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street roots
March 2, 2012
Safety net hangs in the balance at City Hall
T
Let's not waste charter
commission's potential
o much potential lay in the city’s latest charter
commission. And yet is seemed like almost nobody,
even the City Council, gave a hoot.
It’s not that a charter commission — under most
circumstances — would ever draw great intrigue or
excitement from the public, but what could have been with
this latest commission had such potential that the lost
opportunity seems even more tragic.
From the beginning, the commission had one hand tied
behind its back, and it emerged after months of meetings,
sometimes sparsely
attended, with little
more than the
The proposals debated
housekeeping
by they commission
suggestions to hand back
to City Council. Gone
were not arbitrarily
selected - they were all were the innovative
in response to very real ideas to create an
independent utility
problems that risk
commission, to revamp
becoming systemic in
problematic laws around
our community.
crowd control, to shift
oversight of — and
perhaps save — public
restrooms, and to infuse genuine independence into a
handicapped system for police accountability. Nearly
everyone with a dog in the fight has done their share of
finger pointing at who and what is to blame for the failure
- including at themselves.
Whatever.
The blame game is just another diversion from the
problems of our status quo; it’s a distraction, a red herring
to the fact that we don’t need a charter commission’s
stamp of approval to make these changes.
The proposals debated by they commission were not
arbitrarily selected - they were all in response to very real
problems that risk becoming systemic in our community.
S
F or m ore than a decade, people have called for authentic
police oversight and accountability and an end to the one
sided system we have now. We currently have a police
bureau under investigation by the U .S . Department of
Justice, and we have spent millions of dollars to
compensate the families of people wronged by officers
under our pay. In the face of all this, we have a police
accountability system so heavily weighted in favor of the
bureau that challenges are almost nonexistent. Despite
years of outcry, little has changed.
On the other issues, an independent utility commission
may still be the answer to depoliticize utility rates and
expenditures, along with ensuring that essential sewer and
water services remain affordable to low-income
households. It shouldn’t be abandoned.
Crowd control reform — to address the use of pepper
spray and horses to overpower people — is an issue on the
front lines of our civil rights. It demands a public airing.
And the imperative that public restrooms are just as much
a vital public service - for people of all incomes — as water
and sewers, calls for further consideration to shift their
oversight away from the Parks and Recreation Department,
which can’t seem to find the money to keep them open
this summer.
These were all good discussions on important ideas to
address ongoing problems. They shouldn’t be thrown out
with the bathwater. We chant and shout for “people
power,” so we had better be ready to step up and exercise
it. Let’s not let this opportunity get wasted again.
he City of Portland faces some big
hurdles in the upcoming budget cycle.
It’s projected that each bureau, along
with many one-time projects, could be at
risk due to a decline
in revenue brought on
by a shaky system and
a economic stagnation
JP |E S K
that just won’t go
away.
3y Israel Bayer
With the number of
people experiencing
homelessness and
poverty on the rise,
saving our safety net, along with maintaining
and creating more affordable housing,
couldn’t be more important. We all know
that people can’t be successful in our
community without the basics such as
shelter, education and jobs. We hear it over
and over from current public officials and
candidates at both a local and national level.
To the people actually affected and living on
the edge, it’s more than just a rhetorical
Israel Bayer is the
executive director o f
Street Roots. You can
reach him at israel@
streetroots.org
LETTER
A siloed Left stands no chance against an organized Right
BY PATRICK NOLEN AND ILSA
VAN DEN BROECK
“I f you know your enemy and know
yourself, you need not fear the result of a
hundred battles. ”
— The Art of War by Sun Tzu,
600 BC.
un Tzu was, of course,
originally referring to warfare
in ancient China. But to the
hundreds of thousands who have
more recently studied and applied
his principles, his observation holds
just as true in modern politics, and
in our efforts at organizing around
social justice issues.
Many right-of-center institutions
and advocates seem to have taken
Sun Tzu’s advice to heart.
Moreover, they may even be well on
the way to perfecting the
deployment of intelligence-gathering
tools and technologies in their
efforts to understand what they view
as their enemies. At the same time,
those of us who are left of center
seem almost to be afraid to
understand our opponents, lest the
effort involved in gaining that
understanding somehow
contaminate us.
The political right, both
conservatives and libertarians, have
an entire industry full of people who
are paid to think of ways to derail
the Left, to co-opt us and confuse
our messages, all the while
sharpening theirs. There are think
tanks that raise and spend millions
of dollars a year just to correctly
frame issues to make it harder for
S
us to get our points across. Our
efforts on the Left are far less
organized, more ad hoc and,
ultimately, cripplingly siloed.
When we on the Left gather
intelligence, we spend money in
narrow bands, and ask for specific
results, such as “How can we better
serve this group of our constituents
or that special interest group?”
When the Right gathers and uses
intelligence, they write a big check
with the instructions: “Make
something we can use across the
board.” Our intelligence-gathering is
generally so compartmentalized that
the results often do not get
disseminated outside the initial
group sponsors. When the Right
releases information, it is pushed
out far and wide, using every
channel available.
Just to emphasize our point, how
many of our readers have read
George Lakoff’s “Don’t Think of an
Elephant!”? How about
“Counterinsurgency Field Manual
3-24” ? We are betting that
conservative thinker Frank Luntz
has read both. We bet that Luntz
and his colleagues read a lot of
books by “Left-leaning” writers.
They know what we fail to recognize
for ourselves, which is that in order
for them to be most effective, not
only do they have to understand the
issues from their team’s point of
view, but also from our team’s as
well.
Two weeks ago, lisa was in a
conversation with our colleagues
Volunteers
Grant Writer Sarah Cloud
Accountant Heather Stadick
Reporters Amanda Waldroupe, Jake Thomas,
Street Roots
211 NW Davis St
Portland, OR 97209
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Devan Schwartz
Photographers Leah Nash, Ken Hawkins, Kristina
Wright
message - it’s a hard reality played out on
any number of fronts.
For years, Portland City Council and
Mayor Sam Adams have preserved the
safety net, choosing to make sure that many
of the basics surrounding housing are
preserved so that we can be smart and
effective citywide about tackling the issues
of poverty. This year, city hall has a real
opportunity to keep that momentum alive —
from supporting the foreclosure prevention
and homebuyer education to making sure
that the safety net stays in tact.
Striking a balance between what must be
funded to maintain a healthy city and
preserving the safety net is something that
we can’t take for granted, and becomes
tricky business in hard times. We’re looking
to our elected officials to make sure we stay
on the right path, and people have
opportunity in the City of Roses. Being
fiscally smart and having compassion is
something we can all get behind.
where it turned out that not one of
15 people present had even heard of
German general Helmuth von
Moltke, Not one understood how
“Mission Tactics” was important to
our movement. One of our
colleagues even asked derisively,
“How are some German generals
important to me?” They did not
know who Moltke was, or what that
phrase meant to our movement:
However, the Right appears to have
Street Roots publishes the Rose City Resource, a
comprehensive booklet of services for people
experiencing homelessness and poverty.
To inquire about getting an order of the Rose City
Resource for distribution, please write to
pdxrosecityresource@gmail.com. Resources are also
available online at www.rosecityresource.org.
their understanding of both.
At a similar gathering a couple of
weeks later, lisa was laughed at for
having compared the abortion issue,
and its relationship to what used to
be Southern Democrats, to the
German attack past the Maginot
line in 1940. She was even told.
“that metaphor does not work,
politics is not war!”
In the future, we need to learn
more from our mistakes. To be
effective, we need to learn to look at
how we have failed and see what we
can do differently. We also need to
learn to use our opponent’s tactics
and strategies when they prove
useful.
What separates us now from
greater success is our own worry
that we may offend someone, or
somehow be corrupted by an
understanding of how and why the
opposition does what it does. Our
opponents have not forgotten Sun
Tzu’s time-tested advice.
Neither must we.
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r u k t xi'i'tin
Christine Gadeholt Mary Pacios, Leo Rhodes, Jan
Bayer, Eliese Baker, Sue Zaiokar, Tave Drake,
Michael Moore, Malka Davis, Robert Britt, Una
Zakas
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