Yes to
Licensing, Registering Bicycles
Oregon should license and register
bicycles. . . . The Skanner supports the plan and here’s why. The bill
proposes a bicycle registration fee of just $54 every two years. That’s
affordable for almost everyone, and it only applies to adults. But with so many
bikes now on the roads, the fees will help fund badly needed bicycle projects.
Improving bikeways will ease congestion, reduce friction between cyclists and
drivers, and encourage cycling by making it easier and more efficient. Who can
argue with that? . . .
To read the rest of this story click here
'Piney
Ridge' Explores Race, Class, Injustice
“Piney Ridge,” an award-winning
play written by La’Chris Jordan and directed by Isiah Anderson, Jr., runs
through April 5, at the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center . . . After a
race riot tears apart a small Virginia town in 1910, the residents of Piney
Ridge are outraged when a young White girl from a sharecropping farm is
physically attacked. ‘Piney Ridge’ explores the rifts of race, class, and social
injustice. The Skanner spoke to Isaiah Anderson last month about the show, his
career, and the future of urban youth in the Pacific Northwest . . .
To read the rest of this story click here
Economy Encouraging Scammers New
initiatives protect consumers snared
by white collar criminals
As the real estate meltdown affects
more and more Portland-area
families, local agencies are working
to educate homeowners about
foreclosure and mortgage scams.
Consumer complaints about
moneylenders and collection agencies
have bubbled to the top in the
Oregon Department of Justice Top 10
Consumer Complaint Annual Report for
2009.
The list is a compilation of the
number of written complaints the
department receives in the preceding
year. This year the top four are, in
order: telecommunications companies,
financial institutions, consumer
scams and collection agencies.
In addition, 132 Oregonians reported
losing a total of $1.2 million in
international money transfer scams
in 2008. . . .
To read the rest of this
story
www.skanner.com
NAACP Calls in Attorneys
Multiple lawsuits, civil rights
complaints filed against school
district
By Lisa Loving of The Skanner Jesse Hagopian, a teacher at Madison
Middle School commented last month
on the district’s decision to close
several Seattle schools at an
emergency meeting of the
Seattle-King County NAACP at Mount
Zion Baptist Church. Hundreds of complaints and
as many as fi! ve separ ate lawsuits
have been filed against the Seattle
School District over its plans to
save money by shuttering facilities.
Meanwhile, the District this week
announced its schedule of quarterly
meetings to take public input on its
“Excellence for All” education plan.
Officials said in a statement that
the hearings will involve
discussions about development of a
new Student Assignment Plan.
Phyllis Beaumonte, Seattle King
County NAACP education chair, said
this week that NACCP President James
Bible has also filed as many as 200
complaints with the U.S. Department
of Education Office of Civil Rights.
. . .
By Bernie Foster, Publisher of The
Skanner
This week, President Obama’s
economic stimulus plan passes from
the U.S. House to the Senate for
finalization. As it stands
currently, the bill will send an
$819 billion Valentine from the
federal government to the states.
Together Oregon and Washington are
expected to receive between $6 and
$7 billion in government spending
and more in tax cuts. The
government’s goal is to pump money
into the economy to create jobs,
ease the pain of the financial
collapse we are going through, and
restore confidence that business can
bounce back.
Will it work? The same tactic helped
during the Great Depression, when
thousands of people were put to work
on government-sponsored construction
projects.
Economists agree it is necessary,
but they can’t promise immediate
results.
The Northwest is feeling the pain
now: pain measured in soaring
unemployment, business bankruptcies,
home foreclosures! and fam ilies who
need help.
The federal money is targeted toward
a handful of programs including …
Ohio Rep. Marcy Kaptur Tells Foreclosed Homeowners to
Refuse Eviction
The longest-serving woman in
Congressional history, Ohio, Rep.
Marcy Kaptur is encouraging
homeowners facing foreclosures to
stay in their homes. On today’s
edition of Democracy Now with Amy
Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, she lays
out the legal rights of homeowners
facing eviction and suggests that
the banking industry and the Bush
Administration profited from the
home lending crisis.
Click
here or on the
picture to link to Amy Goodman’s
interview with Rep. Kaptur.
New Website
Exposes Ku Klux Klan
Northwest’s untold history unfolds
with photos, documents With a new historical
webpage, University of Washington
scholars are shining a bright light
on one of the darkest chapters of
Washington history – the days when
the Ku Klux Klan was a force in the
state.
It was a brief era when the Klan had
tens of thousands of members. KKK
rallies drew crowds estimated at
50,000, the Klan entered floats in
parades, there were Klan weddings
and Christmases and the Klan even
published its own newspaper, “The
Watcher in the Tower,” in Seattle.
Historians have created a webpage
packed with articles, rare
photographs and documents about Klan
activities in the state during the
1920s as part of the Seattle Civil
Rights and Labor History Project,
headed by James Gregory, University
of Washington professor of history,
and director of the Harry Bridges
Center for Labor.
The project came about when history
doctoral student Trevor Griffey
planned to teach a 2006 class on
local history of White
supremacy. Griffey thought many
people didn’t grasp why the civil
rights movement was needed in
Washington, a place with a
reputation of being liberal.
“We tend to associate images of
Klansmen burning crosses, wearing
white robes and holding public
rallies with the South,” Griffey
said. “But seeing some of the
images we found and learning the
stories of a secret society of White
supremacists in Washington state
shows that the Pacific Northwest
also has a history of racism that we
shouldn’t overlook …
To read the rest of this story go to
http://www.theskanner.com/index.php?action=artd&artid=7875
President Obama. Sounds different,
doesn’t it? Finally, after almost
two years of constant campaigning,
the most exciting election in living
memory is over. The Harvard educated
lawyer with roots in Kenya,
Missouri, Hawaii and Chicago
convinced American voters that he
and no other is the leader we need
today. To commemorate this historic
election, we’ve changed The
Skanner’s usual format. This week
we’re offering our readers a
photographic celebration of this
thrilling, hard-fought,
unpredictable campaign.
President-elect Obama ran the
strongest campaign. He did his
homework. He showed us he is tough,
smart and ready to lead. During the
rough ride along the road to the
White House, we learned that our new
president has incredible discipline,
bears pressure with grace, shows
unfailing good humor and inspires
the majority of Americans with
optimism about the future.
Now we have elected Barack Obama to
the highest position in the land, he
can propose changes to the tax
structure. He can move toward
bringing our troops home from Iraq.
President Obama can restore
America’s standing internationally
by ending our country’s
participation in torture, and
working with our allies to solve
international problems, such as
global warming. He can push Congress
to make sure every American has
health care coverage. We hope he
does all of this and more. Perhaps
one of the major problems he should
address is our flawed election
system. For our democracy to
continue to be the best in the
world, Americans — in predominantly
p! oor and minority districts
–should not have to wait six hours
or more to cast their ballots.
In fact, none of the problems facing
president-elect Obama will be easy
to solve. Powerful special interests
will oppose every change he wants to
make.
Perhaps you are thinking that your
job is done — at least for the next
four years. Wrong! The real work is
only just beginning. Positive,
substantial change will only happen
if we work to make it so.
Here’s what Obama can’t do for our
communities:
• Make job training and educational
opportunities available to all;
• Ensure all children receive a good
education;
• Turn off our TV sets, supervise
homework and send our young people
to college;
• Make our voices count in City Hall
and the state legislature;
• Promote and encourage development
of small businesses;
These are efforts that we must make
for ourselves by supporting,
honoring and working for the leaders
and the organizations that are
solving these problems, locally and
nationally.
As a community, as a nation, and as
part of the human race, we have
reached a critical point in our
history. The problems we face are
daunting: wars; terror threats; lack
of secure energy supplies; global
warming; rising poverty; the
national debt.
Thankfully, by electing Barack
Obama, we have chosen a path of hope
and optimism. We know that all those
problems can be solved, and we are
determined to solve them. But
choosing to hope and believe also
means choosing to work, serve,
volunteer and agitate for change. So
choose the issue that best fits your
personal agenda and let’s get to
work. Because, in the final
analysis, the people who must solve
these problems are not in faraway
Washington. They are here and they
are us. And the time to begin is
now.
Photographic Celebration of Election
View our four-page photographic
celebration of the election results:
www.theskanner.com
Feds Reject Most “Terrorism” Cases
Minor offenses take up bulk of expensive government
prosecutions By Helen Silvis of The
Skanner
After Sept. 11, the U.S.
government passed the Patriot Act
and created the Department of
Homeland Security, in an effort to
improve efforts to detect, prevent
and prosecute terrorism.
This week, documents released by two
Washington DC civil liberties
nonprofits, the Asian
Law Caucus and the
Electronic
Frontier Foundation
show the department has expanded its
authority, allowing border officials
to examine, copy and archive private
documents and files belonging to
travelers.
Administration officials say more
domestic intelligence gathering is
necessary to safeguard our national
security.
Meanwhile civil liberties groups
argue that the United States is
becoming a “surveillance state” with
few privacy protections, especially
for minorities.
How much safer are we? Since Sept.
11 no further attacks on U.S. soil
have succeeded. Some high profile
terrorist cases have sent plotters
to jail for long periods. Yet
figures from the University of
Syracuse TRAC program,
which studies government agencies,
show that federal prosecutors turn
down two out of every three cases
referred to them for terrorism.
According to the report, “For more
than one third of the declinations,
39 percent of them, the assistant
U.S. Attorneys said their negative
decisions were caused by a lack of
evidence of criminal intent, weak or
insufficient evidence or because no
federal offense was evident.&rdquo!
;
T he TRAC statistics show that of
the 1,391 people referred to
prosecutors for “international
terrorism” just 335 people were
prosecuted and 213 were convicted.
Furthermore, 80 people were not
convicted of crimes serious enough
to merit jail time and 91 of the 123
people who were sentenced to jail
received sentences of less than one
year. Eight people received
sentences of between five and 20
years in prison. Just six people
were sentenced to between 20 years
and life.
The typical sentence for people
prosecuted as “international
terrorists” was 28 days. The figures
are “very surprising….
Disaster Agency is a Disaster
Homeland
Security is rated worst-run federal
bureaucracy By Helen Silvis of The Skanner The federal agency responsible
for preparing the country to cope
with terrorist threats and natural
disasters, the Department of
Homeland Security, is one of the
least accountable and poorest
managed federal agencies.
That’s according to the
administration’s own ratings. The
2008 President’s Management Agenda
Scorecard, http://www.whitehouse.gov/results/agenda/FY08Q3-SCORECARD.pdf published
June 30, which measures the
efficiency of federal agencies,
found that on three out of five
performance measures the Department
of Homeland Security has “serious
flaws.” Only the U.S. Veterans
Administration was rated equally
poorly in three areas. The
Department of Defense was the only
other federal agency to receive the
lowest rating for its efforts to
improve performance. Rep. Peter DeFazio, the single
Oregonian in Congress assigned to a
Homeland Security Committee, said
the department is too large and
disparate to function well.
“Homeland Security has been
disastrous,” DeFazio told
the Skanner.
“It’s a $40 billion bureaucracy. Its
priorities are misplaced and there
is not enough accountability. We
should not have created the largest
bureaucracy in the history of the
modern world …
MOVIE
Watch Trouble the Water a
great new movie about disaster
preparedness.
If
you’d like to see The Skanner
newspaper as if it were printed
click on the “flip the pages
online” button
on our home page:
http://viewda.com/webpaper/theskanner
More than 100 African American youth got together at the second
annual youth summit at
MalloryAvenueChurch last Saturday. The summit entitled
“It’s Bigger than Hip Hop” included a youth panel which discussed
everything from how Black youth are depicted in the media to the
future of hip hop. Here Ashleigh
Paschal, 17; Myesha Abdulrahman, 18; and Kenny James, 16,
take part in the discussion. After the panel, Public Enemy’s
Professor Griff joined local artists Libretto, Octavia Harris,
Madgesdiq, Blacque Butterfly and others to perform that evening.
http://www.theskanner.com/index.php?action=artd&artid=5965
Ashleigh Paschal is a member of the Community Empowerment
Organization (club) that aims to unite and empower our community
through educations, activism and mentorship. If you would like more
information on this club email
communityempowermentorganization@yahoo.com.
Get involved in clubs, make college fun!
Cynthia Sartin
Club and Programs Specialist PortlandCommunityCollege-
Cascade
The
Skanner Wins Top Honors in African American Journalism
http://www.theskanner.com/index.php?action=artd&artid=6892 The Skanner News Group won three honors at the National Newspaper
Publishers Association national convention on June 26 in Louisville, KY,
including the prestigious 2008 A. Phillip Randolph Messenger Award.
Considered the very highest honor given in the field of African American
journalism, The Skanner’s former news editor, Helen Silvis, has now won the
prize twice for the newspaper, in 2005 and in 2008. The Skanner News Group is
the only newspaper in the five western states of Washington, Oregon, Colorado,
Nevada, and Arizona, to ever win the award twice.
PUSHED OUT
Rising Foreclosures, Rising Rents
One renter’s story illustrates
the perils of a ‘landlord’s
market’
Story by Lisa
Loving of The Skanner
Sharie Smith and her
little dog Domino live in a
hundred-year-old apartment in an
expansive old house on Northeast
Fargo Street.
Since being diagnosed with
multiple sclerosis, Smith has
lived on a $700 Social Security
payment.
One day this summer, her rent
jumped 30 percent; now it takes
up almost her entire monthly
check.
And there’s not much she can do
about it.
“I said, that’s a huge gouge.
And the landlord said, then you
can move.”
Local tenants rights activists
say the increasing rate of home
foreclosures has dumped a new
population of former homeowners
into the rental market, driving
up rents across the region.
With the increasing number of
renters, more and more
vulnerable people are being
squeezed out at the bottom.
“According to landlord/tenant
statute, there’s no cap on how
much landlords can raise the
rent – they can do it every
month if they want to,” said
Nancy Swann, program assistant
for the Community Alliance of
Tenants. “I don’t know what
we’re going to do but it’s a
landlord’s market and they can
raise rents as much as they
want.”
Tenants facing rent increases
aren’t the only problem, Swann
says; foreclosures hurt renters
another way as well.
&ldq! uo;With renters who live
in foreclosed buildings, we have
to refer people to lawyers, and
sometimes they get just 24 hours
to leave,” she said. “It’s
anywhere from 24 hours to 10
days — not much time when the
housing market is so tight and
the prices are going up.”
Swann said renters caught in the
crossfire of building owners’
foreclosure crises are
economically penalized.
“With foreclosures, all bets are
off and people don’t even get
their deposits back,” Swann
said. “You hear all the time
about middle class families
affected by foreclosure, but I
never read about how it impacts
poor households.”
Smith says she’s seen her
neighbors pushed out one by one,
and replaced with out-of-towner
who can afford more costly
properties.
“Essentially the neighborhood
has changed a great deal over
the past seven years,
regentrification and all,” Smith
said. “The building was actually
one of the last ones on the
block owned by an African
American family.”
The original owner was born and
raised in the home, his parents
lived there, and he still has
other relatives there. Smith
says that owner sold the house
two years ago, and the real
estate agent who listed the
apartment decided to buy it.
The building is attractive, but
a brief tour shows rotting wood,
ancient flooring and rickety
stair rails.
Smith ticks off the dangerous
conditions in the building on
the fingers of two hands: a
leaky sink in the kitchen floods
the apartment downstairs; the
kitchen leak caused Smith to
turn off her hot water to keep
the leak from filling the
neighbor’s light fixture with
water; because of that Smith
went without hot water in the
kitchen for two and a half
months.
“This light bulb in my hallway
outside my door is constantly on
24 hours – you have to unscrew
it to turn it off,” she said.
“But we have no electricity on
the front porch – it’s just
pitch black out there! .”
These situations are dicey,
Swann says, because sometimes
the official avenue for
grievance backfires.
“The first thing to do is ask
for the repairs, keep very good
documentation,” Swann said.
“Keep written records of the
first letter, the second letter,
the third letter.”
If all else fails, tenants can
file a complaint with the City
Inspections Neighborhood
Inspection Program
“The problem is the landlords
get mad if people turn them in
to the city inspector,” Swann
said. “So a lot of people are
afraid to call the inspectors
because they’re afraid they’ll
get evicted. And they’re right.”
Meanwhile, Smith is desperately
looking for a new apartment that
she can afford, but she says
it’s heartbreaking to move away
from her neighborhood.
“Eventually we’re probably going
to see an African American ski
champion because all the locals
will have been displaced out
there,” Smith says. “Gresham is
going to be the new ‘hood,
skiing on Mt. Hood will be the
new activity, and maybe we’ll
see an Olympic champion someday.
That’s my prediction.”
Volunteers
needed
The Community Alliance of
Tenants is recruiting volunteers
to staff their Renters Rights
Hotline. The training is
Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 6 and
7 from 2 to 6:30 pm. At the
Augustana Lutheran Church, 2710
NE 14th St. Snacks are provided.
CAT is also holding its annual
meeting Oct. 1. For more
information go to
www.oregoncat.org,
or call 503-460-9702.
The Renters’ Rights Hotline is
503-288-0130.
Renter Reform
A year-long reform effort, the
Portland Quality Rental Housing
Workgroup, makes its official
recommendations at HCDC’s next
meeting -Wednesday, Sept. 3, at
6:30 p.m. at the Multnomah
County building, ! 501 SE H
awthorne.
The proposed reforms would make
it easier for tenants to make
repairs and provide city funds
to hire lawyers for people who
are kicked out for requesting
repairs, among other things.
Urban Parks Pioneer to Guest Speak at Martin Luther
King Jr. Breakfast
As the green environmental movement begins making inroads into mainstream
America, as Martin Luther King Jr. did nearly four decades ago with the civil
rights movement, the Skanner Foundation will highlight the importance of
environmentally conscious living. This year’s keynote speaker at the 22nd
annual Martin Luther King Jr. Breakfast will be urban forest advocate Steve
Coleman.
Coleman has forged community park partnerships across the District of Columbia
and surrounding region, and he is a leader in the growing national urban parks
movement, assisting urban park partnerships across the country and beyond.
This year’s breakfast will be held from 8:30 to 10:30 a.m. on Monday, Jan. 21 at
the Hilton Executive Tower Hotel, 921 S.W. 6th Ave. in Portland. To
reserve a table, or nominate someone for the Drum Major for Justice Award or for
a student scholarship, call 503-285-5555 or email
MLKBreakfast@theskanner.com.
Beginning with the youth drive he co-founded 30 years ago to restore a forgotten
stream valley park, Coleman has mobilized tens of thousands of people to reclaim
community parks. In 1994, the president and vice president of the United States
honored Coleman and the late Josephine Butler for creating one of America’s top
parks/ community partnerships – the dramatic transformation of Meridian
Hill/Malcolm X Park from Washington’s single most violent park, into one of its
safest. In 1999, he led the establishment of the Josephine Butler Parks Center
inside the former Embassy of Hungary – a permanent 1! 8,000-sq uare-foot
“greenhouse” for seeding community reclamation of the District of Columbia’s
long forgotten community parklands. As executive director of Washington Parks &
People for the past two decades, he leads the capital’s award-winning alliance
of community parks partnerships, which owns and operates the Parks Center as
well as the Riverside Center east of the Anacostia River.
Coleman’s work in the urban parks movement has been broadly covered in the
Washington media, as well as such national periodicals as Parade, National
Parks, Hemispheres, Monuments Historiques, Landscape Architecture, NPR, CNN, PBS
and the BBC. His work has won commendations from the National Congress for
Community Economic Development, the Committee of 100 on the Federal City, the
Washington Architectural Foundation, the DC Preservation League, the National
Park Foundation, the National Park Service, the United States Park Police, and
the president of the United States (Partnership Leadership Award). He has been
guest speaker at numerous local, regional, national, and international parks
conferences. He is a Trustee of the City Parks Alliance, a national consortium
of urban parks partnerships. He is also chair of the founding working group of
the International Urban Parks Alliance.
Coleman has served as Parks and Conservation Chair of the Committee of 100 on
the Federal City, as a member of the Advisory Committee on Greenway Planning for
the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, and as a member of the DC
Environmental Planning Commission. In both 1998 and 2006, Coleman served as
co-chair of the District of Columbia Mayor’s Transition Committee on Parks and
Recreation. His elected community posts in Washington are also numerous.
A former organizational development consultant and journalist, Coleman was
program director of the Better World Society, an international environmental
advocacy organization started by media executive Ted Turner, which produced
award-winning! educational television programming for worldwide broadcast via
Cable News Network, PBS and other networks. Educated at Haverford College and
New York University, he began his
professional career as an intern reporter covering urban affairs for public
television’s MacNeil/Lehrer Report, and later helped the Center for
International Journalists start a Third World journalism training program for
community news coverage of environment and development issues.
His public service experience has included stints with the American Friends
Service Committee, where he led a successful statewide lobbying campaign in New
York, the Maine Natural Resources Council, and SAVE Our Future, a national
low-income voter registration drive that he co-founded. A former field organizer
for Freeze Voter and the Professionals Coalition for Nuclear Arms Control,
Coleman first came to Washington in 1983 to serve as vice president for research
and development of a national business association lobbying to boost funding for
community development. Born in India to Canadian-born parents, Coleman grew up
in and around Pittsburgh, New York, and Philadelphia. He lives with his wife and
son in the diverse Reed-Cooke neighborhood of Adams Morgan.
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The
books at the left are recommended resources for those who want to write
effectively. They can supplement any secondary, college, or
graduate-level writing project. If you would like to obtain either
book, click at left. The Writers Harbrace Handbook is a
basic guide and rulebook for writers. It has particularly useful
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as a practical guide for the writing process. The book is designed for people who want to improve their writing, including students from
non-English based learning environments. Commas
are covered in Adventures in Writing on pages:
189, 313, and
406. For questions, contact
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