Last night, the City of Portland held budget hearings at Montgomery Park. Several hundred people attended; so many that testimony had to be limited to a minute. There was incredible energy in the room and impassioned testimony by community members highlighted the programs that will be severely impacted if cuts proceed as expected. One person in...
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This letter was delivered to ESCO Corporation as a part of March 18′s Tour of Portland’s Worst Polluters Ride – Tar Sands Edition: TO: Calvin Collins, Corporate Officers, and ESCO Corporation Employees RE: ESCO’s Legacy and Place in the Community DATE: March 18, 2013 ESCO, we’ve come to...
Read more →ESCO steel reported $849 million in global sales in 2010. This was enough to earn them lavish praise from local business journalist Richard Read, who suggests that companies like ESCO form an under-appreciated but decidedly manly backbone for Portland’s “weird” economy. One of ESCO’s plants is actually five blocks from Chapman elementary in Northwest...
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This week’s discussion was very lively and, in my humble opinion, excellent. Here’s the video: YouTube Ustream For next week, we are going to hold off on introducing new material in order to do some housekeeping and also to address readings we haven’t yet had an opportunity to fully embrace. Per this development, Elizabeth...
Read more →Colleagues, This week we continue our examination of the sacred with the following readings: Stuart Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred, preface and chp. 1 Alan Weisman, The World Without Us, chp. 5 Paul L Knox, Metroburbia, chp. 2 Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics, chps. 1, 5, and 22 In addition, we still have a homework assignment to come...
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Kari Chisholm at Blue Oregon already published some coal truth this week through his post on the global-danger-posed-by-versus-comparably-low-local-economic-benefits of Northwest coal exports (after taking into account economic sectors that would be negatively impacted by the effects of coal and externalities, I strongly doubt there would be any net local economic benefits), but there’s still a...
Read more →Friends and Colleagues, If you missed the 1/23 session of the Commons, the Public Domain, and the Sacred, fear not. You didn’t miss the actual course content and can still freely jump in with us next week. We mostly went over procedural issues and actually hope to design the course in a way that...
Read more →UPDATE: the first meeting will be at the Community Supported Everything space on Wednesday, January 23rd at 6:45 PM. CSE is located at 1626 NE Alberta St. in Portland. ————————————————————————- Initial Thoughts: the following is a rough proposal for a 16-20 week course I’m calling “The Commons, the Public Domain, and the Sacred.” Though the...
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