Since moving to Oregon in August 2008, I have had the extreme good fortune to spend my birthday celebrations with friends and family, mostly in pursuit of wine and food.
This year, Darby and I motored to Seattle early on the 4th. After a morning business meeting and a light lunch on Capitol Hill, we checked in to Hotel Vintage Park (one of three Kimpton properties in the city), before walking over to Seattle Art Museum during First Thursday proceedings. Soon thereafter, the Newmans swooped in to pick us up for the much anticipated birthday dinner in Ballard.
By the way, it is a real honor to travel to another great American city and enjoy a birthday dinner for eight.
When we got to The Walrus and the Carpenter, a tiny room for Seattle’s most popular oyster bar, we were told the wait would be two hours. Normally, that means one hour. On this night the hostess was a woman of her word. It took two hours and fifteen minutes to get seated. Thankfully, an accommodating bar up the historic Ballard street hosted us while we waited to dine on local edibles from the sea.
Writing about Seattle as a Portland resident is kind of like writing about your beautiful “Prom Queen” sister. You either come off as adoring, or bitter.
A year ago, at another fine dining establishment in San Francisco, Darby and I had a great time with three NorCal friends. Our friend Andy spoke about how “abundance mentality” is prevalent in California, while “scarcity mentality” tends to preside in Oregon. The conversation has stayed with me ever since.
Seattle clearly weighs in as an abundance heavyweight. It is an opulent city on seven hills. Part Minneapolis high design, another part San Francisco funky. I have heard mention of the “Seattle freeze,” but I do not encounter cold shoulders there. I find the people friendly and willing to engage in frank discussion, which of course, I appreciate immensely.
I suspect the very things that make Seattle attractive to me, are the things many Portlanders and Oregonians reject outright. As one good friend here told me last week, “Oregonians don’t want (that kind of) progress.” Right. And this is what makes Portland, Portland and Oregon, Oregon. Unlike Seattle and San Francisco, Portland is tucked away, 60 miles upriver from the coast and the world beyond. The city is also nestled in a valley and protected by a wall of western hills and Forest Park green space. To say Portlanders have a fortress mentality may be a bit extreme, but it is also true to some degree.
Of course, Portlanders and Oregonians do have something to protect. Few would argue otherwise. My interest here, in this geo-cultural exploration of three West Coast cites, is mostly about alignment and how we might reposition ourselves as a community. The “G” word, Growth, is seen as an impolite intrusion in Oregon — a reduction of green space and an increase in traffic, pollution and noise. Yet, growth simply is. There’s no way to stop it, and even with an urban growth boundary, there’s no way to maintain a psychic gate around this precious place. The question is how might Oregonians better align themselves with this planetary force?
Urban planners, economists, engineers and politicians have some good answers, but no one group of thinkers or doers has all the answers. The problem however is well documented. The median income for a Seattle family – $91,300 – is nearly half as much more than the family income in Portland of $63,400. To me, that’s a startling difference for two cites 167 miles apart from each other. Also, one in 20 Seattle homes is valued at more than $1 million. In Portland, the ratio is 1 in 100.
If we are to believe the management guru and best-selling author, Steven Covey, “abundance mentality” is something we can choose to consciously manage for personal gain. It stands to reason then, that the people of a city or state might also invite abundance into their lives for the betterment of the community. Too bad there’s no on-off switch to go from scarcity to abundance in a flash. Like most good things, it’s a process that takes commitment, a plan of action and time.
Politically speaking, last week was one for the history books. A black man with a funny name was voted to the highest office in the land for the second time, proving 2008 was no fluke.
And the right wing’s chief screw tightener lost his shit during a live “news” broadcast.
In case you missed it, Fox News called Ohio, and thus the election for The President. Karl Rove said not so fast, just like he did in 2000 for Bush. Except this time, he was way off, and the Fox anchors were forced to say so. But before they were willing to put this highly paid mouthpiece in his place, the producers asked Megyn Kelly to walk back to the war room, where the real data crunchers were pouring over the results.
Just the suggestion from Rove that Fox might be in error, led to a five minute fact-finding mission aired live on national TV. Rove had power, but he lost it on Tuesday. Even his right wing friends are turning on him. Brent Bozell, president of For America, said, “If I had 1/100th of Karl Rove’s money, I would have been more productive than he was.”
New York Times op-ed writer, Frank Bruni, reflects on the Rovian meltdown:
Of course arrogance, or at least self-assurance, is a consultant’s stock in trade. That’s what we buy when we buy advice: not just the content of it but the authority, even the grandiloquence, with which it’s delivered. We exchange the anxiety of autonomy for the comfort of following orders. And Rove gives great orders, rife with arcane historical references and reams of data.
Historically, the need for bluster and misdirection may have been there. But thankfully, the times they are a changin’. Rove’s game is from another time. Twelve and 8 years may seem like just a moment ago, but in terms of the digital dynamic and its impact on communications as a whole, and thus politics, it was eons ago.
Let’s marvel for a minute at what communications technology is doing to our culture. The Web is deeply democratic and thus totally revolutionary. People are empowered by the information they take in and share, and an empowered electorate is a massive disruption for old time pols and their advisors. As Romney learned in Ohio this fall, we live in a nation of fact-checkers now, and that makes it real tough to lie and get away with it.
Thomas Peterffy, 68, of Greenwhich, CT is the epitome of self-made man, a first generation American and one of the richest men in the world. He’s also a political advertiser.
According to Forbes, Peterffy was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1944 during a Russian bombing raid. He immigrated to the United States in 1965, and by 1977 purchased his own seat on the American Stock Exchange where he began trading options. In 1993 he launched the electronic brokerage firm, Interactive Brokers. The firm paid its first dividend to investors in December 2010, dolling out a whopping $1 billion.
Peterffy’s own wealth is reported to be $5.4 billion, making him the 189th wealthiest billionaire in the world. In other words, this is a man with little to be worried about. Yet he is worried. He’s worried that the Hungary of his youth and the America of our present are too similar — that we are a nation sliding into socialism.
Gyro/SF creative director, Steffan Postaer, thinks Peterffy’s ad is well done.
Yes, the music and imagery are pedantic. And yes, it’s pure propaganda. But the fact isn’t the facts: It’s the story. And the story is riveting. Whether Mr. Peterffy is right or wrong doesn’t matter. He believes he is right. And his argument is unwavering as it is stoic. When he infers that under President Obama “The rich will be poorer, but the poor will also be poorer” we are thunderstruck. I was anyway.
Personally, the only parallel I see between post-war Hungary and modern day America is the widespread use of propaganda. The desire for a prosperous America is pretty much universal, even radical independents like myself are for it. It’s how we achieve that prosperity and how we reinvest it, that calls for debate and more delicate solutions.
The fear of a Socialist America is an impure fabrication. To what end, I can’t quite conceive. Also, I question the idea that socialism is bad, or that it robs people of ingenuity or an incentive to achieve great things. Modern socialism — the kind found have in Sweden, for instance — means we’re all in this together, and we’re going to provide for one another. That isn’t wrong, it’s right.
It’s also right to point out that Mitt Romney has a great safety net firmly in place. It’s called The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Peterffy wants to see Romney in the White House because it quells his childhood fears of a socialist state. To each his. Oh but that’s not what Romney, the good Mormon, believes. No, he wants to impose his will, like the Bishop/CEO/Governor that he is.
Help me out here…the insanely rich guy from Hungary wants the super rich guy from Michigan for President, in order to promote capitalism and it virtues, but the super rich guy for President is really a bit of a totalitarian jerk?
It’s political season again and the airwaves are full of polluted words. Presidential campaigning is a travesty, an official lie. And mainstream media is a diversion, at best. It’s enough to drive a person to drink. Thankfully, there are voices crying in the wilderness. Voices like Arun Gupta’s.
Gupta, a journalist and activist, spoke in Seattle, WA on August 23, 2012. The transcript of his talk, plus the audio file are available for purchase from AlternativeRadio.org. I plopped down my $3 to download the transcript after hearing a portion of Gupta’s talk on KBOO Community Radio, earlier this week.
As a radical independent, I enjoy hearing people eloquently make a case against the corporate, two party Babylon system. Gupta does it well. Let’s listen in…
The Democrats are a firmly right-wing party while the Republicans are a fanatical right-wing party. What we’ve had over the last 30 years or so is the Democrats take the right-wing radicalism and turn it into bipartisan consensus. So the next iteration of the right becomes more and more extreme. We do know, if the right does get into power, if Romney is elected, they will nominate extreme Supreme Court justices, they will viciously attack organized labor beyond what the Obama administration is doing, and they will, of course, viciously attack reproductive rights and access to birth control. So there is an argument to be made, yes, you should just go in the voting booth. But on a whole host of other issues it’s difficult to say who is going to be worse.
Both parties are going to pursue austerity policies on Social Security and Medicare, neither party will address global warming, or, in fact, they will address it—they will make it worse. It’s “Drill, baby, drill.” Those have been Obama’s policies for the last four years. The wars will continue, the Islamophobia will continue, the targeted assassinations will continue, the police and prison industrial complex will continue, the assault on civil liberties, spying on Americans, and on and on and on. We know that it really doesn’t make a difference, because liberals do not provide any sort of oppositional force when the Democrats are in power.
Gupta admits there is “an argument to be made” for voting for the least offensive of the two corporate candidates. It’s an argument I am working over in my head, just in time for our Oregon ballots to arrive via snail mail. I have a history of voting for third party candidates for President, because I prefer to vote my heart. That’s my preference and my right, misguided as it sometimes seems. My problem this fall is I feel as disillusioned with “making a statement” when I vote — which is what voting third party largely is — as I do with voting for a Democrat. (more…)
It’s been 40 years since Nixon’s second successful bid for The White House.
It’s also been 40 years since the Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CREEP) sent a group of rubber-gloved thugs to break in to Democratic National Committee headquarters at The Watergate.
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, who won The Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for their coverage of the break-in and political conspiracy, have a new piece in the Post that paints Nixon in severely dark tones.
In a tape from the Oval Office on Feb. 22, 1971, Nixon said, “In the short run, it would be so much easier, wouldn’t it, to run this war in a dictatorial way, kill all the reporters and carry on the war.”
“The press is your enemy,” Nixon explained five days later in a meeting with Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to another tape. “Enemies. Understand that? . . . Now, never act that way . . . give them a drink, you know, treat them nice, you just love it, you’re trying to be helpful. But don’t help the bastards. Ever. Because they’re trying to stick the knife right in our groin.”
This reflective piece from Woodward and Bernstein comes, for me, on the heels of my first reading of The Boys On The Bus by Rolling Stone reporter Timothy Crouse. His behind-the-scenes look at the media and the coverage provided during the 1972 Presidential campaign is a critical read. While it too is 40 years old, the narrative is far from dated.
Crouse argues that Nixon and his team played the press like a violin during the campaign, feeding them an official story of the day and running them here and there, all the while keeping Nixon almost totally out of sight. The team included H.R. Halderman, Nixon’s White House Cheif of Staff, who worked at J. Walter Thompson in NYC and LA for 20 years before joining the White House team. Halderman also brought Ron Ziegler, Nixon’s White House Press Secretary, with him from JWT.
Not surprisingly, Halderman and Ziegler had a well defined media and brand strategy, and they executed it perfectly. Consider that The Watergate break-in happened on June 17, nearly five months ahead of the election, and it had no impact whatsoever on the election. In fact, Nixon won a majority vote in 49 states, including McGovern’s home state of South Dakota.
I love when an environmental issue, or any issue, helps to melt the artificial construct of political lines between people and communities come together to face off against corporate agressors.
Thankfully, that’s exactly what’s going on in Nebraska, Texas and other communities that would be directly impacted by the proposed Keystone Pipeline.
Property-rights conservatives, water supply activists and landowners are banding together along the pipeline’s proposed route through Texas, challenging plans to claim land for the proposed pipeline that will run from Canada’s oil sands to Texas’ Gulf Coast.
“Crippling someone’s water supply knows no party line,” said Rita Beving, consultant to the bipartisan East Texas Sub-Regional Planning Commission. A Republican mayor and a Democratic city secretary lead the group’s fight against the pipeline.
In other words, cowboys ain’t taking any of TransCanada’s shit. Or Washington’s, for that matter.
“Lifelong Republicans are standing shoulder-to-shoulder with urban tree-huggers,” Malinda Frevert, a spokeswoman for BOLD Nebraska, said of that effort.
For a Gentile, Scott Carrier knows a lot about Mormons, having lived most of his 50-plus years in Salt Lake City. Carrier’s new book is titled Prisoner of Zion, which interestingly is something he’s perfectly willing (and happy) to be. The place does have a magnetic pull, no question about it.
His book of stories weaves tales of home with tales from Carrier’s adventures in war torn countries on the other side of the world. Both carry weight, but I particularly like his take on Utah and Mormon culture. I also think Carrier’s timing is good, as the closer Mitt Romney gets to the White House, the more people will want to know about the Latter Day Saints.
In “Inside the Momosphere” Carrier describes how when he was eight years old, his LDS friends told him about being baptized in the Mormon temple, and what it meant.
They told me they’d been baptized in the temple and now they were going to a different heaven than I was, unless I converted. They said there are three levels of heaven and they were going to the highest one, the Celestial Kingdom, but the best I could hope for was the second level, the Terrestrial Kingdom, which isn’t a bad place, just not the best place.
To reach the Celestial Kingdom is to become god-like yourself. So, you can see why Mormons have had, and continue to have, an adversarial relationship with people of other faiths. No one wants to be told their version of heaven, which they’re presently making great strides to reach, is second class.
And class is a campaign issue this year. Thanks to the wealth he has amassed, Romney’s life on earth is a bit finer than most Americans will ever know. But it doesn’t stop there, it’s not just about money. Because Romney is by all accounts, “a good Mormon,” he’s also headed for a better afterlife, one where he will achieve godliness, and I have to think that’s a problem, politically speaking.
—
At the end of the book, in a piece called, “Najibullah in America,” Carrier endeavors to describe the American-centric world view held by many Mormon students in his classes at Utah Valley University in Orem. For these students, there simply is no separation between church and state. No need.
Jesus Christ created the United States of America by raising up our founding fathers and guiding their hand in writing the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Once protections for religious freedom were in place, Jesus directed Joseph Smith to found an entirely new religion, restoring the true gospel, and begin building the Kingdom of God on Earth in preparation for His Second Coming.
That’s right, the pilgrims were just laying the groundwork for the intergalactic super show to be orchestrated, like a radio program, from Temple Square. But more importantly, America is for Jesus. Literally. When He comes back, He’s coming back to the America. So, naturally we must protect America at all costs from infidels, and keep funding the military at insane levels, which is a plank in the Romney campaign.
I know a lot of Jack Mormons, people who’ve thrown off the faith. I also know some good Mormons. They’re good people and I don’t want to see the kind of misunderstandings that might occur in this election season around religion. For instance, some conservative Christians, notably Southern Baptists, won’t admit the Mormons into the Christian brotherhood. Yet, Mormons are “busy building the Kingdom of God on Earth in preparation for His Second Coming.”
It may seem unfair to bring a man’s religion in to the campaign, but one’s ideas are often shaped by one’s faith. Therefore, it’s not just fair game, it is an essential part of considering where the person is coming from. Romney was a Mormon missionary in France. He knocked on doors in a Catholic nation that loves wine and sex. He knows what rejection looks like, which is good.
He also believes he’s living a righteous life, but it’s hard to know for sure if he is or isn’t. Just this morning he said he really doesn’t care all that much about the poor. He meant he wants to appeal to the middle class, but it didn’t come out that way. It came out like he’s callous and out of touch. The thing I wonder about is if it’s not all his fault, because a sense of superiority appears to be baked right into his cosmology.
[UPDATE] Reciting verses from The Bible this morning, President Obama responded to Romney’s comments about the poor, without having to call out Romney by name. He’s also clearly saying to Romney’s team and to the nation that he, President Obama, will be the good Christian in this race, thank you very much.
Portland Mayor Sam Adams is not running for re-election, but he is working hard to do the job Portlanders hired him to do.
For one, Adams wants Portland to be “the scrappiest small global city in the United States.” That means exports, among other things. “Even without a coherent regional strategy or partnership, Greater Portland ranks second in the nation in export value as a percentage of our economy,” says Adams.
Here’s a look at one Portland-based company actively participating in the global economy:
Portland Development Commission has loads of video segments on YouTube that help to paint the city’s business environment in a positive light.
Here’s one that showcases the city’s attractiveness to startups:
For more information on the progress being made on several important fronts, see these Progress Reports from the Mayor’s office.
Lawyer and Democratic state Sen. Suzanne Bonamici is competing against Republican business consultant Rob Cornilles for Oregon’s 1st Congressional district seat (vacated by sex scandal-ridden David Wu).
This is what Bonamici and Cornilles look like on TV, which is where most 1st district citizens voting in the Jan. 31 special election will see them:
The 1st district is considered the economic engine of Oregon, according to KATU. It includes downtown Portland and suburban Washington County where Nike and Intel hold fort. The district which stretches to the Pacific Coast is also home to much of Oregon wine country.
She says, “Portland needs real people with real experience” in City Hall. Which means experience earned in business, not politics.
According to The Oregonian, if elected Brady would give her cellphone number to city workers so they could call her directly with problems. I like that “Call me and I will help” mentality.
Brady also said she’d work to accelerate the city’s business permitting process to encourage job creation and build an economic development team.
I don’t know much about Brady or the other candidates, but I do know Portland is a place with the potential to become an engine of 21st century commerce. Whoever can best harness the copious talent here is going to win — not just elections, but also hearts and minds.
