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Slant: Short opinion pieces and rumor-chasing notes News: News: News: Happening Person: Joanie Cypress SORENSON RESPONDS Gov. Ted Kulongoski last week announced his intention to seek reelection in 2006 and says he will run on his record of accomplishments. But his only announced opponent in the May Democratic primary says the governor is simply taking credit for the Republican agenda, and even borrowing Republican propaganda.
"This governor is running on his record, and I'm running against his record," says Lane County Commissioner Pete Sorenson. "He has been a disappointment. His leadership is nonexistent. The Democrats of Oregon deserve a choice." Sorenson filed for the gubernatorial race back in January and says he's looking forward to a lively primary campaign. But he's irked that the governor's campaign has so far ignored his requests for a debate at the Oregon Summit in October. He says the governor has "flip-flopped" on whether he will run, and his indecision "serves as a clear reminder to Oregonians of this governor's flawed idea of leader-ship." Kulongoski is claiming leadership in a string of recent victories. His list of "legislative highlights" includes expanding funding for pre-kindergarten by 3.5 percent, increasing funding for K-12 schools by 8 percent, increasing opportunity grants by 71 percent, securing $38 million for community college bricks and mortar, $410 million for university construction and maintenance, $7 million for nanotechnology research, expansion of industrial lands, protecting watersheds and salmon, combating global warming, updating Oregon's land-use system, fighting meth, improving mental health systems, etc. But Sorenson says the governor's accomplishments are minimal concessions and Oregon continues to slip "further and further behind" in key areas of the environment, economy and tax equity. "The governor may be putting a Band-Aid on a problem or two," says Sorenson, "but the bottom line is there's such a gulf, such a chasm, between what we need to be doing and what he's saying. Basically, he's taking credit for the Republican Legislature, and he's spinning it almost exactly the same way they are. We balanced the budget and we didn't raise taxes at all." Sorenson says Kulongoski has shown no leadership on tax reform. "Two-thirds of the largest corporations doing business in the state paid no income taxes. The remaining one-third paid 5 percent of the income taxes, and the other 95 percent was paid by individuals and small businesses." "We are now dead last, number 50, of the states in corporate income tax as a percentage of our state budget," he says. A new Riley Research poll shows support for Sorenson at only 2 percent. Sorenson says he's a loyal Democrat and has pledged to support the party's choice, "even if it's not me." More on Sorenson's campaign can be found at www.petesorenson.comand more on Kulongoski's campaign can be found soon at www.kulongoskiforgovernor.com — Ted Taylor
(LITTLE) BODY BILLBOARD EBay's not just for selling digital geek gear and autographed posters of Kevin Bacon anymore. Oh no. The online auction site has moved on, and now its sellers hawk Costa Rican real estate, cemetery plots, dark magic revenge spells — and advertising space on children.
Danielle, a third-grader who attends a public elementary school in Eugene, is auctioning off ad space on her backpack, school supplies and clothing for the entire school year. The little girl is pictured grinning on her eBay auction site, long brown hair cascading down one shoulder and a backpack slung over the other, with "YOUR AD HERE" written on the strap. "You are bidding on a rare ad space opportunity on a GORGEOUS, very popular, outgoing and active 8-year-old," the auction reads. "Every time Danielle gets on the school bus, walks down the hall, your company name will be seen EVERYWHERE!" Danielle's mom, Tamina, hopes that the auction will bring in at least $1,300 so that Danielle can be a cheerleader next year. The family can't afford to pay for another sport because they are upgrading their house. "I just want her to learn the value of earning money for something she wants to do," Tamina says. Danielle's auction is the kiddie-est incarnation of a new trend in advertising: body billboards. At first it was just a trickle — a pregnant woman auctioning space on her belly, a student offering up his forehead. But the movement picked up steam in May when New Jersey college student Courtney Van Dunk posted a bikini-clad photo of herself on eBay and auctioned off one month of ad space on her body. The auction drew widespread media attention, and a wine retailer won the bid for $11,300. Three months later it seems that Van Dunk is still raking it in, with her own website and several new commissions. According to Danielle's auction, the little girl was inspired by the big girl. "[Danielle] is a HUGE Courtney Van Dunk fan (as you can see, she even resembles a young Courtney)," the auction reads. Danielle plans to donate 10 percent of her winning bid to the charity of the bidder's choice, just like Van Dunk did. Is it appropriate to compare a third-grader raising money for cheerleading to a busty young woman selling her sex appeal? Tamina seems flustered by the very notion. "I just like [Van Dunk's] goal of trying to earn money for college," she says. "I know there are girls out there who do questionable things, and I don't want things like that to be associated with my daughter's auction. Of course we wouldn't endorse anything that's questionable for her age group. "We're not selling her," she adds. The auction starts at $999 and will run from Aug. 17-27. It has drawn more than 45,000 hits, but as of Aug. 22, there were no bidders. — Kera Abraham
FROGGIE FOUND IN NECTAR WAY The fight to save a 40-acre Eugene forest from development took a hop forward Aug. 17, when state biologist Jeff Ziller confirmed that animals photographed on the property were a red-legged frog and a pileated woodpecker, both sensitive species in Oregon. The red-legged frog is also a federally listed species of concern, endangered in California and Canada.
The property, now known as the East Fork Amazon Headwater Forest, sits between Nectar Way and Dillard Road in southeast Eugene. The city lost an opportunity to buy it in 2004, when it capped its offer to DDA Oregonia Local Manager Munir Katul at $300,000. Developer Joe Green then offered $325,000, but the city wouldn't go higher. "I would have sold it to the city for $326,000!" Katul says. Neighbors and land use activists quickly galvanized an effort to save the forest from development. The city followed suit, offering first to buy the property for $430,000 and then to re-negotiate a purchase price, but Green rebuffed their efforts (see news brief, EW 8/18). The city still has some wiggle room as Green pushes forth with his development plans. The upcoming Goal 5 inventory of natural resources may restrict the developer's options, and the discovery of two sensitive animals on the property strengthens the case for preserving it. City Councilor Betty Taylor suggested in an e-mail to City Manager Dennis Taylor that the city can deny Green's development permits or use its power of eminent domain, the government's right to appropriate private property for the public good. — Kera Abraham
QUOTABLE "Since Bush became president, the largest five oil companies operating in the U.S.— ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, ConocoPhillips, BP and Shell — have enjoyed profits of $254 billion, with ExxonMobil leading the way with profits of $89 billion. Clearly, there is a direct correlation between record prices paid by consumers and record profits enjoyed by oil companies. For example, the profit margin for U.S. oil refiners has shot up 79 percent from 1999 (the year Exxon and Mobil merged) to 2004. But rather than hold these price-gougers responsible, the energy bill signed by Bush this month gives $6 billion in tax breaks and subsidies to oil companies." — Wenonah Hauter, director of Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program (www.energyactivist.org)
Desperate
Times The U.S.-led war in Iraq is looking bleak. The Iraqi people are increasingly unhappy about the occupying American presence, and a majority of them now feel that things were better under Saddam. Kids who see their houses bombed, their parents disappear or their siblings die of cancer from depleted uranium are learning to hate America. Muslim extremists are pouring into the country to join the insurgency, and these guerilla fighters with hearts ablaze are killing American soldiers daily. The U.S. troops, for their part, are hot and tired and unsure why they're there. They're coming home mentally disturbed, wounded, or in body bags.
The White House may not care, but peace activists in Eugene do. While George W. Bush refused to speak with grieving mother Cindy Sheehan, who camped outside his ranch in Crawford, Texas, to ask why her son Casey died in Iraq, hundreds of Sheehan's supporters in Eugene gathered for a vigil on the evening of Aug. 17. The crowd was surprisingly big and surprisingly hushed. Organizers counted 680 heads at the Federal Building, probably the largest crowd in recent years. Many of attendees were elderly; about a third were college-age or younger. They didn't chant, and they didn't shout into microphones. They did, however, hold candles and sing. It was low-key but lasted two hours. The Register-Guard did not cover the event. George Beres, a Eugene activist who attended the vigil, noticed a lot of his neighbors from the south Eugene hills, a wealthier part of the city. "To me, that gave a different dimension to this than many of the demonstrations in the past," he said. Lifelong civil rights activist Ruth Koenig was also there. "There wasn't too much organization, so I just started singing 'Give Peace a Chance,'" she said. Donating Blood Two days after the vigil, activists staged a smaller but more cutting action. A group of people stood silently outside the military recruiting offices in Santa Clara Square while Luisa Beal, a veterinary surgeon from Tacoma, Wash., made a one-inch vertical cut in her left wrist. Beal, dressed in white pants and a white shirt reading "WAKE UP!", pressed a synthetic fiber into the cut until it was soaked with blood. She carefully, neatly wrote "Bush Lied" in big letters on her white Ford pickup. Then she walked to the doors of the Army, Navy, Marine and Air Force recruiting offices and left a crimson handprint on each. She cleaned them up a few minutes later. The crowd of supporters and passers-by worried about her health, but Beal was fine. She bandaged her wrist, sipped some carrot juice and drove her pickup into downtown Eugene — and later back to Tacoma — to display her statement to the world. Beal waves off the idea that her bloody statement was extreme. "I didn't lose much blood," she said. "Maybe a quarter of a cup, less than when you donate blood. But I was donating blood, in a sense. People are insulated from what was going on in Iraq, and in a way, I wanted them to see it here. "A lot of people say, 'She's crazy.' And yeah, I'm mad. I'm mad as hell, and I want to disturb people. People are too complacent. Unless we know someone in the military or who has been arrested because of actions, the war is not in our consciousness." Asked how people responded to the bloody words on her truck, Beal replied, "The reaction has been shock and awe." Strike called at UO On campus, too, peace activists are raising the stakes. On Aug. 19, UO graduate student Brian Bogart (author of "America Programmed for War," EW 7/28, 8/4, 8/11) declared a strike in opposition to universities' role in the war industry, beginning Sept. 26. "I refuse to study inside the classroom of any school that sells itself to the war industry," Bogart wrote in a letter to President Bush, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Oregon Gov. Kulongoski, Association of American Universities President Nils Hasselmo and UO President Dave Frohnmayer. Bogart takes offense to the fact that more than 300 American universities receive funding from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to develop war technology. "It is abundantly clear that you believe America's top priority is profit from the business of war, not the general welfare of its people," he wrote. Bogart, the UO's first graduate student in the Peace Studies master's program, is launching IntelligentFuture.org, a website that challenges the growth of weapons research on campuses and develops peace education curricula. During the strike, Bogart plans to stand outside the university and speak against the partnerships between universities and the DoD. Hundreds of scholars sponsored Bogart's action, including historian Noam Chomsky, Global Exchange founder Medea Benjamin and several UO grad students. College-level teachers and students can sign the petition by e-mailing bdb92@hotmail.com
Change
in Gear First the old news: The U.S. is the most fossil-fuel-hungry nation in the world. We've got 5 percent of the world's people, but we belch out a quarter of the world's greenhouse gases, the primary contributors to global warming. While a majority of nations moves ahead to reduce emissions in accordance with the Kyoto Protocol, the U.S. government just continues to blow smoke.
After shunning Kyoto (the U.N. agreement to curb global warming, which Clinton signed in 1998 and Bush retracted in 2001), the White House announced a plan that amounts to asking termites infesting a wooden mansion to please chew a little slower. The Bush administration claims that it can reduce greenhouse gases 18 percent by 2012 through voluntary cutbacks, but the Pew Center on Global Climate Change estimates that the policy will actually result in a 12 percent increase in greenhouse gas emissions. On July 29, the U.S. Congress passed an energy bill, drafted in secret, that awards $8.4 billion in tax breaks to oil, natural gas, coal and nuclear power companies. Now the new news: While the Bush administration drags its oil-heavy feet, American states and cities are lunging ahead to reduce global warming, and Oregon and Eugene are parts of that movement. The most significant effort is the establishment of a West Coast "clean car corridor." In 2004, California enacted a law requiring cars and light trucks to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent, and toxic and smog-causing pollutants by 20 percent, by 2016. Last spring, the state of Washington passed a bill to adopt California's standards — but only on the condition that Oregon follows suit. The Alliance of Automobile Manufact-urers, an industry group representing most major automakers, shifted into high gear. Lobbyists leaned hard on Salem lawmakers to prevent Oregon from implementing the new standards, and initially, they succeeded. The Legislature passed a state budget that prohibited the Department of Environmental Quality from spending any money on adopting or enforcing stricter auto emission standards over the next two years. But Gov. Ted Kulongoski wouldn't have it. Getting Oregon in step with California's tailpipe rules was his baby. He caught the nation's attention when he told The New York Times that he didn't need legislative approval to enact the standards, and now he intends to follow through on his word. Spokeswoman Holly Armstrong said that the governor plans to line item veto the language in the state budget that prohibits the DEQ from pursuing the stricter standards, leaving Oregon free to align with efforts south and north of thestate border. Solidarity among states demanding cleaner vehicles will likely force domestic auto makers to churn out lower-emission cars despite the lack of direction from Washington, D.C. In recent years, Detroit auto makers have shunned the domestic cleaner-car market, leaving it to Japanese auto makers to produce hybrid electric and low-emission vehicles. A July EPA report shows that today's new domestic cars and trucks are slightly less fuel-efficient than they were in the late 1980s. But California alone controls more than 10 percent of Detroit's auto market. Add in the other states preparing to adopt Cali's standards — Washington, Oregon, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont and Maine — and the figure becomes nearly 33 percent. States aren't the only ones playing Clean Air Red Rover. Cities have a role to play, too, and Eugene's got its game face on. At the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Chicago in June, Eugene Mayor Kitty Piercy joined hundreds of other mayors in signing a resolution calling for cities to reduce greenhouse gases to 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, à la Kyoto. And at the Sundance Summit on Climate Protection in July, Piercy joined 45 other U.S. mayors in Salt Lake City to discuss the causes and potential solutions to global warming. Piercy came back to Eugene inspired. She noted that Eugene is already taking many steps toward energy conservation: shifting the city's fleet to biofuels and low-emission vehicles, changing street lights to low-energy LED bulbs, improving public transportation and offering incentives for energy-efficient buildings. She says that the city's Sustainable Business Initiative will provide a framework for local businesses to become both economically and environmentally smarter. But Piercy admits that there's much more work to do. "We could take some substantial leaps forward," she says. "The federal government is not taking the initiative that it needs to on this issue, and time is running out. We know it's in the best health interest of our world to be addressing this, but the truth is, it makes the most economic sense too. This is a great opportunity for Eugene to make a difference in the ways that we can."
Getting
Gas The surge in gas prices this year will suck an extra $32 million per year out of local wallets if prices remain high. That's about $137 for every adult and child in Eugene/Springfield, according to EW analysis of local gas price data and statistics on non-commercial vehicle use within the metro area. Locals consume about $127 million of fuel a year at today's prices, and that's up from $95 million at last year's prices. Gas prices are about a third higher today than a year ago, according to American Automobile Association surveys. Just since last month, they're up 8 percent. The $32 million sent to oil companies could take a bite out of the local economy. The lost money is about enough for 800 jobs paying $40,000 a year in salary and benefits.
The hike in gas prices hits low-wage car commuters the hardest. The average minimum-wage earner loses about 1 percent of his/her pay to the higher pump prices. Local Congressman Peter DeFazio has blamed oil corporations for gouging consumers, pointing out that ExxonMobil just reported its third largest profits in history. DeFazio has introduced legislation to impose a windfall profits tax on oil companies, impose profit caps, limit monopolistic mergers, and require minimum gas inventory levels to smooth price spikes. Oil companies have blamed rising prices on rising demand in China and Asia and other market factors for the dramatic price increases. But energy corporations used the same kind of "perfect storm" spin a few years ago with the West Coast electricity crisis. The spin was widely swallowed at the time, but later lawsuits revealed that market manipulation by the Enron corporation was to blame for soaring electricity prices. Of course, the easiest way for locals to reduce gas prices would be to use less gas. Just driving 10 percent less — by walking, biking, busing or carpooling a couple times a month — would save local wallets $13 million a year at current prices. Another option would be to drive cars that use less gas. Local cars average about 20 miles per gallon, according to Lane Council of Governments data. Increase that by 10 percent — with a smaller car or just by accelerating and driving more slowly — and local pocketbooks would save about $12 million a year. There's already national reports of SUV sales falling this year by 20 to 30 percent and used SUVs losing their resale value. Cutting driving or increasing mileage would save on pollution. Local cars spew about 143 tons of carbon dioxide every weekday. Driving less would also save taxes on ugly and expensive road projects that chew up land. The new I-5 interchange at the Gateway Mall will cost an estimated $150 million and the price of the proposed West Eugene Parkway is now at $170 million and rising. But the local area isn't heading toward common sense when it comes to gas consumption. PeaceHealth plans to move 2,000 jobs from downtown out to the edge of town for long commutes. Local transportation plans are clogged with a long list of sprawl-inducing freeway projects and predict that driving rates and gas mileage will remain about the same while public transit use will reach only 2.5 percent of trips by the year 2025. In the end people may have little choice about driving. The concept of peak oil has grown increasingly mainstream — even ExxonMobil now acknowledges that world oil extraction has peaked and will now decline. Some predict that shortages and high prices will mean the end of suburbia and the abandonment of shopping mall sprawl. Already, Wal-Mart has blamed a fall in profits on rising gas prices. Although the transition could be painful if it's abrupt, it may be good for the country. In Europe, gas prices are about double those in the U.S. and people drive far less. As a result, citizens enjoy more compact cities with far better transit service. With higher gas prices, European cities are often more walkable, healthy and livable, and less polluted, traffic-snarled and ugly than American cities with far cheaper gas. With the huge local and national investment in urban sprawl infrastructure, moving to a European model could be expensive. But in the long run, studies have shown that compact, transit-oriented cities are far more efficient in terms of saving time in traffic jams, extending expensive road, sewer, school, fire and other sprawling public infrastructure and services and, of course, in saving gas.
JOANIE CYPRESS
Nashville native Joanie Cypress first visited Oregon on a summer motorcycle trip with her high-school sweetheart Marv Cypress. "Life was simple, a backpack and a sleeping bag," she notes. Following their wedding the next year, the couple returned and lived for seven years in Five Rivers, 60 miles from Waldport. "I ground wheat berries and cooked on a wood stove," she recalls. After several years in Walport and Yachats with their two young children, they moved to Eugene in 1983. "I was over at Taylor's, starving for music," she recalls. "One of the women asked, 'Would you like to be a Radar Angel?'" And when the Radar Angels took first prize in the Eugene Celebration Parade that year, Cypress began a 20-year career with the street-theater troupe, singing and dancing at the Celebration, the Oregon Country Fair and other community events. "I love to perform," she says. Last fall, Cypress let her Southern roots show — her character Scarlett O'Slimera was selected as the 22nd Slug Queen. A year filled with royal appearances was capped by the Queen's Ball in April, a benefit event that brought in 1,000 pounds of food to benefit FOOD for Lane County. -BY PAUL NEEVEL |
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