and carbon footprints.

There’s also a small but growing body of studies that examine these questions at the household scale. A French study found that, after controlling for income, households with longer working hours increased their spending on housing (buying larger homes with more appliances), transport (longer hours reduced the use of public transportation), and hotels and restaurants.

A recent Swedish study found that when households reduce their working hours by 1 percent, their greenhouse gas emissions go down by 0.8 percent. One explanation is that when households spend more time earning money, they compensate in part by purchasing more goods and services, and buying them at later stages of processing (e.g., more prepared foods). People who have more time at home and less at work can engage in slower, less resource-intensive activities. They can hang their clothing on the line, rather than use an electric dryer. More important, they can switch to less energy-intensive but more time-consuming modes of transport (mass transit or carpool versus private auto, train versus airplane). They can garden and cook at home. They can meet more of their basic needs by making, fixing, doing, and providing things themselves.

Doing-it-yourself, or self-provisioning, is now on the rise, both because of a culture shift and because in hard times people have more time and less money.

Fwd: How to file a junk mail complaint

2011-12-28T07:00:00.000-08:00

Now that the Christmas machine is winding down and ready to be put away for another year or two, here's a good post-Christmas task: turn off the junk-mail deluge.

Add Team@catalogchoice.org to your address book to make sure our email updates land in your inbox

Member Tip:
How to File a Complaint

Hi

Chief Justice Berger's majority opinion in Rowan v. Post Office states "a mailer's right to communicate must stop at the mailbox of an unreceptive addressee."
While most companies heed Berger's advice and honor your first opt-out choice, some need to be told twice. We aim to make the process as easy as possible. Here is a quick reminder how to file a formal complaint through your Catalog Choice account if you are still receiving unwanted mail.
Already submitted an opt-out to that company?
The best place to start is on Your Choices page where we list all of your past requests. On this page, do a quick search to see if you've made an opt-out choice to the company for the same name and address.
If your request was made more than 90 days ago, click on the Details button and then File a Complaint. If it is less than 90 days old or it is a new name or address, select New Request.

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Select Find Companies from the red navigation bar, do a quick search for the company and submit your opt-out. If the company is not listed in our service, suggest it and our staff will do the research to add it.
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When you are scanning Your Choices, take a note of the brands that no longer send you mail, but you still like their products. Let's show them that respecting your opt-out choice is good for their brand by visiting their website to see what is new. We provide a link to the company website on the Details page.
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Talking back to the testing maniacs

2011-12-27T07:00:00.000-08:00

A Texas school superintendent takes on Arne Duncan & Barack Obama

John Kuhn - Let me speak for all public school educators when I say unequivocally: We will. We say send us your poor, send us your homeless, the children of your afflicted and addicted. Send us your kids who don't speak English. Send us you special-needs children, we will not turn them away.

But I tell you today, public school teacher, you will fail to take the shattered children of poverty and turn them into the polished products of the private schools. You will be unacceptable, public school teacher. And I say that is your badge of honor. I stand before you today bearing proudly the label of unacceptable because I educate the children they will not educate.

Day after day I take children broken by the poverty our leaders are afraid to confront and I glue their pieces back together. I am unacceptable and proud of it.

The poorest Americans need equity, but our nation offers them accountability instead. They need bread, but we give them a stone. We address the soft bigotry of low expectations so that we may ignore the hard racism of inequity.

Standardized tests are a poor substitute for justice.

So I say to Arne Duncan and President Obama, go ahead and label me. I will march headlong into the teeth of your horrific blame machine and I will teach these kids. You give me my scarlet letter and I will wear it proudly, because I will never cull the children who need education the most so that my precious scores will rise.

I will not race to the top. I will stop like the Good Samaritan and lift hurting children out of the dirt. Let me lose your race, because I'm not in this for the accolades. I'm not in it for the money. I'm in it because it's right. I am in it because the children of Perrin, Texas need somebody like me in their lives.

Our achievement gap is an opportunity gap. Our education problem is a poverty problem. Test scores don't scream bad teaching. They scream about our nation's systematic neglect of children who live in the wrong zip codes.

Listen to me, Arne Duncan: It's poverty, stupid. And that's not an excuse, that's not an excuse, it's a diagnosis. We must as a nation stop assuaging the symptoms and start treating the disease.

Let me ask you a simple question: Where is adequate yearly progress for the politician? Will we have 100 percent employment by 2014? Will all the children have decent health care and roofs over their heads by their deadline? But wait. They don't have a deadline. They aren't racing anywhere, are they?

When will our leaders ensure that every American community offers children libraries and little leagues instead of drugs and delinquency? Lawmakers sent you into congressional districts that are rife with poverty, rife with crime, drug abuse and poor health care, but lawmakers will never take on the label of "legislatively unacceptable" because they do not share the courage of a common school teacher. I say let us label our lawmakers like they label teachers. Let us have a hard look at their data. Let us have merit pay in Congress.
Congressmen, politicians, if you want children that are lush, stop firing the gardeners and start paying the water bill. Politicians, your fingerprints are on these children. What have you done to help them pass their tests?

As we gird our for an election year (ugh), worth noting some reality

2011-12-26T07:00:00.000-08:00

by: Dave Johnson, Campaign for America's Future | Op-Ed

Problem: Your right-wing brother-in-law is plugged into the FOX-Limbaugh lie machine, and keeps sending you emails about "Obama spending" and "Obama deficits" and how the "Stimulus" just made things worse.

Solution: Here are three "reality-based" charts to send to him. These charts show what actually happened.

Spending

Government spending increased dramatically under Bush. It has not increased much under Obama. Note that this chart does not reflect any spending cuts resulting from deficit-cutting deals.

Deficits

Notes, this chart includes Clinton's last budget year for comparison.

The numbers in these two charts come from Budget of the United States Government: Historical Tables Fiscal Year 2012. They are just the amounts that the government spent and borrowed, period, Anyone can go look then up. People who claim that Obama "tripled the deficit" are either misled or are trying to mislead.

The Stimulus and Jobs

In this chart, the RED lines on the left side -- the ones that keep doing DOWN -- show what happened to jobs under the policies of Bush and the Republicans. We were losing lots and lots of jobs every month, and it was getting worse and worse. The BLUE lines -- the ones that just go UP -- show what happened to jobs when the stimulus was in effect. We stopped losing jobs and started gaining jobs, and it was getting better and better. The leveling off on the right side of the chart shows what happened as the stimulus started to wind down: job creation leveled off at too low a level.

It looks a lot like the stimulus reversed what was going on before the stimulus.

Conclusion: THE STIMULUS WORKED BUT WAS NOT ENOUGH!

More False Things

These are just three of the false things that everyone "knows." Some others are (click through): Obama bailed out the banks, businesses will hire if they get tax cuts, health care reform cost $1 trillion, Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme or is "going broke", government spending "takes money out of the economy."

Great stuff --- From Prison Gang to Knitting Circle

2011-12-25T07:00:00.001-08:00

How Knitting Behind Bars Transformed Maryland Convicts

In late 2009, Lynn Zwerling stood in front of 600 male prisoners at the Pre-Release Unit in Jessup, Maryland. “Who wants to knit?” she asked the burly crowd. They looked at her like she was crazy.

Yet almost two years later, Zwerling and her associates have taught more than 100 prisoners to knit, while dozens more are on a waiting list to take her weekly class. “I have guys that have never missed one time in two years,” Zwerling says. “Some reported to us that they miss dinner to come to class.”

Zwerling, 67, retired in 2005 after 18 years of selling cars in Columbia, Maryland. She didn't know what to do with her time, so she followed her passion and started a knitting group in her town. No one came to the first meeting, but the group quickly grew to 500 members. “I looked around the room one day and I saw a zen quality about it,” Zwerling says. “Here were people who didn't know each other, had nothing in common, sitting together peacefully like little lambs knitting. I thought, ‘It makes me and these people feel so good. What would happen if I took knitting to a population that never experienced this before?’”

Her first thought was to bring knitting to a men’s prison, but she was turned down repeatedly. Wardens assumed the men wouldn’t be interested in a traditionally feminine hobby and worried about freely handing out knitting needles to prisoners who had been convicted of violent crimes. Five years passed before the Pre-Release Unit in Jessup accepted her, and Knitting Behind Bars was born. “I [wanted to teach] them something that I love that I really believe will make them focus and happy,” Zwerling says. “I really believe that it's more than a craft. This has the ability to transform you.”

The men were reluctant at first, complaining that knitting was too girly or too difficult. But Zwerling assured them men had invented the craft, then gave them a five-minute knitting lesson she swears can teach anyone. Suddenly, Zwerling says, the men “found the zen,” and got hooked. Now, every Thursday from 5 to 7 p.m., they come to class, leaving their crimes and the hierarchies of prison life behind.

They started by knitting comfort dolls, which they gave to children removed from their homes because of domestic issues. Then they moved on to hats for kids at the inner-city elementary school many of the prisoners attended, Zwerling says. “If you look at them, they’re covered with tattoos, they’re rough looking, and many of the young guys don't have all their teeth," she says. “But it doesn't feel rough. They’re very respectful and grateful and very happy to knit.”

The prison’s assistant warden, Margaret Chippendale, believes the men involved with KBB get into trouble less often. “It's very positive because you can see when you go into the room, the dynamics of their conversation; very calm, very soothing,” Chippendale says. “It radiates even when they leave the room and go out into the institution.”

Richy Horton, 38, served almost four years at the Pre-Release Unit and reluctantly joined KBB about 6 months before he was released. “I was like, I’m not going to that thing,” Horton says. “And then I went, and you were actually speaking to real people. People can’t really understand [that in prison] you’re completely separated from anything normal or real in the world. You’re always told what to do and when to do it, so to have people come in and treat you like a human being means so much. They came in and they were like my mom.”

Horton and the other men formed deep friendships with Zwerling and her fellow volunteers, Sheila Rovelstad, 61, and Lea Heirs, 58. “They tell us their stories and dreams,” Zwerling says. “And some of them lie to us. They don't want us to know the really terrible things they did.”

Each week the men eagerly await the women's arrival, then promptly get to work. “It takes you away a little,” Horton says. “You have to watch what you’re doing, otherwise your stitches will become loose or tight or you’ll skip stitches. It almost makes you feel like you don't have to be anything. You’re all sitting there knitting. You can just be yourself.”

During an inmate's first class, Zwerling, Rovelstad and a third volunteer will help him make a little swatch — nothing more than a few stitches worked back and forth. But before that new knitter leaves, the women will have him cut the yarn, taking care to leave a long tail. They'll tell him to carry the square in his pocket and if he gets upset, to pull the tail.

That first class wasn't easy for Raymond Furman, a 46-year-old from Washington who's serving a sentence for telephone misuse and stalking. Frustrated and unable to do more than a stitch or two without a mistake, he threw down his work and said, "I can't do this." But, he remembers, one of the women said, "Just relax. Let the yarn have its way."
Furman stayed put, kept at it and left that night with a little blue strip that he decided was a bookmark for his Bible. The next week he came back and started on a hat, that when he finished, he proudly wore around the prison yard. "The guys," he says, "were sort of impressed."

On that recent Thursday evening, Hopkins, Furman and about 10 others were working wool, side by side, the room nearly silent with concentration. Most of them were making hats for students in need at Baltimore's Arlington Elementary.

There's yarn of all colors spread along one table, as well as scissors, tapestry needles and pom-pom-makers — every last bit of which the women will have to account for before they leave the prison.
The women buy most of the group's supplies themselves, though on the knitting site Ravelry.com, they've set up a page where people can make donations of money or yarn.

Also, Rovelstad, who has a business hand-dying yarns where she names the shades after songs, designed one to benefit the program called, "I Fought the Law and the Law Won." She had people nominate color suggestions online, then brought the choices in to the guys for a final vote.
They chose a variegating stripe of three colors — blue for the sky, green for the grass and black — for the bars that keep them from enjoying either one.

It's Gary Ralph's last night. After spending nearly all of his 30s and 40s in prison for burglary, robbery, making and selling drugs and, most recently, for violating parole, the 52 year old was four days away from going home to College Park. He smiled when someone pointed out that he'd never finish the hat in his lap.

The former biker, still with long silver hair that falls well past his shoulders, has made about 10 hats. He's known for topping them with big, voluptuous pom-poms. He also knit his mother a scarf, part burgundy, part gold, with fringe at the ends. A Redskins fan, Ralph says she "went crazy" over it.
While working on all of those things, Ralph said he thought about home. He says he hopes he keeps knitting once he finally gets there.

"I don't want to go out anymore, doing what I used to do," he says. "I'd rather stay home, watch TV, sit there and knit."

Richy Horton, who's been out for nearly a year now after serving three years for assault, has kept at it. Now living in Beltsville and working for his brother's home improvement company, Horton, who's 38, says in his free time he goes fishing, lifts weights and reads. Every once in a while, in the evening, he also sits down to chip away at a beaded scarf he'd like to give his grandmother.

Knitting, he says, was the only peace he found in prison. In the jailhouse dormitories, no one really talked to one another, no one let their guard down, no one could be themselves. But in the knitting room, learning something new with women he could call by their first names — that, he says, felt real. And it felt good.

"Prison is just a dormant wait. You shut your life off and wait," Horton says. "But them giving you that chance to interact and kind of blend back into the world, it's a big deal."

Though Zwerling worries about the prison tiring of the program, Chippendale promises they have nothing to worry about. The knitting stays, the warden says, as long as the women are willing and the inmates interested.

Which is good for Zwerling's real goal — a half-serious plot to achieve world peace, one knit, one purl, at a time.

"You have to see it," she enthuses. "These big, tough, tattooed guys, knitting, with a look on their face of tranquillity and peace. It's magic."

Horton was released from prison last December and now works in construction. He believes his involvement with KBB helped him get out of jail and onto parole, showing the parole interviewers his small but positive effort to help the outside community. He continues to keep in touch with the women of KBB and is currently knitting a beaded scarf. “They’re not normal people,” Horton says of Zwerling, Rovelstad, and Heirs. “They’re almost like saints.”

To donate to Knitting Behind Bars, visit their Etsy shop, or contact Lynn Zwerling at lynnzwerling@verizon.net.

WORD: Rx for Peace

2011-12-24T11:07:00.000-08:00

As many are moved to think of Peace at this time of the year, some words of wisdom from the inimitable Sam Smith:

Pocket Paradigms

The journalist Bernard Fall noted that the French, after Dien Bien Phu, had no choice but to leave Southeast Asia. America, with its vast military, financial, and technological resources, was able to stay because it had the capacity to keep making the same mistakes over and over. Our war against "terrorism" has been in many ways a domestic version of our Vietnam strategy. We keep making the same mistakes over and over because, until now, we could afford to. One of these has been to define the problem by its manifestations rather than its causes. This turns a resolvable political problem into a irresolvable technical problem, because while, for example, there are clearly solutions to the Middle East crisis, there are no other solutions to the guerrilla violence that grows from the failure to end it.

In other words, if you define the problem as "a struggle against terrorism" you have already admitted defeat because the guerrilla will always have the upper hand against a centralized, technology-dependent society such as ours. There is one way to deal with guerrilla warfare and that is to resolve the problems that allow it to thrive. The trick is to undermine the violence of the most bitter by dealing honestly with the complaints of the most rational.

What you don't do if you are interested in actually combating terrorism -- engage in it.

New website/blog of Note: Salem CityWatch's "The Observation Post"

2011-12-03T21:05:00.000-08:00

Here.

Best Bet for Friday, Dec. 2: Confluence Chorus's Holiday Concert in Salem

2011-11-27T07:00:00.000-08:00

We're going to need this in times to come

2011-11-26T07:00:00.000-08:00

So support now.

Better Ways: 'flipping' homework and lectures

2011-11-25T07:00:00.000-08:00

Excellent idea.

So much of how we do school seems to be by rote repetition of how school was done to us. This is a much better approach.

WORD: Occupy Parenting — Getting big corporations out of our families

2011-11-24T07:00:00.000-08:00

The great thing about Thanksgiving itself is that it's the ultimate non-commercial holiday. How do you sell people stuff when you're dealing with a holiday that's all about giving thanks for what you have?
You can't! That's why the media and businesses work so hard to have you ignore the holiday, trying to prime you to go right for the "Black Friday" aspect of things, hoping you'll be all set for a four-week bacchanalia of debt-fueled spending.

Nice to see some sanity creeping in.

By the way: there is no "away" where pollution goes

2011-11-23T07:00:00.000-08:00

Image by subadei via Flickr

Probably the most insight you get by serving aboard a nuclear submarine that travels submerged for months at a time is that there is no place called "away" where you can throw things. You have to have a plan for each and every item you bring aboard, because everything you discharge, you discharge into the ocean where you are drawing your water.

Then you realize that Earth is just a large submarine with a tiny habitable living quarters and a whole hell of a lot of passengers. There is no "away" here either:

Women's use of contraceptive pill may be linked to men's prostate cancer risk.

HealthDay (11/14, Reinberg) reported, "With the vast increase in the use of the contraceptive pill over the past 40 years, the amount of estrogen entering the water supply may be partly responsible for the increased incidence of prostate cancer around the world," according to research published in BMJ Open. Researchers looked at "data from the International Agency for Research on Cancer and the United Nations World Contraceptive Use report to identify the rates of prostate cancer and prostate cancer deaths as well as the proportion of women using contraceptive pills." The investigators "looked at some 100 countries and found that where the use of oral contraceptives was high, so was the rate of prostate cancer."

Post-collapse Transit Options: Small is Beautiful

2011-11-22T07:00:00.000-08:00

Image by John McNab via FlickrWe're already seeing contraction in our always meager transit systems. It's good to have some idea of how the rest of the poor folks have managed transit without ginormous transit systems.

Apparently growing food is not a "21st Century Skill"

2011-11-20T20:32:00.000-08:00

Which -- in an era of ecological and economic meltdown -- might mean that eating isn't either. (This is a headnote -- an idea abstracted from a legal opinion -- much like the one that first caused the corporate personhood zombie to start wreaking havoc on our country.)

78 Civil Rights
78II Employment Practices
78k1199 Age Discrimination
78k1200 k. In General.
In employment discrimination context, phrase "21st Century skills" refers to nationally-recognized skill set, the primary focus of which concerns the integration of modern technologies for research, organization, evaluation, and communication of information.
Marlow v. Chesterfield County Sch. Bd., 749 F. Supp. 2d 417 (E.D. Va. 2010)

The Growth Fantasy

2011-11-20T19:19:00.000-08:00

In a bizarre, self-contradicting editorial, the Statesman-Journal manages, in the space of four paragraphs, to show that the paper's editorial staff, despite being in a great position to assess the situation realistically, believe that "growth is just around the corner" and that there is something that John Kitzhaber et al. could do to make that growth happen --- if they only wished to, apparently.

Moreover, the writer fails to explain why in the world, if "a cohesive and strategic plan to further grow private-sector jobs" is needed and can be produced, someone as smart as Kitz refuses to produce it.

Here's the paper, correctly pointing out that we're cutting public sector employment (which has a devastating effect on private sector hiring) before resuming the weird chant for government to "do something" about "private-sector jobs."

The encouraging news is that employment numbers are up 1.5 percent compared with last year. Overall, Oregon is 13th nationally in jobs growth. But fewer jobs in the public sector and a slow recovery in the housing market are handcuffing economic growth in the state and nation. The employment gains have come in the private sector as many local government agencies - such as the Salem-Keizer School District - have had to make deep cuts to balance their budgets.

Government's impact on the Willamette Valley explains why the region showed the largest job losses of any Oregon region during the third quarter. Year-over-year job losses were 3.4 percent in Marion and Polk counties, according to the forecast, the worst of the worst.

The governor and lawmakers can look for shiny hues in this forecast, but there's only one truth.

Oregon's economic picture looks ugly. And budget cuts don't address the reality that Kitzhaber and state leaders have not developed a cohesive and strategic plan to further grow private-sector jobs.

Before considering whether such a plan could even be created, it's worth pausing for a moment to consider what it says about the mindset of the people who call for such things: these people, who reflexively oppose all tax increases (the SJ was reactionary in opposition to Measures 66 and 67, for example), seem to have zero self-awareness about what it means to call for government to produce "a cohesive and strategic plan to further grow . . . jobs."

Government acts in one of two ways: with force or with money.   The video clips we've seen of government employees clubbing and spraying harmless kids and grandmothers in the face and eyes with pepper spray is one face of government. Presumably the SJ isn't calling on government to use force on recalcitrant businesses who refuse to hire.

So that leaves the only other mode of governmental influence: the decisions about what to tax or not to tax, and the decisions about how to spend the money collected through taxation. That is the only other way government works. Government takes money from some or all and gives it to some or all.

In American history, the idea that government was responsible for creating plans to spur hiring was rare, and would have even been considered anathema for centuries.   The Founders surely and probably most lesser mortals believed that, while government had a role "to promote the general welfare," the idea of government acting directly and intentionally to spur hiring would have been considered a call for corruption, given that we know that employers only hire when it is profitable for them to do so.

One of the reasons that the New Deal worked as well as it did was that Roosevelt and his "New Dealers" didn't wait to spur "private sector jobs" as the SJ says we must -- rather, they looked at the very long list of needs -- the work needing doing -- and the very long list of people needing work, and matched the two directly. Thus, instead of giving employers twice as much so that they would take on the work and hire some workers (as few as possible, for the lowest wage possible, as is the rule), New Deal programs concentrated on restoring the flow of money by hiring workers directly, to do things for the public good, while priming the capital spending pump with earned wages.

The bottom line, though it will likely be a frosty day in Lucifer's living room before this is discussed in the SJ, is simple:

GROWTH IS OVER.

What does that mean? That means that no amount of word-stew, no stellar team of economists and other believers in illusions, no amount of hope or prayer can change the fundamental physical reality that we have long since passed the limits to growth, which is really just a shorthand for "consumption of material resources and use of energy."

Our vast store of wealth is really just the residue of the even vaster process of waste that we began when we figured out how to tap coal and then oil, even as we kept a 17th Century ("The world is empty") mindset while the years flew by, each one bringing about increasingly advanced tools for using more energy and materials faster and faster (for that is, physically, what "growth" means). For about two and a half centuries now, we have found ever more clever ways to blow through aeons of stored solar energy ("fossil" fuels) while using the best, highest-grade, easiest to mine/capture/drain resources to produce ever more elaborate things -- some good, some bad, but every one of them more energy intensive than the tools they replaced.

Even the few devices that use less energy individually wind up using more collectively, as the net result of each advance means that more people will use the more advanced tool. As Richard Register notes, you give an American a Prius that gets twice the mileage, the only thing that changes is that the American moves twice as far from work, so that he can afford a bigger house to fill with bigger screens. Yes, that's hyperbole. Also pretty accurate.

News flash for the newspaper: There is nothing John Kitzhaber or all the mavens and gurus (and certainly all the economists put together) can do to promote "growth," thank god. Now that we're past the limits of growth, we're like an insolvent business that still has a little money in checking -- sure we can spend faster, but that only makes the final reckoning harsher. We've operated North America like a going-out-of-business concern for 250 years, and we've done such a good job spreading that gospel around the world that China and India have decided to join us in living as if there will be no tomorrow, that the books need never balance -- because who'll be here to audit them anyway?

The challenge for Salem -- and it will have to be done at this sort of local level -- is figuring out how to preserve the social advances of the last 250 years locally, even as the predicate that spurred and allowed all those advances (the unsustainable use of Earth's natural wealth) starts to reverse, remorselessly contracting year upon year, decade upon decade, ever faster. If you think times are hard now, when the boulder has just barely stopped rolling up the hill, wait until it has some time to pick up speed.

The Occupy Wall Street folks, and their local variants, understand that the economy is not working any more. Naturally, the pundits atop the media empires scorn the "unwashed hippies" and "60's flashbacks" camping in the parks. What's most interesting is that the press either misses or pretends not to notice the really interesting problem that the Occupiers point out: that the economy is producing over-educated people with crushing debts at a tremendous rate, even as we have stopped needing many people to keep the "business as usual" system going.   (Scarier still, most of these people are absolutely dependent on "business as usual" going on as usual, because they have no more knowledge of how to grow food to sustain themselves than they do of quantum electro-dynamics.)

When other countries have an excess of educated young people and no opportunities for them, our press pundits write about how these societies are in peril, because the disaffected youth will forever be harmed by having had no way to join the ranks of responsible adults. Funny how the remaining few reporters and editorial scribes don't want to think about what it means that a frightening number of 15 - 30 year-olds in this country can not buy a decent job in their own home towns.

WORD: Occupy Bankruptcy!

2011-11-20T07:00:00.000-08:00

Bankruptcy -- a debtor's ability to escape permanent shackles of debt -- is so fundamental to our system that it is specifically provided for in the US Constitution.

Unlike, say, corporate personhood, an invention of the railroad lawyers who ran the country during the Gilded Age (as their heirs do today in the guise of "textualist" Supreme Court justices who are expert at reading the invisible text that only they can see, the text that elevates piles of money -- which is all a corporation is -- into supercitizens).

Awesome idea - Opting Out of Junk Mail Just Got Way Easier

2011-11-19T07:00:00.000-08:00

Now THAT'S a great gift for anyone who complains about the junk mail onslaught.

Our New Product:
MailStop Envelope

Hi

Catalog Choice has a new, even easier way to opt out of unwanted mail. In response to member requests, we are introducing MailStop Envelope, a mail-in program for stopping unwanted junk mail.
With the postage-paid MailStop Envelope, you simply collect and send in opt-outs. Unwanted mail goes from your mailbox to your MailStop Envelope, without taking up your time or cluttering your desk. When you reach 15 opt-outs, drop your MailStop Envelope back in the mail and we'll take it from there. Since MailStop is part of Catalog Choice, you'll still be able to check the progress of your opt-out requests in your account.

MailStop Envelopes are perfect for:
People who don't want to spend time entering individual opt-outs.
Helping elderly relatives or friends control the amount of unwanted mail they receive.
People who do not use or have a computer at home but want to save trees, reduce clutter and protect their privacy.
Learn more about MailStop Envelope - it might become your new way to opt-out of unwanted mail or a great gift for your family and friends.

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Catalog Choice 1845 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, CA 94703 Privacy Policy

WORD: Teach them Math, Science, and Chess

2011-11-18T07:00:00.000-08:00

What if there was a game that kids love, that is easily affordable for every family, never needs upgrades, and promotes logical reasoning, egalitarianism, patience, and respect for others ... would the schools ignore it just because it doesn't lend itself to the standardized testmania (and because kids can quickly outpace adults)?

Apparently so.

Word: Local Hero: Britta Franz

2011-11-17T07:00:00.000-08:00

Image via WikipediaSpeaking of energy problems, Britta Franz has a good approach to adaptation.

Franz is just one person — a longtime civic leader and retired Salem businesswoman — but she's savvy, innovative and persistent. More and more people are becoming converts to her idea that Oregon should embrace regular, dependable rail service and forget about high-speed rail.

Given Oregon's topography and relatively small population, high-speed rail doesn't look promising. But people would use better rail service connecting Salem with Portland and Eugene if it were dependable and on a schedule that met commuters' needs.

"Speed is not the issue. It's being on time," Franz said.

WORD. We need to forget the high-speed rail fantasy, which is nothing more than a slight variation of the highway boondoggle ... a transit system designed in utter disregard of our economic and environmental limits. What Salem needs more than anything else in 2012 is a rail system as good as we had in 1912. We'd think we died and went to heaven if we could have that.

Naturally the Highway Department (cover name "ODOT" but really just the same old Highway Department it has always been) and its local front groups give Franz the old "yes, but" again and again. But reality has a way of winning out -- as our budgets continue to melt down, we're going to find ourselves thinking back to rail more and more.

The peak oil crisis: the energy trap

2011-11-16T07:00:00.000-08:00

http://energybulletin.net/stories/2011-10-26/peak-oil-crisis-energy-trapImage via Wikipedia
http://energybulletin.net/stories/2011-10-26/peak-oil-crisis-energy-trap

About that "finest health care system in the world" stuff?

2011-11-15T07:00:00.000-08:00

Image by Public Citizen via Flickr

Man Dies From Toothache, Couldn't Afford Meds
A Cincinnati man without insurance died from a tooth infection because he couldn't afford his medication. (Getty Images)

A 24-year-old Cincinnati father died from a tooth infection this week because he couldn't afford his medication, offering a sobering reminder of the importance of oral health and the number of people without access to dental or health care. . . . Kyle Willis' wisdom tooth started hurting two weeks ago. When dentists told him it needed to be pulled, he decided to forgo the procedure, because he was unemployed and had no health insurance.

When his face started swelling and his head began to ache, Willis went to the emergency room, where he received prescriptions for antibiotics and pain medications. Willis couldn't afford both, so he chose the pain medications.

The tooth infection spread, causing his brain to swell. He died Tuesday.

The Limits to Growth: U R THERE

2011-11-14T07:00:00.000-08:00

Cover via Amazon

The Limits to Growth -- not a possible future, but a present reality.

As the banksters profit, the rest of us wonder why there's no money for eldercare

2011-11-13T07:00:00.000-08:00

Image by fernanda_maria via Flickr

WASHINGTON — As her mother's Alzheimer's worsened over eight long years, so did Doreen Alfaro's bills: The walker, then the wheelchair, then the hospital bed, then the diapers — and the caregivers hired for more and more hours a day so Alfaro could go to work and her elderly father could get some rest.

Alfaro and her husband sold their California house to raise money for her mother's final at-home care. Six years later, the 58-year-old Alfaro wonders if she eventually develops Alzheimer's, too, "what happens to my care? Where will I go?"

Dementia is poised to become a defining disease of the rapidly aging population — and a budget-busting one for Medicare, Medicaid and families. Now the Obama administration is developing the first National Alzheimer's Plan, to combine research aimed at fighting the mind-destroying disease with help that caregivers need to stay afloat.

"This is a unique opportunity, maybe an opportunity of a lifetime in a sense, to really have an impact on this disease," says Dr. Ronald Petersen of the Mayo Clinic, who chairs a committee that later this month begins advising the government on what that plan should include.

An estimated 5.4 million Americans have Alzheimer's or similar dementias. It's the sixth-leading killer. There is no cure; treatments only temporarily ease some symptoms. Barring a research breakthrough, those numbers will worsen steadily as the baby boomers gray: By 2050, anywhere from 13 million to 16 million Americans are projected to have Alzheimer's, costing a $1 trillion in medical and nursing home expenditures.

But that's not the full toll. Sufferers lose the ability to do the simplest activities of daily life and can survive that way for a decade or more, requiring years of care from family, friends or paid caregivers. Already a recent report finds that nearly 15 million people, mostly family members, are providing more than $200 billion worth of unpaid care.

Thousands of those caregivers have turned out at public meetings since early August — and at a "telephone town meeting" organized by the Alzheimer's Association that drew 32,000 people — pleading for a national Alzheimer's strategy to bring changes.

They want primary care doctors trained to diagnose dementia earlier, describing how years of missed symptoms cost them precious time to make plans or seek treatment. That's a recommendation being echoed Tuesday in an international Alzheimer's report.

They demand to know why the National Institutes of Health spends about six times more on AIDS research than on Alzheimer's, when there are good drugs to battle back the HIV virus but nothing comparable for dementia.

Overwhelmingly, they ask for resources to help Alzheimer's patients live their last years at home without ruining their caregivers' own health and finances.

"Either you're rich and can afford $25 an hour for care at home, or you send him to a facility. We're in the middle of the road," says Shirley Rexrode of suburban San Francisco, whose 85-year-old father, Hsien-Wen Li, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's nearly three years ago.

Adult day care didn't work out — even at $90 a day, the only place with an opening couldn't handle the behaviors of Alzheimer's. Rexrode says her mother, Li's primary caregiver, has suffered some depression from the stress.

"We just have to muddle through, but we don't know how long we can," Rexrode says.

And while Medicare will pay for doctor bills and medications, even getting to the doctor can be a hurdle. When her 89-year-old mother with advanced Alzheimer's developed a urinary tract infection, Susan Lynch couldn't find a doctor willing to come to her parents' home in Fall River, Mass. Lynch flew there from her Gaithersburg, Md., home but couldn't carry her mother down the stairs. A private ambulance service didn't have an opening for weeks. Lynch wound up calling the town ambulance for a costly but Medicare-covered trip to the emergency room.

Federal health officials, who promise a first draft of the national plan by December, say they're getting the message.

"Folks desperately, desperately want to be able to provide the care themselves," says Donald Moulds, a deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services who oversees the project. "It's very, very hard work. Figuring out better mechanisms for supporting people who are trying to do that work is, one, the right thing to do."

It also may be cheaper for taxpayers. Nursing homes not only are pricier than at-home care, but many families only can afford them through Medicaid, the health care program for the poor. Another key, Moulds says, is better care coordination as Alzheimer's complicates the many other health problems of aging.

But given the budget crisis, the big question is whether any anti-Alzheimer's strategy can come with enough dollars and other incentives attached to spur true change.

"That's a concern, a very real one," says Mayo's Petersen.

The law that requires a national Alzheimer's plan didn't set funding, and Moulds is mum on a possible price tag. Almost complete is an inventory of all Alzheimer's-related research and care reimbursement paid for by the U.S. government, to look for gaps that need filling and possible savings to help pay for them.

Other countries including England and Australia — and 25 U.S. states, by Moulds' count — have developed their own Alzheimer's plans. But the U.S. is taking a special look at France, where President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2008 pledged to invest 1.6 billion euros, about $2.2 billion, over five years for better diagnosis, research and caregiver support and training.

Sarkozy told an international Alzheimer's Association meeting in July that he wants to guarantee "that no French family is left without support."

On Tuesday, a report from the advocacy group Alzheimer's Disease International says every country should have a national dementia strategy that stresses earlier diagnosis. Most of the estimated 36 million people worldwide living with dementia, and as many as half of U.S. patients, haven't been formally diagnosed, the report says. That's in part because of stigma and the belief that nothing can be done, but the report notes that even today's imperfect medications can help, a diagnosis lets families plan ahead, and scientists are working to create treatments that one day may slow the disease.

At meetings around the U.S., families say any Alzheimer's plan must bring better understanding of a disease too often suffered in isolation.

"What I want to see is mainly awareness, awareness of this disease and what it does not only to the individual but also to the network of family and friends that are going to care for the person," says Alfaro, of Aptos, Calif.

"It should be as understood as diabetes, and as treatable," adds Audrey Wiggins of Triangle, Va., whose father has and grandmother died of Alzheimer's.

Meanwhile -- the administration bails on attempt to deal with the lack of long-term care insurance.

Probably a good idea then

2011-11-12T07:00:00.000-08:00

The foreclosure solution banks hate

Ann Brenoff, Real Estate AOL - The loan modification programs have been a joke. You have a house that has tanked in value and the best the banks can come up with is: a plan where they sort of delay what you owe long enough for you to get back on your financial feet -- if that -- based on the flawed logic that the housing market is certain to improve in just a matter of months.

The real answer for what ails us is a Third Rail solution that banks don't want to touch: Erase some of the amount we borrowed, a process known as a principal reduction. To do so would share the burden of the housing crash with the lenders who helped create it. It would also allow us to get on with our lives, and, according to The New Bottom Line, save the economy in the process.

Banks would rather poke out their proverbial eyes with sharp sticks than offer principal reductions. Only 2.8 percent of all loan modifications in the first quarter of 2011 involved any actual sort of principal reduction, according to the ratings agency DBRS. And that number is actually up a full percentage point from the same time last year.

But some analysts believe that the industry-wide reluctance to perform principal reductions on a wide scale is actually what is holding back the housing recovery. . . .

For Veteran's Day

2011-11-11T07:00:00.000-08:00

Image by Niklas via FlickrImage by The National Guard via FlickrImage by fotografar via Flickr

The Reckoning

The scars from today's wars amount to a national pathology. America could take a generation to heal.

By James Kitfield

The troops come home from war much the way they left, largely invisible to a distracted nation. Returning units are typically met at an airfield by buses that shuttle them to a gated military base. On a parade ground, a commander reminds the assembled, some of the more than 2.3 million service members deployed during the past decade of war, of all that they accomplished. He recalls the brothers in arms who didn’t make it back and the memories that unite those who did. The shared hardships, the moments of terror and elation, the constant joking that held the awfulness at bay. The unbearable melancholy that descends at the playing of “Taps.”

The commander dismisses the formation, and the troops realize that the ties that bound their lives together are breaking. The married service members run into the open arms of their families, husbands holding babies they’ve never met, uniformed women hugging young children they can hardly recognize. Even before the smiles and tears subside, spouses sense the vast gulf that now lies between them and wonder how to get across. Single troopers head for the barracks, cracking wise but often wishing that they, too, had family to welcome them home. And, inevitably, there are the stragglers—young soldiers shuffling and chain-smoking, unsure of where to go or what to do next. Having come of age on distant battlefields, they are suddenly lost in America.

Even Col. David Sutherland, a decorated commander who served in Iraq, was shocked by the dizzying sense of alienation he felt on reentry. “Never in the history of our Republic have so few been asked to do so much for so long. And yet, when soldiers return home, they feel acutely this disconnect between the military and a civilian society that doesn’t even seem to be at war,” says Sutherland, the Joint Staff’s special assistant in charge of the Warrior and Family Support program. “We fall into the same trap of our fathers from World War II or Vietnam, which is to keep the memories of those sacred moments on the battlefield to ourselves. That’s how they become secrets, and secrets are not healthy.”

Tens of thousands of other troops return home on the aeromedical-evacuation flights that land routinely at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland or Travis Air Force Base in California, where the buses waiting to meet them bear large red crosses. The critically wounded emerge from the massive C-17 transports first, nearly invisible beneath bandages, a jungle of medical equipment strapped to their gurneys. Next out are the less-dire cases, carried on stretchers. Finally, the ambulatory patients shuffle single file to the waiting buses. In the past decade, Air Mobility Command has flown more than 35,600 aeromedical-evacuation sorties, transporting more than 177,000 wounded or ill service members home.

Staff Sgt. Dan Nevins was one of those patients who landed on the tarmac at Andrews in 2005 clinging to life. Having already lost one leg, he fought through 18 months and 30 surgeries at Walter Reed Army Medical Center trying in vain to save the other. “In retrospect, finally letting go of my other leg and getting on with my life was the best decision I ever made,” says Nevins, who now works for the nonprofit Wounded Warrior Project helping other injured veterans try to get on with their lives.

Thousands of other troopers have returned home in flag-draped coffins at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Last month, President Obama and other senior officials traveled to Dover to honor the 30 American troops killed in Afghanistan on Aug. 6 after their helicopter was shot down, the worst single-day loss of the long Afghan war. Their names joined the honor roll of more than 6,000 fallen service members from Iraq and Afghanistan. The deafening silence of the dead continues to send shock waves through a landscape of grief inhabited by their families and comrades—the collateral wounded of these wars.

“A death in the military is unlike any other loss in our society, because there are so many complicating factors,” says Bonnie Carroll, founder and president of the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, or TAPS, which reaches out to grieving military families with “peer professionals” who have social work degrees and have also lost loved ones in the military. Because deaths often happen on long combat deployments, Carroll says, grieving spouses sometimes trick themselves into thinking that a missing service member will still walk through the front door someday. Other times, the manner of death is so traumatic that families receive multiple sets of remains. “When a death is so horrific in nature, and the spouse hears about it repeatedly in the media or third-party accounts, they can create a memory that leads to their own post-traumatic stress disorder.”

The pathology of war

Every war leaves its imprint on those who fight it and on the national psyche. At the 10-year mark, the wounds and mental scar tissue from Afghanistan and Iraq have amassed into something like a pathology unique to these conflicts—one that will afflict this country for a generation.

Due largely to advances in combat medicine, rapid aeromedical evacuation, and body armor, the wars have proven to be the least lethal in modern U.S. history. According to Dr. Ronald Glasser, a Vietnam-era Army surgeon and the author of the recent book, Broken Bodies, Shattered Minds: A Medical Odyssey from Vietnam to Afghanistan, for every battlefield death, 16 service members survived their wounds. The ratio in Vietnam, he said, was 2.4 wounded for every death. In the Civil War, the ratio was less than 1-to-1, with few soldiers surviving battlefield wounds.

In his book, Glasser warns that the nation will face a moral and economic reckoning in caring for so many wounded veterans. “Because of body armor there have been relatively few of the penetrating chest wounds or abdominal injuries that caused so many battle deaths in past wars,” he tells National Journal. “But no one was really prepared for the number of seriously wounded survivors.” According to the Pentagon, 168,000 service members wounded or injured in these wars are graded “60 percent disabled” or higher, and the VA faces a 492,000-case backlog of disability claims. More than 508,000 veterans of today’s wars have already been treated at VA hospitals and clinics. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the medical costs associated with today’s veterans could come to $40 billion to $55 billion over the next decade.

Just as the current wars have dragged on, with tactics and geography shifting over the years, the pathology of these wounds has also mutated over time. Early on in Afghanistan, for instance, small arms caused many injuries. A few years into the fighting in Iraq—as insurgent bombs got bigger and the armor on U.S. military vehicles got thicker—troops absorbed blast waves through their seats, causing a spike in spinal-cord injuries, concussions, and brain trauma. Over the last 18 months in Afghanistan, the profile has changed again.

“As Afghanistan has turned primarily into a war of dismounted infantry, our polytrauma wards have seen a huge influx of troopers with really massive injuries from absorbing blasts while on foot patrol, including multiple amputations, really severe brain injury, and the emotional wounds that go with all of that,” says Dr. Shane McNamee, the chief of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the VA’s Polytrauma Rehabilitation Center in Richmond, Va. “In the past five years, I can’t tell you how many times we have regeared to tailor our care delivery to subsequent waves of service members with different kinds of wounds.”

But improvised explosive devices, the enemy weapon of choice in both conflicts, have caused their signature wounds, creating more than 1,300 amputees, numerous burn victims, and unknown numbers who suffer from traumatic brain injury. According to the advocacy group Veterans for Common Sense, more than 190,000 troops have suffered a concussion or brain injury. There is also growing evidence of links between TBI and posttraumatic stress disorder. “They both injure similar areas of the brain and exhibit similar symptoms,” says McNamee. “The lines between them are pretty gray.” According to a 2008 Rand survey, one in five veterans of these wars—some 300,000 people—are suffering either from major depression or PTSD, while 320,000 have suffered concussions or TBI.

Those growing numbers are significant. By allowing the Vietnam War—and the physical and emotional trauma it caused—to recede from our national consciousness, America inherited an epidemic of veterans suffering from the attendant ills of PTSD. Today, the post-9/11 generation of volunteers faces the same risk. “When a lot of us Vietnam veterans returned from war, it took us a decade or even two before we would even talk about what happened, and we bottled up a lot of anger and hurt,” says Tom Mitchell, a state director for U.S. Vets, a nonprofit that works to get homeless veterans off the streets. “A lot of us are determined not to let that happen with this new generation of combat veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The volunteers

Today’s wars are the first extended conflicts to be fought not by draftees but by a relatively small cohort of volunteers. That partly explains why the pathologies specific to this war have been so hard to predict. Like previous generations, however, today’s veterans generally keep the toxic aftereffects of war to themselves; they are simply too painful to admit or confront.

The small size of the all-volunteer force, for instance, has necessitated multiple combat deployments with inadequate breaks in between, which mental-health experts believe greatly increases the propensity for PTSD and its effects: depression, drug abuse, failed marriages, and emotional distress. The Defense Department’s Task Force on Mental Health found in 2007 that 38 percent of all active-duty service members have reported psychological symptoms after their tours. In some months this year, the suicide rate for active-duty service members has exceeded combat deaths, and in April, the VA’s suicide-prevention hotline received more than 14,000 calls—the most ever recorded in a single month. Dr. Robert Petzel, the VA undersecretary of health, says that doctors have become expert at recognizing and treating PTSD. “It’s probably true that multiple combat deployments increase the likelihood of PTSD,” he warns, “though we don’t have adequate research to prove that yet.”

Today’s all-volunteer force is also older than its draft-era counterpart, with more married service members and a larger number of uniformed women (14.6 percent of the active-duty total). More than 220,000 women have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, meaning that they’ve borne a higher share of the burden than in past wars. After 9/11, the military divorce rate climbed from 2.6 percent per year in 2001 to 3.6 percent in 2010. And 7.8 percent of women in the military divorced in 2010. (Because the military does not track overall divorce rates, count as divorced those service members who remarry in a given year, or follow up on the divorce rate of military personnel a year or two after they leave service, many experts believe the Pentagon underestimates the actual rate of military divorce.) “Overall divorce rates in the military could climb to as high as 80 percent for first marriages, which would mean that service in the military is becoming a precursor for divorce,” says Leticia Dreiling, a Houston Vets Center marriage and family therapist.

According to the VA, about one in five female veterans, or 20 percent, have also tested positive for posttraumatic stress related to “military sexual trauma,” a catch-all category that includes everything from sexual harassment to rape. “I actually think the military sexual trauma among women is much higher than the official figures, because we find that a lot of women service members feel guilty even talking about it,” says Judith Broder, a clinical psychologist who started The Soldiers Project, which offers free mental-health counseling to returning veterans. “Women veterans often feel like it’s a betrayal of their unit to speak about sexual trauma, so they tend to carry that wound a long time in silence, which increases the likelihood that it will develop into combat-stress disorder.” Women are also the fastest growing subset of the homeless-veteran population in America, according to Broder. Some land on the streets with their children.

As a percentage of the overall deployed force, the National Guard and Reserves have also shouldered more of the burden in Afghanistan and Iraq than in wars past. Yet as citizen-soldiers, reservists are less prepared for the stresses of a long combat tour. Indeed, the Task Force on Mental Health found that 49 percent of National Guardsmen reported experiencing psychological troubles after their deployments.

With the wars now winding down, the Pentagon estimates that as many as 1 million service members are likely to leave active duty in the next five years. They will enter a struggling economy where the jobless rate for young (ages 18 to 24) male veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan was 21.9 percent last year, and where veterans make up an estimated 20 percent of the homeless population. Many experts believe that the nation is simply unprepared for that approaching army of suffering.

“There are combat wounds you can see, and others that are invisible until symptoms develop long after service members return home, and we’re seeing an increase in virtually all of the metrics that track them,” says clinical psychologist Barbara Van Dahlen, the founder and president of the nonprofit Give an Hour, which connects veterans to a network of 6,000 mental-health professionals for free treatment.

Despite improvements in the military and VA health care systems—and the cooperation of nearly 5,000 nonprofits that serve military personnel—Van Dahlen sees a population at severe risk. “We should have learned from Vietnam, because all you have to do is study the homeless population today to understand that an awful lot of those veterans never really made it all the way home,” she says. “If we don’t get ahead of the challenge, we will risk losing this generation of veterans.”

The odyssey

The odyssey begins on a day like any other, logging duty in a faraway and unfamiliar land. Dan Nevin’s began in Iraq in a Humvee that was bouncing down a dusty road outside the Sunni-insurgent stronghold of Falluja. Without warning, his vehicle struck a roadside bomb. In an instant, Nov. 10, 2004, became the day that changed his life forever. By the time Nevin arrived at the U.S. military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, 12 hours later, he had already lost one leg. Eventually, he lost the other to a bone infection.

In 2004 and 2005, the insurgencies that would eventually drive Iraq to the brink of civil war grew; correspondingly, the number of critically wounded service members pouring into the military medical system spiked. Nevin had to wait a week to get space on one of the crowded medical flights from Germany, and when he arrived at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the staff was nearly overwhelmed. The care “was absolutely world-class,” he says. But the caregivers “just couldn’t handle all of the wounded. Those guys worked day and night, but it was a constant battle to get appointments if you needed a modification to your prosthetic leg. And when you did get an appointment, you could wait hours.”

Leaders of the military health care system were also beginning to realize the complexity of providing life-saving and rehabilitative care for so many severely wounded troops. Nevin’s Reserve activation had forced him to take a major pay cut from his job selling pharmaceuticals in California. Because his wife couldn’t afford to leave her own job, he could only see her one weekend every six weeks or so, putting more strain on their marriage. Yet compared to some of the younger active-duty patients who were told they were too injured to continue serving—meaning forced separation from the only job and culture they had known as adults—he felt lucky. “As a reservist, I had a college degree, a good job, and a supportive family to go home to,” Nevin says. “Some of those young kids joined the military right out of high school, however, and they didn’t have any of that to fall back on. So they found every excuse imaginable not to be released from Walter Reed. I thought they were crazy at the time, but later I realized that those young guys barely into their 20s were paralyzed with fear about what came next.”

By 2007, the problems at Walter Reed exploded into a full-blown scandal when The Washington Post published a series of articles detailing neglect, overworked case managers, and shoddy infrastructure. The commander of Walter Reed and the secretary of the Army resigned. But the scandal helped show the Pentagon and VA that their understaffed and stovepiped medical facilities were still unprepared for the wounded and maimed patients often transitioning back and forth between their systems. For the Army, the result was the creation of the Warrior Transition Command. From the beginning, its mission was to protect subsequent waves of returning wounded soldiers from the paralyzing fears that haunted young troopers at Walter Reed—the notion that the military was abandoning them at their moment of greatest need.

Lt. Col. Danny Dudek, who now works for the Warrior Transition Command, realized how precarious he felt when his own odyssey began in 2007. While traveling north of Baghdad just three months earlier, a penetrating explosive hit his armored Stryker fighting vehicle. The blast killed the soldier next to him and caused a spinal-cord injury in Dudek that left him paralyzed below the knee. Within days, he had been through surgery at Walter Reed; within a few months, he was sent to the VA hospital in Seattle to recover near his family. The care was excellent, but Dudek felt bereft of the camaraderie and support structures that he had come to depend on in his unit and somewhat lost in the VA bureaucracy. “We overlooked all the other stuff that goes into being a soldier, like being able to rely on strong leadership, showing up for formation, knowing that our families are taken care of,” Dudek says. “I think the Army realized that we can’t just treat wounded soldiers like patients. We need to continue to treat them like soldiers, too.”

That epiphany led to the establishment in 2007 of 29 community-based Warrior Transition Units for all soldiers whose care requires at least six months of complex medical treatment. The units blend the efforts of a primary-care doctor, a nurse case manager, and a squad leader. Soldiers help shape their own comprehensive transition plans, which include career and employment goals; Soldier and Family Assistance Centers aid their family members.

Still, the challenges are so complex that even this well-intentioned program initially went awry in some places. Media investigations of various units showed conflicts between the medical and military staff, overcrowding, and an overreliance on medication. An Army Inspector General’s report issued in January estimated that up to a third of all soldiers in Warrior Transition Units last year were overmedicated, hooked on drugs, or abusing illegal substances.

The Army has investigated the charges but hasn’t backed away from the concept. “We did have some inexperienced leaders in Warrior Transition Units who didn’t fully understand the complexity of tailoring a treatment regime to each soldier, and some soldiers do feel that military drills get in the way of their recovery,” says Dudek, who commanded a transition unit in Seattle. “There were also some conflicts between nurse case managers and squad leaders. But with good leadership, that organizational friction usually gets quickly resolved.” He adds that “the last thing we need to do is come back wounded and just ‘take a knee.’ What I told my soldiers is that you have to fight to overcome the pain, the apathy, and the fear of an uncertain future. And for me and a lot of them, it is the hardest fight of our lives.”

Falling through the cracks

When Lance Cpl. Nancy Schiliro was medically discharged from the Marine Corps in 2005 after losing an eye in a mortar attack in Iraq, there was no long counseling session or transition unit. They hadn’t been created yet. One day she was living in the 24/7 bubble of life as a Marine—being told what to do, where to go, when to eat, and who to hang out with—and the next day she was home and that bubble had burst. The whole experience was so disorienting that, for six months, Schiliro didn’t even realize that she was suffering from PTSD. “I wasn’t sleeping. I jumped at loud noises. I basically stayed to myself and stopped interacting with people. I just wasn’t me,” she says. Finally, her brother’s father-in-law, himself a former Marine, called a friend at a local veterans’ center, who reached out. “It’s taken me awhile to learn how to manage my disease, and it’s gotten better,” she says. “But I don’t think I’ll ever be totally cured.”

Cases like Schiliro—veterans who need care but fall into the gap between military medical treatment and VA follow-on care—have driven reforms designed to make the transition more seamless. The Pentagon and the VA established a Joint Executive Council that issued 26 initiatives to standardize treatment and evaluation systems. For instance, military treatment facilities today typically don’t release a wounded service member until he or she has scheduled appointments in the Veterans Health Administration system. If requested, one of a hundred VA “transition patient advocates” will even travel with service members as they move from major military hospitals to VA hospitals closer to home. Anticipating demand, the VA also hired 7,000 mental-health officials in recent years, expanded suicide-prevention hotlines, and established caregiver programs that provide stipends and travel allowances for family members who care for seriously wounded veterans. “The departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs have gone from a relatively low-level of interaction in 2001 to a degree of cooperation that is historically unprecedented,” says Petzel, the VA health undersecretary.

For all of those advances, however, major problems persist. Despite the move to a joint disability evaluation process designed to streamline claims procedures, some veterans are still waiting up to 400 days for a decision on whether they will receive payments and at what levels, and a backlog of nearly 500,000 late claims have gone beyond the 125-day standard at the VA. Until disability payments begin, easing some of their financial burdens, wounded veterans are susceptible to alcohol or drug abuse—or worse—to alleviate their suffering. “I know that VA and DOD have big challenges,” Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray, D-Wash., said at a hearing earlier this year. “But service members and veterans continue to take their own lives at an alarming rate. Wait times for benefits continue to drag on for an average of a year or far more.”

Another sign of trouble: Despite aggressive outreach, only about half of the Iraq and Afghanistan vets have even registered with the VA, meaning there is a vast at-risk population. “A chief lesson of Vietnam was that we need to get new veterans help as early as possible, before their lives spiral into crisis,” says Fern Taylor, supervisor of a clinic for returning veterans at a VA hospital in Houston. “Too often, our first contact with a veteran is in the emergency room, through the criminal-justice system, or on our suicide-prevention hotline.”

Kathy Molitor, the suicide-prevention coordinator at a VA post-deployment clinic in Houston, has no doubt that many vets need help. In 2007, the VA’s suicide hotline received 9, 400 calls, she says, and the next year, it jumped to 67,400. In 2009, it reached 119,000, and last year it was up to 135,000. Just listening to the calls for help can induce secondary traumatic stress: I feel like an animal, unfit for civilized society.… My husband only wants to hang out and drink and do drugs with his buddies.… I can’t talk to my wife because she might be infected with my disease.… My husband barks orders at our children like they were soldiers.… After watching my buddy blown to bits, I’m angry all the time.… Why does Daddy want to go back to war? … Our son is constantly cleaning his gun in his room alone, and we can’t get him to stop.… I’m not/she’s not/he’s not the same person anymore …

The essential message that Molitor and the other hotline therapists try to convey to callers is simple: War is hazardous to your mental health. “It’s really no surprise that these veterans have posttraumatic stress, because these are hard issues for humans to deal with on top of all of life’s other stresses and difficulties,” she says. “On the phone, we try and let them know that these are normal reactions to what are really abnormal experiences.”

Brothers under the bridge

On a recent sweltering day, Oskar Gonzalez-Yetzirah of the nonprofit U.S. Vets trolled beneath one of Houston’s countless highway overpasses, offering bottles of water to the ragged men and women gathered there. He had a simple question for any takers.

“You a vet?”

U.S. Vets is one of roughly 5,000 nonprofits nationwide that aid military personnel and veterans. In a sense, they are America’s catchers in the rye—the last line of help for veterans poised on the precipice of a cliff. The veterans whom Gonzalez-Yetzirah finds under the overpass have already hit rock bottom, joining some 3,500 homeless veterans in Houston and 150,000 nationwide. Almost all are jobless; many are substance abusers or mentally ill.

He tries to coax the vets into government or nonprofit assistance systems. U.S. Vets has a 72-bed facility in downtown Houston, but it is overbooked by 30 spaces. Gonzalez-Yetzirah and his boss would have to work the phones to find an open slot at another shelter. He knows that many veterans who suffer from PTSD would rather sleep outside than subject their frayed nerves to the chaos of a homeless shelter. He also knows from experience that if red tape keeps him from logging the veterans into the system before nightfall, they will almost surely slip through his fingers and disappear onto the streets again.

As a former Marine who served in Iraq, Gonzalez-Yetzirah himself has also struggled with PTSD and readjustment issues. In his first job back—waiting tables—he almost clocked his boss, a pimply 18-year-old, for ordering him around. That might have landed him in the Harris County Jail, where he runs group-therapy sessions for the 400 to 600 jailed vets being held there on any given day. He now sees a new wave of vets approaching the precipice, just one similar outburst away from joining their brothers in jail or under the bridge. “I run into a lot of [recently returned] veterans in my work who are not homeless yet, but they are at the stage of running from place to place, sleeping on a buddy’s couch, living paycheck to paycheck and barely making ends meet,” Gonzalez-Yetzirah says.

Many are married to young wives who have little education and are caring for babies, even as the veterans struggle against their PTSD to hold down jobs. They tend to follow a pattern, he says: Soon, their families will break apart and the vets will end up on the streets. “I’ve seen that enough times to understand how it happens. I just don’t understand how we as a country can allow those people who fought for our freedoms to stay homeless.”

Like previous generations of veterans before them, the post-9/11 volunteers are coming home from war burdened by wounds and sorrows. Only this time it’s not too late to help them carry that weight.

The soldiers sent to fight on our behalf are not victims; they don’t want our pity, and they have much to contribute and even to teach us. But combat veterans struggling to regain a sense of normalcy in everyday life need and deserve the same assurances at home that their buddies gave them on faraway battlefields: They need to know that someone has their back.

Oh, by the way, . . . LOOK OUT!

2011-11-10T07:00:00.000-08:00

Image via WikipediaBritish government quietly admits oil could peak in five years

Tom Whipple, Falls Church News Press, VA - With little fanfare, a press release appeared last week on the website of the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security. The release said that during a meeting between Chris Huhne, the UK's Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, and representatives of ITPOES, an agreement had been reached that Her Majesty's Department for Energy and Climate will collaborate with ITPOES on a joint examination of concerns that global oil supply will begin to fall behind demand within as little as five years. This collaboration is seen by the British government as the first step in the development of a national peak oil contingency plan.

There are many implications buried in this seemingly innocuous announcement. First, American readers should note that the British government recognizes that energy policy and climate change are inextricably linked so that you cannot formulate policies for one without the other. The major step forward, however, is the official and semi-public recognition by a major government that global oil supplies will fall behind demand in as little as five years. After years of official denial this is indeed a breakthrough worthy of note.

Gone is the rhetoric about the billions of barrels of oil remaining that will last for so many decades that nobody alive today needs to worry. Official recognition has been given to the concept that the remaining oil will be so expensive to extract or will be locked into the earth by intractable political disputes, so that it simply will not be available in the unlimited quantities or at the prices we have known for the last 100 years. Also implicit in the announcement is that ever-rising real energy costs will destabilize nearly all of the world's economies and that economic growth in the form we have come to know it will no longer be possible. . .

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