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Call to Action: Protect Youth Privacy It is no news that privacy rights are under attack. It is no surprise, then, that youth, too, are the target. High schools must release the names, phone numbers and addresses of all 11th and 12th grade males and females to military recruiters under a provision in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Under the Solomon Amendments community colleges and universities must release name, address, phone number, major, previous schools attended, and for athletes, height and weight. You can do something about this violation of student privacy. First, students can opt out of their private information being released by completing a form at their school instructing the school not to release information to military recruiters. But do this soon, very soon. High school students should do this right now as some school districts release this information within two weeks of fall registration; college students should do this when they begin fall classes. Military recruiters request this information from schools soon after fall registration. Schools release the information within the couple of weeks it takes them to prepare to respond. Secondly, if Congress were to pass HR 551, this violation of privacy for high school students would end because high schools would only have to release information on those students who specifically "opt in" to the release of private information. Our representative, Peter DeFazio, has signed on as a sponsor of this bill, but we citizens need to let Congress know our support for ending this privacy invasion. Wondering why you or your child are still getting mailings and phone calls from military recruiters even though you have opted out at your school? One of the many other ways recruiters get names just became public last May. The Department of Defense has contracted, since 2002, with a private marketing firm, BeNow, to run a data base on all 16 to 26 year old males and females. BeNow collects new pieces of data daily and sends updated data to the Pentagon monthly. This database is far more insidious than what local military recruiters get from schools. More data is collected, including name, address, e-mail address, birthdate, phone number, cell phone number, ethnicity, GPA, field of academic study, if males have registered with Selective Service. Initially, they collected Social Security numbers, but because of the outcries of protest, they may have stopped. One can opt out of the release on one's data to military recruiters by writing JAMRS, attention opt out, 4040 No Fairfax Drive, Arlington, VA 22203. Ask to "opt out," but be aware that this only suppresses the release of data to military recruiters. It does not stop data from being collected and stored. The stated reason for this data base is to help military recruiters do their work. It is easy to wonder what else such a database might be used for. Here are two: to track down males who have not registered with Selective Service, or track down youth who are evading a military draft, if Congress should authorize a return of the draft. Please join the growing national uproar about this violation of American youth privacy. Complain to members of Congress; urge the ending of collecting data on our youth and the destruction of the existing data base. Talk to your friends and neighbors to ask them to act now.
Carol Van Houten, Eugene
Carol Van Houten is co-coordinator of the Committee for Countering Military Recruitment, which is a joint project of Community Alliance of Lane County (CALC) and Eugene Peaceworks.
HOW? PRIORITIES Kurt Yeiter (8/25) nicely outlines the conundrums of mixed-use centers (MUC) and frames the question: Can we grow AND improve? Residents ponder workable alternatives to coffer-draining sprawl on farm and forest lands. Oregon has a strong heritage of public access beaches, enacting the Willamette River Greenway, modeling a bottle deposit-for-return and land use laws that protect the commonwealth — a pioneering vision lacking in much contemporary planning. Skeptics point to the city's unintended outcomes at the Royal Node (sprawl on a greenfield at the edge of the Urban Growth Boundary) and the Chase Gardens Node (neighbors got the density and accompanying car traffic, but didn't get the services and transit options). Optimists will point towards the city's refined approach currently applied to Walnut Node/MUC (resident and business blocks viewed through different lenses) and Chambers MUC (where the grassroots group Chambers Area Families for Healthy Neighborhoods has reinvigorated caring, thoughtful public involvement) as examples of MUC progress. Like Oregon's visionary planning pioneers, how do we plan for outcomes not fully realized until our grandkids are grown? Start with priorities: Make our parks safe. Create a scale and tenor of new development in harmony with existing neighborhoods. Target density in proportion to neighborhood character. Provide business incentives and siting in accordance with on-the-ground transportation options (bike, pedestrian, mass transit) that make a MUC a live, safe, and a desirable place to be. Rasor Park MUC is up next for planning. Can the Greenway be respected by new development (like the McMenamin's grill near Autzen) that might face the Willamette along River Road, making the bike path safer and a destination spot for transportation of all kinds? Could Rasor MUC host hospital-support services when Triad considers siting a new hospital at 2nd and Chambers in Eugene? Yeiter challenges our thinking with his questions, while inviting residents and businesses to get involved with designing the answers. A Neighborhood Initiative is a current City Council priority goal. Grassroots involvement at the neighborhood level is key to determining the shape of our community in the years to come. Rob Handy, Eugene
NAME GAME Now that EW has taken it upon itself to name things, why don't you try for some consistency? Last week (8/25) the property you now claim is "known as" the "East Fork Amazon Headwater Forest" was the "Nectar Way Forest," even though I've attended more than a dozen meetings at which the property was discussed and never heard the nomenclature before. How romantic that name, the Nectar Way Forest! I fear the "East Fork Amazon Headwater Forest" is not nearly so lovely or compelling. Nor have I ever heard of it, either. Perhaps the property is not actually known as that by anyone other than your so-called "reporters," but it will help in the future when you report breathlessly on the evil "destruction by development" of the "East Fork Amazon Headwater Forest."
Kim Young, Eugene
EDITOR'S NOTE: The property has been known by several different names, but neighborhood activists have just recently begun calling it the East Fork Amazon Headwater Forest.
TAX THE RICH? In the absence of an investigative reporter in any of Eugene's daily media, Alan Pittman fills the gap in impressive fashion for the EW. While the rich and deluded may laugh at his proposal for a county income tax (news story, 9/1), it is a logical and just answer to the area's serious financial problems. His concept is well-researched and documented, going well beyond an idea for the city of Eugene I broached more than a year ago on local radio. Alan suggests a county income tax for returns in excess of $100,000, with a comparable corporate income tax. Mine is more stringent, but affects fewer people. No matter how skewered the contrast between massive holdings of the wealthy and absence of them among the great majority, taxes can't redistribute the wealth. But a tax can be a start. I propose one of 10 percent on all earnings between $500,000 and $1 million. Your neighbor and mine may not rake it in at that level, but a surprising number in Eugene do. For everything some bring in above $1 million annually, the tax would be 20 percent. Now, if there are 100 bringing in between half and a full $1 million, averaging perhaps $250,000 for each, that amounts to $25 million taxed at the 10 percent rate, or $2.5 million. Let's assume there are 10 who bring in more than $1 million to an average of a taxable additional $200,000 for each. That would produce another $400,000 in taxes — a boost for city services of $2.9 million. It would not be felt by those with gross wealth, who would aid vital community services by giving with a smile. George Beres, Eugene
THE BROADER ISSUE Recent criticism of the UO's School of Journalism & Communications does not go far enough. George Beres (8/18 Viewpoint) is on target when he identifies the very name of the educational program as symbolic of the crisis. What, precisely, is meant by "communications": deep linguistic or manipulative? And just what is "public relations"? Beres says PR is "mixing facts with fiction," that is, lying. I disagree. At its best, PR works to cultivate an understanding of and goodwill toward a person, firm or institution. Yet, in On Bullshit (2005), Princeton University moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt writes, "advertising and public relations … are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept." It's insufficient for former UO Journalism School Dean Arnold Ismach to say other journalism schools combine with advertising and public relations schools. Neither Beres nor UO administrators grasp a broader issue: economic interests colonizing and steering all other institutions — even universities. Instead of universities, op-ed pages, coffee houses and other forums where a free exchange of ideas and opinions form, corporate and government imperatives control the direction in which our society goes. Means — money and power — become ends. The market economy and administrative state impose an ethos of instrumental rationality — knowledge for wealth and power — on educational and other institutions: Truth is not good in the deepest sense, values are not what is in fact valuable, rationality is merely instrumental, being human and the natural environment have no intrinsic value, what it means to be human has no higher or shared purposes, only individual purposes. In such atmosphere, there is no reason the UO — let alone the journalism school — should continue to have loyalty and consensus from within, respect among citizens and freedom from tight corporate and state control. Efficiency management for externally imposed objectives would be its rational role. Sam Porter, Eugene
BOTTOM LINE That the Bush administration would turn down more than 1,500 doctors from a country that was offering their services for free is one of the most glaring evidences of politics over humanity that I have ever witnessed. The neocons who refuse to abandon ship even at this point (and their pitbulls like Bill "They Chose To Stay There" O'Reilly) are desperately scrambling to shift the blame for the KKKatastrophe onto Louisiana's state and local officials. What should be made mention of here is that not only was the federal government, at the very least, equally as culpable in the fiasco, they went one step further: They actually made efforts to obstruct relief, and that is the bottom line, as far as any subsequent investigation is concerned. "We don't need that water." "We don't need that gasoline." "We don't need those doctors." I think that Rove, Wolfowitz, Pearl, and all of their other New American Century cohorts should be rounded up and independently interrogated, live, before a nation of their peers. Then everyone will start to get an approximation of exactly who this "we" is. Scott Michael Perey, Eugene
COLLISION AHEAD Regarding "Gouging at the Pumps" (9/9), doesn't anybody remember anything from 1972-73? We had a lying, scheming lame duck Republican president who was owned by the oil industry. There had been consolidation within the industry so that seven companies controlled the lion's share of the market There was political instability in the Middle East (when isn't there?). A month after Nixon took office — and well before the so-called "Arab embargo" that really wasn't — we were "running out of gas" and prices were shooting up. When the oil industry goes on a gouging spree, always based on some excuse it tries to sell as legitimate, it starts the following chain of events: Angry congressmen publicly rail against the industry — but do nothing. It sounds good though Congress holds hearings and conducts investigations — which conclude nothing and result in nothing State attorneys general blast the oil industry and conduct investigations. They even file lawsuits sometimes. At least these guys want to do something, but are hopelessly outgunned. The lame duck Republican president, who is usually (but not always) in office when these things happen, not only does nothing but says nothing. The industry that owns him knows he will say nothing and do nothing. That's why they invested a fortune to get him re-elected. And if he has a VP who is also owned by the industry, so much the better. The public gets gouged. If it were simply a matter of increasing cost being passed along, oil industry profits would not be skyrocketing. But regardless of the obvious gouging going on now, New Orleans has given us a rare glimpse into the future when our exploding population finally collides head-on with finite resources. That day is coming sooner rather than later. But as long as we can still plop into the easy chair, crack a cold one and watch our favorite programs, life is good! Jerry Ritter , Rural Springfield
RENTAL RACKET We need to reform our landlord-tenant laws in Eugene, or at least enforce the ones we already have. Three companies control a high percentage of the university-area rental market: Bell, Jennings, and von Klein. With students comprising most of their lessees, they have cornered the market and have been allowed to run what amounts to an unchecked racket. Scams like non-refundable pet deposits (von Klein charged me $200), non-refundable carpet and drape fees ($100, even for units with only hardwoods and blinds like mine), and cleaning fees assessed after tenants evacuate immaculate units ($20/hour) need to stop. A tenant's job is to pay rent on time and to keep her unit in good condition; a landlord's job is to maintain the unit. Maintenance includes cleaning the carpets every once in a while and making sure the unit is move-in ready after a tenant leaves. Tenants should not be liable for these — otherwise they may as well buy their own places and be their own landlords — which may not be a bad idea. Student cooperative, anyone? Maybe with fewer students clamoring down their doors, management companies will have no choice but to start providing honest service at legitimate prices. Danielle Zeghbib, UO grad student
THE NEW REALITY Over the past five years, under the tenure of Bush II, life in the U.S. has taken on more and more of a somnabulistic quality. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the writer whose ground-breaking magic-realism novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, pre-saged our deepening dilemma. You go to sleep and wake up to a new reality, where Katrina has displaced Iraq in the headlines and where we are now faced with the dismal prospect of John Roberts being the chief justice of the Supreme Court for the next 30 years. As if magically, thanks to the Goebbels-like deftness of Karl Rove and the other apocalyptic horsemen, Rumsfeld, Chaney and Bush, our attention is continually misdirected so we never see the central point: Our government is in the hands of a fanatical amoral cabal whose ruthlessness knows few limits. We have drifted far from the relative prosperity of huge surpluses five years ago to a multi-trillion dollar debt. The rich got tax breaks and the poor got a war, with all the bills dumped on the next generations, our children and theirs. Whatever it will take for the people to wake up and take back our country, it ain't happening yet. What will break this spell we're under? That's left for we, the people, to come up with, and soon. Much is at stake and the time is late. Paul Prensky, Eugene
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