Monthly Archives: March 2022

APPLETON Milly Rugland remembers watching the Fox River when she was a child as ribbons of colored foam drifted past,green, pink and yellow.

Back then, it was an industrial river traversed by coal barges, polluted by paper mills and farm runoff.

There were no fish, other than resilient carp, and mothers would tell their children not to put even their feet in the water. One industry leader in the 1960s called it nothing more than a high-class sewer.

Most people dont realize how polluted the waters were, Rugland said. They dont remember foam and coal barges, dead fish floating in Lake Winnebago, but it was really nasty.

Ruglands father, Gordon Bubolz, a prominent businessman in the Fox Cities and conservative state senator, saw value in the states natural resources and used his position to help clean up the waters. A conservationist at heart, Bubolz often said he felt the need to preserve the waters and land because God doesnt make it anymore.

He was in business circles with people who were running the paper mills, but he was very vocal about the fact that the paper mills polluted the Fox River, and something needed to be done, said Dave Horst, a nature columnist and environmental grant writer for the Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region.

The Wisconsin Conservation Hall of Fame will posthumously honor Bubolz, who died in 1990, with a virtual induction ceremony for his contributions to restore the river and for raising funds to preserve more than 4,600 acres of public land across the state. Hell join Alren Christenson and Kathleen Falk as 2022 inductees.

Horst, who wrote the nomination for Bubolz, said he was drawn to research the man because of the opposing forces he represented. He was a businessman and a conservative, and he was known to work with liberal politicians likeSen. Gaylord Nelson, who created Earth Day, and conservative Wisconsin governor Warren Knowles.

Party positions or party membership didnt matter to him, said his son, John Bubolz. It was about who people were, what their beliefs were and ideas they had in common.

Bubolz was so outspoken in his desire to restore the Fox River that he had to send his daughter to school with a police escort. Rugland said she wasnt exactly sure what was going on at the time, but she remembers people felt strongly that environmental regulations would be the death knell for the paper industry.

I was 10, and I remember one morning my parents came to me and said, 'Youre going to get a special ride to school today,' Rugland said. It was unmarked cars, and it didnt last very long, but there were definitely threats made against our family.

Bubolz was born in 1905 and grew up on a farm in northeast Wisconsin with five brothers and six sisters. His father started an insurance company in 1900 after a devastating windstorm hit the state in 1899.

Bubolz graduated from Lawrence University, studied business and insurance in Ohio and Pennsylvania and earned a law degree from the University of Wisconsin. He would go on to succeed his father as head of the insurance company, which is now called Secura.

John Bubolz said he believes his fathers passion for conservation came from his early life on the farm.

He knew the importance of the land and the need to preserve it, he said. Especially land that was in jeopardy of being developed.

Bubolz served as a state senator from 1945 to 1953, during which he was on the state Conservation Commission and chaired the advisory council of the Department of Resource Development. It provided oversight for the predecessors of the DNR.

He also served on the Legislatures Joint Water Resource Committee and co-authored legislation to implement in Wisconsins provisions of the federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1948. He was the first to chair what is now called the East Central Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission.

Rugland said her father was like a sponge, absorbing information on environmental causes. He believed that living things were interconnected, and he was excited to learn how things affect one another. Rugland remembers her father working with University of Wisconsin scientists to study how wetlands would impact future generations.

He walked in and said, Do you know what wetlands are? Theyre natures sponges do you know what they do? Rugland said. It was like telling a kid they could raid a candy shop. He was so excited, and he was excited about everything he tried to do.

Following his work in the state Senate, Bubolz started a nonprofitcalled Natural Areas Preservation Incorporated, or NAPI, which found areas with ecological significance to educate the public about conservation.

In 1990, hewas recognizedas a key fundraiser and organizer for the state to create four nature centers, three wildlife areas, two county parks and High Cliff State Park.

Bubolzs son and daughter agree their father wasnt a man who sought recognition. However, his induction to the conservation hall of famebrings to life a quote that he often referred to.

"That which we do for ourselves dies with us. That which we do for others lives on.

Bubolz worked to preservemore than 4,600 acres of public land. Below is a list of the properties Bubolz helped establish. The information was compiled by Horst for the Wisconsin Conservation Hall of Fame.

Contact Jake Prinsen at jprinsen@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @PrinsenJake.

Read more here:

Fox Cities businessman, senator Gordon Bubolz to be inducted into Wisconsin Conservation Hall of Fame - Post-Crescent

Oligarchs under sanctions in the EU and US have been linked to almost 200m of property in London and the home counties, a Guardian analysis has found, as Boris Johnson came under mounting pressure from Labour to step up financial curbs.

Among those hit with sanctions by the EU in recent days over Russias invasion of Ukraine are Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven, who separately own mansions in London and Surrey. Both men stepped down from the board of their private investment group, LetterOne, on Tuesday.

Aven attended a business meeting with Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin last week, which his spokesperson said he was required to do. He bought the plot of Ingliston House in Virginia Water in the 2000s for an estimated 8m, and he has spoken of housing a vast art collection there. The property is owned through a company.

Fridman bought and still owns Athlone House in north London, paying 65m for the property in 2016, according to the Land Registry.

A spokesperson for both men said the justifications for EU sanctions were simply and demonstrably false and stressed that the pair were in no way involved in politics, had condemned the war and would contest the allegations. Fridman has previously said he did not know whether he would face sanctions in the UK and hoped it would not happen.

Igor Shuvalov, a former Russian deputy prime minister who chairs Russias state development bank, is also said to be a London property owner under EU sanctions. He was named in the House of Commons by Labour as owning two flats in Westminster, bought for an estimated 11m.

On Wednesday Keir Starmer said the only reason Shuvalov was known to be the real owner of the flats was because it had been revealed by the jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

Transparency is essential to rooting out corruption, the Labour leader said. It should be built into our law, but its not. And Im ashamed that we only know about Shuvalovs Westminster flats because a dissident risked his life. Is the prime minister?

Another billionaire oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, is under sanctions in the US and has previously challenged the restrictions in the courts.

He is listed by the US Department of the Treasury as residing at Belgrave Square in London. The property was bought in 2005 for an estimated 25m through Ravellot Ltd, a company based in the British Virgin Islands. A spokesperson for the businessman said the property was owned by members of Mr Deripaskas family.

The spokesperson added: As regards the US sanctions against Mr Deripaska, the grounds on which they were imposed are entirely baseless. No evidence has ever been produced to substantiate allegations of wrongdoing against him. I trust that Mr Deripaskas position on the importance of peace speaks for itself.

There is more of a mystery surrounding London property previously linked to Alisher Usmanov, who was put under EU sanctions this week and whose sponsorship links to Everton football club were recently frozen. He has for many years been reported as having owned two mansions one on the same Hampstead road in north London as Fridman and another in Surrey.

Usmanov bought the Grade-II listed Beechwood, which is set in 4.5 hectares (11 acres) of ground, for 48m in 2008 through Hanley Ltd, a company based in the Isle of Man. He has also been reported to be the owner of Sutton Place, a 72-room Tudor mansion near Guildford in Surrey that was once frequented by Henry VIII, and was bought for an unknown amount in the mid-2000s. It was marketed for 25m but is thought to have sold for less.

However, Usmanovs spokesperson on Wednesday disputed the information about his property ownership, without being specific about whether he was no longer the beneficial owner of one or both of the properties.

Usmanov previously said in response to the EUs move: I believe such a decision is unfair and the reasons employed to justify the sanctions are a set of false and defamatory allegations damaging my honour, dignity and business reputation. I will use all legal means to protect my honour and reputation.

Questions have been mounting from British MPs in recent days over why the UK has not matched the US and EU in some of its sanctions. So far, fewer than 10 oligarchs have been sanctioned by the UK in relation to Russias invasion of Ukraine. Sanctions have also been brought against Putin and his foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov.

A British official rebuffed suggestions that the UK was moving too slowly on imposing further sanctions against individuals close to the Russian president and their business interests.

The official pointed to measures such as a ban on all Russian-flagged ships docking in UK ports as an example of how the government was ahead of the EU, US and other G7 nations, but admitted there were quite significant risks of asset flights from those fearing they could have their finances frozen.

Analysis by the NGO Transparency UK has previously estimated that since 2016 1.5bns worth of UK property has been bought by Russians with alleged links to the Kremlin.

Amid a lack of transparency over the beneficial owners of London property, Labour wrote to the government on Wednesday urging it to change proposed legislation to give foreign property owners 28 days rather than 18 months to reveal their identity.

The Liberal Democrats called for the government to seize empty property in London owned by oligarchs with links to the Kremlin in order to house Ukrainian refugees. Alistair Carmichael, the partys home affairs spokesperson, said: Its time to freeze these assets and put them to good use, by temporarily housing Ukrainian refugees escaping this terrible war.

More here:

Oligarchs under EU and US sanctions linked to 200m in UK property - The Guardian

In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: Up to and including 1889 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports. This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement.

With this, Frederick Jackson Turner began his essay The Significance of the Frontier in American History, based on a paper he gave at a meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago in July of 1893. The frontier, the outer edge of the wavethe meeting point between savagery and civilization, as Turner called it, had closed.

Turners essay has joined the ranks of classics on Mark Twains definition: books which people praise and dont read. But the fact remains that the basic idea of a closed frontier has overtaken its more nuanced origin in Turners writings and come to serve as a rhetorical signpost for discussions about American history. The frontier closed in 1890that somewhat dubious assertion (see Gerald D. Nashs brief 1980 essay The Census of 1890 and the Closing of the Frontier for a sketch of how slapdash a job the 1890 census was) has entered the American consciousness and worried the minds of those given to thinking about our national character, and how it was once tied to the taming of a wild land. I, too, have often fretted with Turner: Our frontier is closed.

Ive begun to think differently about the frontier, however. Contra the census takers, the frontier didnt close in 1890. It just got wet. America took a fateful swerve, from being a land power to a sea power, with consequences disastrous for our republic and the continent that nurtures it. We went and got a huge honking navy, and then it was curtains for our continental republic. John J. Mearsheimer lays it out very nicely in The Great Delusion: Liberalism abroad undermines liberalism at home. States that pursue liberal hegemony invariably damage the fabric of liberalism inside their own borders. This is precisely what happened when Americans elasticized their frontier and set about liberalizing all four hemispheres.

One can understand the expansionist temptation, to be honest. At the close of the 19th century the United States was very quickly becoming rich and technologically advanced. The Conestoga-wagon-LittleHouseonthePrairiefrontier had closed, but many East Coast Americanswho ironically never knew the Turnerian frontier or much of America apart from New York and Bostonwere dreaming imperial dreams beyond the United States. Progressives, mainly in the Republican Party, had their eyes, and their countrymens tax dollars, set on new frontiers, new wildernesses to allay. Pushed along by East Coast money and Washington political and military power, the frontier moved beyond the coast and out into the Pacificinto the Caribbean, too. With new imperial holdings in Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Samoa, and Wake Island, American Progressives entered the 20th century flush with dominion, and whetted to even further acquisition. Just when you thought the frontier had closed, boom, you up and get an empire.

This new-frontierism has continued from that day to this. Americans went East and West, beyond the bookends of the Carolina and California coastlines. Our imperial-inflected frontiering led us to try taming Europe (good luck with that) by defeating the atavistic Hun in two wars, and to try driving a stake in the heart of Oriental superstition by forcing the Japanese Emperor to de-divinize on New Years Day, 1946. Weve frontiered in Somalia and Bosnia, frontiered in Grenada and Nicaragua, frontiered with the Siberian Expedition, frontiered in Saudi Arabia and Oman, frontiered among the Syrians and the Poles. The frontier didnt end in 1890, and it didnt end in America. It got stuck westerly in the mud halfway down the Korean Peninsula, where it remains today, and is now fluttering around easterly somewhere in the depths of Ukraine. NATO and the PACOM are the two farthest outposts of the frontier one hundred and thirty-two years after its putative closing.

But is this imperial adventurism really an extension of the American frontier? For Turner, no. The frontier was not merely advance along a single line, Turner wrote,

but a return to primitive conditions along a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating the American character.

In this passage, and in Turners essay overall, one can see that Turner is speaking of not one frontier, but two. There is the geographic frontier, the one that keeps moving westward. That, I argue, is the part of Turners idea that got telescoped out to the far western Pacific and the middle of Eastern Europe. But that is not really what Turner saw as the frontiers pulse and lifeblood. That would be the inner frontier, the process of men and women going out into the wilderness and being rejuvenated, reborn even, by baptism in the American continent.

It is this second frontier that we forgot about when we made the fateful transition from land power to sea power, from continental to maritime nation. We sold our soul for some cruisers and aircraft carriers. But our hearts are forever in the bayous, grasslands, and forests of our native soil. We Americans are not British, not islanders fated to roam the seas like Polynesians or Vikings. We are a landed people, tilling soil and making homes in the earth. In doing this we become ourselves. Our closest civilizational cousins are not Europeans but Mongolians and Navajo. We range land, not water. The Southern Agrarians and the Western cattlemen, then, and not the military adventurer or the imperial proconsul in Manila or Havana, is who we are at heart. We need the frontier, for it is only there that we know and meet our destiny to become Americans.

The wilderness masters the colonist, Turner wrote.

It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs, any more than the first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the Germanic mark. The fact is, that here is a new product that is American.

Turner is at odds here, trying to birth the civilizational frontier out of the transmogrification of the European into the American in the wilds of the West. But it was always the interior transformation that we were after. Going native is who we are. And I think it is high time we came home from the deserts and jungles of the world and worked on becoming Americans again. At the burnt end of our empire, Minervas owl having flown off sometime during the Obama Administration, we can turn around and see that it was just half of Turners thesis that was ever worth keeping. It is not that we ought to civilize others, but that we ourselves must be civilized in the wilderness. We are Americans when we are in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois, when we are arrayed in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. Instead of hitching our American nature to an abstract, and after Turners heyday increasingly eugenicist, notion of progress, we should have stayed in the Indian clearings and on the Indian trails.

It is not too late to do this. It is not too late to reopen the American frontier in every heart by going into the American land and living on it like true sons and daughters of the continent. This time, though, instead of an inexorable westward wave, let there be an ingathering of the exiles, from all corners of the globe where the imperial diaspora has reached. The American continent needs saving, and we, who have become so civilized by our imperium that we are able to incinerate the planet many times over at the touch of a button and the turning of a key, need rewildingbad. Going among Indian clearings and meandering on Indian trails would go a long way toward teaching us how to be our own masters again, and to give up the cheap substitute of lording it over others.

It is not just Americans who need saving. Consider how the betrayal of our national character has hurt our homeland. When I drive across the country I see endless fields of corn and wheat and soybeans, for example. Virtually none of these crops are consumed locally. Oceans of chemicals are pumped onto Nebraskan and Iowan fields so that those fields will grow fat with grain, but then much of the bounty of the American heartland is put on trains and trucks and then on ships and ferried out to the wide world beyond. We poison our land and water to compete in a global grain market, when there are Americans on our streets who are hungry and destituteit is insanity squared. We dont realize it, but we have ourselves become colonized by our own imperial ambitions. And our land is made serf to the globalized world, a cog in a faceless machine. So many acres of wheat, bound for destinations far beyond the United States. This is no frontier. This is slow death and the dissolution of our national soul.

I propose a new initiative: Homesteading. On farmland. Anyone who wants to grow crops or raise livestock for personal or local consumptionwith local defined as anywhere you can see from the roof of your Cherokee log cabinshould be allowed to take over a part of a massive Big Ag latifundia. Farms are drowning in debtlet the federal government step in, maybe, and pay off the mortgage in exchange for title to the land. After, say, 30 years of homesteading, the recovered land could be deeded over to the homesteader, on the condition that it will never be sold to anyone who will not also live on the land and work it for personal and local sustenance. Homesteading is not the first step toward reconquering nature, but toward letting nature reconquer North America. As Big Ag is thus broken up, the spaces in between the homesteads will naturally rewild. And in this wilderness, communities will form, instead of the neo-feudalism of globalist agricultural conglomerates.

Hearts always brighten when hands are caked with a little mud and dung. It does a man good to hear coyotes bay at night and roosters crow at dawn. A horse on the hoof and lightning draping the horizon make us more human, more American. We wilt in office buildings, but come alive in Gods country.

Psychiatrists will probably go out of business in droves as we return to our American roots. Fringe benefits all over the place.

As the American maritime empire dies and the market for tankerloads of corn and soybeans diversifies, the swaths of the Big Ag latifundia not homesteaded should be laid open to the wild things that owned our continent until just a few generations ago. Gigantic herds of smelly, stampeding bison should kick up prairie dust across a thousand miles of inland America. And if anyone wants to Jurassic Parksome woolly mammoths back into existence, then that would be fantastic. Let the mammoth cry and the buffalo grunt be the muezzin of our land. A saber-toothed tiger or two would jazz up any township in this new dispensation. I envision an America snorting and roaring and free.

Im far from the only one advocating for this kind of thing. A 2020 National Reviewarticle by Santi Ruiz, for example, describes how bison are slowly making a comeback in the United States. Spurred on by megafauna nationalism, many on the American right are now calling for a rewilding of America. But the real work on the ground appears to be being done by some of the Indian tribes, which are dedicating parts of reservations for raising up bison herds. Ruiz mentions the Rosebud Sioux, who are bringing the buffalo home on behalf of the Great Sioux Nation.

This is a good start. But at the mention of the Great Sioux Nation we must pause and steel ourselves for what has to be done next. The rewilding of America will have no moral meaning without the restoration of America to the Native Americans. Our imperial project started with them, recall. Frederick Jackson Turner talked of Europeans going among the Indians and discovering what it means to be an American. This is all well and good if one is of European stock. It looks very different if one is an Indian.

Turner is conflicted in The Significance of the Frontier in American History about this, arguing that the effect of the Indian frontier as a consolidating agent in our history is important. To me, it is the Indian that will civilize the rest of uswe need not see Indians as a common danger, demanding united action, as Turner wrote of the westward-moving whites. The common danger was Europeans. Indians failed to take united action, and were overrun. This is a crime which must be set right.

The Great Sioux Nation is leading the way in bringing the bison back. Lets go whole hog and bring America back, too, by deimperializing the continent our forefathers wrested away while we deimperialize the government they bequeathed to us. Rewilding America has to start with smoking a peace pipe with the people who were here first. If the buffalo roam but the Sioux are still in corrals, then the same un-American sadness will still haunt our land, and we will all be the poorer for it.

We lose nothing, and gain everything, by becoming, in this way, Americans again, or for the first time. Remember that the European came out in us too strongly when we went west. We did not become Indian, did not become American enough, not nearly. White men tried to take the place of the buffalo, to go roaming off in glory instead of letting the wild beasts gallop towards the distant hinge joining land and sky. As if sensing an imperial competitor, white men slaughtered bison in droves and left their skinned carcasses to rot in the sun. There were 60 million bison in Thomas Jeffersons day, but just a few thousand left in Frederick Jackson Turners generation.

It is time to let those ghosts rise, and look on as the buffalo run free again. Let there be great swooping and stampeding fauna, the eagle and the mustang at play, and a revival of the prairie grass and the redwood, the flora fit for our land. The Louisiana delta shall stick its tongue out into the Gulf of Mexico, the swamps that sponge up the hurricane surge shall grow thick and pungent once more. Piney Appalachia and taiga-like Minnesota, all the patchwork of the landscape vibrant and alive again. MAGAby filling her with some good, old-fashioned savagery and so de-Europeanizing her forever.

Let us let the ghosts of the megafauna rise, but let us leave the old imperialists to lie in their graves undisturbed. The Progressive Republicans of yore, especially, should be left to molder in peace. Theodore Roosevelt made laudable attempts to protect the environment and preserve the wilderness. But imperialism undid those. The Progressives couldnt have it both ways. The American Empire was the last burning-off of the European in us, the final Hegelian turning of the transplanted Enlightenment. That was never our soul, all those sorties and bombing runs, all those freedom of navigation operations and forward operating bases. Lets sell our battleships to the Hawaiians, who will need them to defend against yet another land power in maritime imperial drag. As for us, lets go back into the depths of the continent, reopen the frontier in our hearts, and be, at long last, Americans.

Jason Morganis associate professor at Reitaku University in Kashiwa, Japan.

See original here:

Reopen the American Frontier - The American Conservative

Peter Gutwein,Premier

The Tasmanian Liberal Government is taking further action to ease the cost of living for Tasmanian families and put downward pressure on rents, with the tax-free threshold for land tax to double to $100,000.

This means land tax will not be paid on land valued under $100,000, and we will also lift the upper tax threshold to $500,000 and lower the tax rate for land valued between $100,000 and $500,000 from 0.55 per cent to 0.45 per cent to reduce tax payable.

We took action last year to relieve some of the costs of rental properties and put downward pressure on rents by resetting the land tax thresholds, which provided more than $56 million in land tax relief for landlords and property owners over four years.

There is no doubt our strong economy and desirable lifestyle has meant more and more people want to live, work and raise a family in Tasmania.

With house prices and rents continuing to rise, we know more needs to be done, and the new arrangements will save Tasmanians hundreds more each year, providing more money to spend in local businesses.

The changes mean around 70,000 Tasmanians will save on average approximately $800 every year, up to a maximum saving of $1625 - with close to 12,000 taxpayers no longer needing to pay any land tax at all.

When combined with the changes we made last year, it will provide about $220 million of tax relief for property owners over the next four years - to enable further reductions in the costs for rental properties and helping to put downward pressure on rent prices.

More Media Releases from Peter Gutwein

More Media Releases from the Premier

View post:

Property owners and tenants to benefit from $220m of tax relief - Premier of Tasmania

A Liberal MLA wants P.E.I.'s government to use a new contingency fund to buy up all the fields where potato wart has been found in the last 22 years, and take them out of production.

This week's budget included a $15-million contingency fund to help farmers hurt by the November closure of the U.S. border to P.E.I. potato exports. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency ordered the halt in exports, saying American officials were about to closethe border themselves if Canada didn't act.

On Friday, MLA Robert Henderson said the newly announced fund should be used to expropriate the fields where warthas been detected a total of 33 instances since 2000 and compensate the owners at prices the land would have fetched before wart was found in the soil.

He aimed this question at Premier Dennis King: "Will you tell your minister to allocate that contingency money to buying the land of the 33 index classified fields where potato wart has been confirmed?"

Premier Dennis King replied that he "would be in the campthat would be supportive"of taking land out of production,but said questions have to be answered before any land is bought to be taken out of productionprimarily, whether that would make American and Canadian officials any more likely to let table potatoes from P.E.I. cross the border.

"I want to make sure if we go to these extreme lengths that our efforts are recognized by CFIA, by [its counterpart] APHIS in the United States," he said.

The premier went on to take aim at the federal Liberals and Henderson alike, saying he doesn't want to"get into the mess of a dance, of just giving things away like his party did in Ottawa during these negotiations, which have crippled this province."

Later in the exchange, Henderson pushed the province toleada class-action lawsuit against the U.S. government and theCFIA for damages associatedwith handling the potato wart issue,adding: "A number of comments have been made that there's been negligence on this file."

This is the second time this week that opposition parties have urged the government to take the fields in question out of production permanently.

At the moment, fields where the fungus has been found can be used to grow wart-resistant potato varieties afterfive years haspassed.The CFIA'swebpage on the fungus says it can stay dormant in the soil of a field for more than 40 years.

"This province has absolute jurisdiction over land use," Green Party Leader Peter Bevan-Baker said on Tuesday. "We can choose to take those fields out of production obviously compensate the farmers appropriately. "

More:

Premier urged to use aid money to buy potato wart fields, take them out of production - CBC.ca

When Vladimir Putin announced Russias invasion of Ukraine at dawn on Thursday, he justified the special military operation as having the goal to denazify Ukraine. The justification is not tenable, but it would be a mistake simply to dismiss it.

Vladimir Putin is himself a fascist autocrat, one who imprisons democratic opposition leaders and critics. He is the acknowledged leader of the global far right, which looks increasingly like a global fascist movement.

Ukraine does have a far-right movement, and its armed defenders include the Azov battalion, a far-right nationalist militia group. But no democratic country is free of far-right nationalist groups, including the United States. In the 2019 election, the Ukrainian far right was humiliated, receiving only 2% of the vote. This is far less support than far-right parties receive across western Europe, including inarguably democratic countries such as France and Germany.

Ukraine is a democratic country, whose popular president was elected, in a free and fair election, with over 70% of the vote. That president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, is Jewish, and comes from a family partially wiped out in the Nazi Holocaust.

Putins claim that Russia is invading Ukraine to denazify it is therefore absurd on its face. But understanding why Putin justifies the invasion of democratic Ukraine in this way sheds important light on what is happening not only in eastern Europe, but worldwide.

Fascism is a cult of the leader, who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by ethnic or religious minorities, liberals, feminists, immigrants, and homosexuals. The fascist leader claims the nation has been humiliated and its masculinity threatened by these forces. It must regain its former glory (and often its former territory) with violence. He offers himself as the only one who can restore it.

Central to European fascism is the idea that it is the Jews who are the agents of moral decay. According to European fascism, it is the Jews who bring a country under the domination of (Jewish) global elite, by using the tools of liberal democracy, secular humanism, feminism and gay rights, which are used to introduce decadence, weakness and impurity. Fascist antisemitism is racial rather than religious in origin, targeting Jews as a corrupt stateless race who seek global domination.

Fascism justifies its violence by offering to protect a supposedly pure religious and national identity from the forces of liberalism. In the west, fascism presents itself as the defender of European Christianity against these forces, as well as mass Muslim migration. Fascism in the west is thus increasingly hard to distinguish from Christian nationalism.

Putin, the leader of Russian Christian nationalism, has come to view himself as the global leader of Christian nationalism, and is increasingly regarded as such by Christian nationalists around the world, including in the United States. Putin has emerged as a leader of this movement in part because of the global reach of recent Russian fascist thinkers such as Alexander Dugin and Alexander Prokhanov who laid its groundwork.

It is easy to recognize, in Putins invasion of Ukraine, the roadmap laid out in recent years by Dugin and Prokhanov, major figures in Putins Russia. Both Dugin and Prokhanov viewed an independent Ukraine as an existential threat to their goal, which Timothy Snyder, in his 2018 book The Road to Unfreedom, describes as a desire for the return of Soviet power in fascist form.

The form of Russian fascism Dugin and Prokhanov defended is like the central versions of European fascism explicitly antisemitic. As Snyder writes, if Prokhanov had a core belief, it was the endless struggle of the empty and abstract sea-people against the hearty and righteous land-people. Like Adolf Hitler, Prokhanov blamed world Jewry for inventing the ideas that enslaved his homeland. He also blamed them for the Holocaust.

The dominant version of antisemitism alive in parts of eastern Europe today is that Jews employ the Holocaust to seize the victimhood narrative from the real victims of the Nazis, who are Russian Christians (or other non-Jewish eastern Europeans). Those who embrace Russian Christian nationalist ideology will be especially susceptible to this strain of antisemitism.

With this background, we can understand why Putin chose the actions he did, as well as the words he used to justify them. Ukraine has always been the primary target of those who seek to restore Soviet power in fascist form. Echoing familiar fascist antisemitic tropes, in a 2021 article, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev denounced Zelenskiy as disgusting, corrupt and faithless. The free democratic election of a Jewish president confirms in the fascist mind that the fascist bogeyman of liberal democracy as a tool for global Jewish domination is real.

By claiming that the aim of the invasion is to denazify Ukraine, Putin appeals to the myths of contemporary eastern European antisemitism that a global cabal of Jews were (and are) the real agents of violence against Russian Christians and the real victims of the Nazis were not the Jews, but rather this group. Russian Christians are targets of a conspiracy by a global elite, who, using the vocabulary of liberal democracy and human rights, attack the Christian faith and the Russian nation. Putins propaganda is not aimed at an obviously skeptical west, but rather appeals domestically to this strain of Christian nationalism.

There are broader morals here. The attack on liberal democracy in the west comes from a global fascist movement, whose center is Christian nationalism. It will be hard to disentangle this movement from antisemitism (albeit a version of antisemitism that allies with forces pushing for a Jewish nationalist state in Israel). Unsurprisingly, proponents of the view that a Christian nation needs protection and defense against liberalism, globalism and their supposed decadence, will be marshaled to their most violent actions when the faces of free, secular, tolerant liberal democracy prominently include Jewish ones.

View post:

The antisemitism animating Putins claim to denazify Ukraine - The Guardian

Analysis by Alex Traiman, Jerusalem bureau chief of JNS

With fighting raging in Ukraine, Israel finds itself torn between supporting independent Ukrainian sovereignty and not wishing to anger a newly belligerent world power in Russia.

Should the Jewish state support a diminishing world order led by the United States and Western European powers, or an emerging order in which a China- and Russia-led axis now seeks to dominate international affairs? Must Israel choose?

For Israel, the stakes are high.

The world order as we know it is changing, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett told an IDF officers graduation ceremony on Feb. 25. The world is much less stable, and our region too is changing every day. These are difficult, tragic times. Our hearts are with the civilians of eastern Ukraine who are caught up in this situation, he added.

Bennetts statement was carefully crafted.

Support for Ukraine

Sympathizing with the citizens of Ukraine, who have come under attack, is the correct moral position, regardless of politics.

Jerusalem also has strong ties with Kyiv. Ukraines President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish. Over 40,000 Jews live in the country and approximately 200,000 Ukrainians have direct Jewish lineage and qualify for Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return. In addition, Israel and Ukraine have robust economic ties. In just one example, Ukraine is a primary supplier of wheat to Israel, accounting for nearly half of the Jewish states wheat consumption.

Since the outbreak of hostilities, Jewish organizations have rushed to offer humanitarian aid to the Ukrainian Jewish community. The State of Israel is working to facilitate the absorption of Ukrainian refugees.

But coming out in support of Ukraine is a risky strategy.

The larger conflict being waged by Russia is against Europe, the United States and a NATO alliance the worth of which will now be put to the test.

Just a day prior to Bennetts statement, Israels Foreign Ministry was less careful in its wording than the prime minister.

On Thursday, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid (who is also Israels prime minister-in-waiting) said, The Russian attack on Ukraine is a serious violation of the international order. Israel condemns the attack. He added that Israel is ready and prepared to provide humanitarian assistance to the citizens of Ukraine.

On Wednesday, Lior Haiat, a spokesman for Lapids ministry, tweeted: Israel supports the territorial integrity and the sovereignty of Ukraine. Haiat added that Israel is continuing to engage in dialogue with its partners on ways to get the diplomatic efforts back on track.

Israels backing for Ukrainian sovereignty was made at the request of the United States, Israels closest ally.

From Russia with love

Russia was not pleased with Israels position, and quickly let the Jewish state know.

Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Dmitry Polyanskiy said in a statement that We are concerned over Tel Avivs announced plans for expanding settlement activity in the occupied Golan Heights, which directly contradicts the provisions of the 1949 Geneva Convention. Russia doesnt recognize Israels sovereignty over [the] Golan Heights that are part of Syria.

In referring to Tel Aviv, Russia was indicating that it does not view Jerusalem, the seat of Israels parliament, Supreme Court and prime ministers official residence, as the recognized capital of the Jewish state.

More importantly, for the last several years, Russia has been a dominant force in a war-torn Syria. Russian forces are a heartbeat away from Israels northern border. Just two weeks ago, Russian planes were seen flying together with Syrian planes. Russian air defenses systems are stationed in the country.

Russia suddenly refusing to acknowledge Israels sovereignty over the Golan, and considering the strategic hills overlooking Israels primary water supply the Kinneret as part of Syria, would be a message anything but subtle. If disagreements continue, Israel and Russia could find themselves entangled in a complicated and dangerous diplomatic row.

Good relations with Russia are a major strategic imperative.

Diplomatic relations between Israel and Russia have grown warmer over the past decade, to the point that the two nations are considered allies. Mutual respect was developed between Russian President Vladimir Putin and former Israel premier Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu has visited Moscow, and Putin has visited Israel. Bennett met Putin in Sochi this past October.

Putin has been very friendly to the Jews of Russia, compared to Russian leaders of the past. Historically, the words czar and pogrom have been synonymous. Not so under Putin. Russias Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar is known to be a confidante and adviser to the Russian leader. Putin himself donated to Russias Jewish museum.

Then there is the issue of Israels military campaign in Syria, where Iranian fighters have been active in recent years, and to which the Islamic Republic has been importing arms. Weapons traveling into Syria often make it to Lebanon, where Iranian proxy Hezbollah has over 150,000 rockets and missiles, many precision-guided, pointed at the Jewish state.

To limit Irans hegemonic aspirations and to protect its own security interests, Israel has conducted numerous military actions against Iranian fighters and weapons convoys in Syria, mostly by air, and even some on the ground. Sophisticated de-escalation measures with Russia are in place to ensure that Russian military adventures dont instigate any retaliation from Israel, and vice versa. It is imperative that these understandings between Israel and Russia remain in place.

Recognizing that it may have erred in openly siding with Ukraine, Israel refused to back a UN Security Council resolution on Friday night condemning Russias invasion. While it is true that resolution had no chance to succeed due to Russias own permanent Security Council veto, it is similarly unlikely that Israel will support a UN General Assembly resolution, which Russia cannot veto, due to the sensitivities involved.

Poking the Chinese bear

Back in June, Lapid and the Foreign Ministry made another diplomatic error. Then, Israel voted at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to condemn China for its treatment of the Uyghurs.

At the time, I wrote that Jews should undoubtedly be the first to express deep concern over grave human rights abuses. Yet, the Israeli government should know better than to give any credence to a forum that unfairly singles out Israel for censure more than all the worlds countries put together. Secondly, Israel should think twice about angering an ascending global superpower.

Why did Israel vote against China, in a vote that passed by large margin meaning that Israels own vote was of no consequence to the outcome? Because the United States asked Israel to do it.

Lapid, who was all-too eager to please the Biden administration, allowed his foreign policy establishment to make a rookie mistake.

The United States has been repeatedly pushing Israel to temper its relations with China, and the suggestions indeed have merit.

China is a nation on the offensive, and their business practices are often less than scrupulous. They regularly steal technology and data, and undercut national and company interests by offering low-interest financing that ultimately ends up weakening the nations and companies they do business with. China is also a surveillance state that commits numerous human rights violations.

Yet China is a nation that has no history of anti-Semitism, and has something of an affinity with the Jewish state. They value Israels status as the startup nation and an incubator of the technology they crave. As China becomes the dominant world superpower, it behooves Israel to remain on Chinas good side.

With friends like these

At the same time, it is worth reevaluating Israels alliance with the United States and Europe.

Though Israel, as a liberal democracy, sees its values as being closely aligned with the West, there are two major challenges. The first is that the United States and Europe are diminishing world powers.

The economic and moral foundations of the United States are cracking. Lengthy campaigns to undercut American values are proving effective, while the economic might of the United States is dwindling. The United States no longer acts like a moral superpower.

One of the messages being heard through Russias aggression in Ukraine is that the United States has dropped the banner it has carried since World War II as foremost leader of the free world.

The United States may have the worlds largest and most powerful army, but in recent campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, and even in Vietnam, it did not prove victorious. Americas recent hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan demonstrated tremendous weakness. Firepower is well and good, but if one does not have the will to fire, let alone the will to win, might is lacking.

Europe is in a similar position. The withdrawal of Great Britain from the European Union was a serious blow to Europes dominant position.

Secondly, as allies both the United States and Europe are double-edged swords.

The international community frequently condemns the Jewish state for applying sovereignty in lands it controls between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, despite strong legal, moral and historical claims to that land.

Empowering, enriching our enemies

Western powers are heedlessly and senselessly rushing towards a renewed pact with Iran, that would lift sanctions on the Islamic Republic and infuse the worlds largest state sponsor of terror with billions in capital to fund its hegemonic aspirations.

This despite the fact that Iran violated the terms of the first nuclear agreement, the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and has been enriching uranium to levels that are only necessary for developing nuclear weapons. At best, even if Iran signs a new deal, the deals terms would be set to expire in barely two and a half years, at which point Iran will legally be able to become a nuclear power.

It is unclear what the West is getting in return for its negotiating position.

The United States and Europe are also the primary sponsors of the Palestinian Authority, despite the PAs constant incitement to violence and convoluted multimillion dollar terror financing schemes.

Similarly, the United States, Europe and United Nations constantly censure Israel over its settlement policies, and even its military responses to terror flareups.

The Trump administration, by contrast, was a brief window of true friendship. Trump recognized Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, and insisted that settlements were not inherently illegal. Trump pulled out of the JCPOA and installed crippling sanctions on the Iranian regime. He similarly defunded the PA and expelled the PLO mission to Washington.

Furthermore, the Trump administration protected Israel at the United Nations, after the Obama administration secretly brokered and then allowed UN Resolution 2334 to pass, censuring Israel and calling settlements a flagrant violation of international law.

More importantly, the Trump administration helped Israel broker the Abraham Accords normalization agreements with Arab-majority nations, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan and Kosovo.

Among the strongest lessons of the accords should be that Israel has no choice but to align its interests with nations in its own neighborhood.

The Biden administration is back to the behavior of the Obama administration, in which the United States continuously undercut the positions of several allies, including those in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, Democrats continue to blame Israel for working well with a president Trump who arguably did more to advance Jewish interests than any other American leader.

Now, while American and European leaders consistently pledge their support for the Jewish state, many of their actions prove otherwise. Israel finds itself forced over and over again to beg for friendship. Such behavior is not what Israel should expect from countries it calls allies.

Israel must defend itselfby itself

Israel should take several lessons from the early days of fighting in Ukraine. The first is that Western allies cannot be counted on to defend its sovereignty.

To survive and thrive in a dangerous region and a dangerous world, Israel must maintain its military doctrine of being able to defend itself, by itself. Relying on the guarantees of others for security is foolish.

Yet the doctrine must not apply only to troops and technology. Israel must strive to be self-sufficient with regards to weapons and munitions. A primary example is the replenishment of its Iron Dome missile interceptor system. The system was used to shoot down a significant portion of the 4,000 rockets fired at Israeli population centers from Gaza during the May flare-up, as a result of which Israel launched Operation Guardian of the Walls.

The US administration had promised Israel in June to provide the funds necessary to replenish the Iron Dome, just weeks after fighting concluded. Yet the funding has been delayed for months in Congress, leaving Israels missile defense system dangerously undersupplied.

A nation that stands alone

The second lesson is that the world order is indeed changing. Rapidly. Military power, economic power and diplomatic power are shifting.

Israel has always been, both historically and prophetically, a nation that stands alone. Israel must be on good terms with the West, but it is not a Western country despite its democratic and liberal values. Israel may not approve of Russia or Chinas behaviors, but it must remain on good terms with them as well.

The third is that the United Nations cannot be counted on to bring peace to the world. Proof of this is the world bodys frequent condemnation of Israel, and its newly minted open-ended international investigation into Israeli treatment of Palestinians.

Israel is a nation that craves peace and stability more than any other. To achieve that peace, Israel must be dependent on no foreign power, must use savvy to navigate between world powers with their own sordid interests, and be both willing and able to use force when necessary to protect its sovereignty.

As world powers sort out their positions in a changing world order, ultimately Israel must stand alone.

Continued here:

Where will Israel land as world order changes? - The Jewish Star

Not long ago, proposing to force the homeless population in one of Americas most liberal cities into three massive shelters would have seemed a political, potentially career-ending non-starter.

But, in late January, mayoral aide Sam Adams signaled times had changed. In a now infamous eight-page memo sent to multiple government offices, Adams, a former mayor himself, not only posed the idea but suggested such an action could be politically palatable.

Adams included screenshots of three responses from polls paid for by a group called People for Portland. Each showed the public overwhelmingly fed up with regional leaderships approach to homelessness and trash piling up near campsites.

Adams proposal for shelters staffed by the Oregon National Guard was bashed by homeless advocates, who drew instant comparisons to internment camps. Adams later said he heard feedback that 1,000-people sites may be too large, but appeared overall unfazed by the backlash, buckling down in a series of tweets and thanking his boss, Mayor Ted Wheeler, for his support.

The People for Portland campaign soon distanced itself from the plan, telling the public not to blame them for the mayors incompetence or bad ideas. Yet, to some donors, this proposal along with Adams commitment to it in the face of roaring condemnation was hardly political ineptitude.

It was People for Portland working as intended.

Were trying to give the electeds cover to make tough decisions because they are tough decisions and not get overwhelmed by the vocal minority, said Downtown Development Group co-president Greg Goodman, one of Portlands largest private landowners and a contributor to the campaign.

FILE: A man sits outside his camp in Southwest Portland in September 2021.

Kristyna Wentz-Graff / OPB

Its been half a year since two top political consultants unveiled People for Portland, a mostly anonymously funded campaign to spur local officials to act on some of the most pressing problems they say face the city: trash, homelessness and public safety. The campaign has flooded the airwaves with TV ads, orchestrated a mass-email campaign to elected leaders and paid for polls that paint a clear picture of a gloomy electorate.

Six months and at least a million dollars later, both critics and those who dug into their pockets to finance the effort are mulling the same question: Has it made a difference?

Interviews with over a dozen public officials, donors, activists and political consultants reveal two schools of thought. Some brush the campaign aside as an agent of chaos, sucking up the air in government offices and stoking the ire of already frustrated voters without accomplishing much in the way of fresh policy.

But another camp of both opponents and supporters see the group dominating civic conversation in Portland, particularly when it comes to the right way to address the citys homeless crisis. They say its provided certain elected officials the political support they need to move aggressively to build big shelters and clear the streets of tents, a push critics say will ultimately fail to make a dent in the crisis and one supporters see just now starting to bear fruit.

While Goodman had quibbles with the mayors plan for mammoth shelters 1,000-person camps was too large and the use of National Guard questionable he applauded Wheeler for the concept.

I think that might have given Ted the cover to do what he did, he said, referring to the campaigns polling. If that gives him the cover, then I think its very effective.

A screenshot from the People for Portland website where over 4,000 people have used the form to send an automated email to politicians to encourage them to find ways to address the houseless in Portland.

Screenshot / OPB

People for Portland has proven divisive since day one.

The campaign burst into public view in late August. Dan Lavey, a longtime Republican consultant, and Kevin Looper, a leading strategist for Democrats, announced they had united to create a platform to make politicians listen harder to voters.

Through public polling and a mass-email campaign, the consultants said they wanted to show elected leaders the public demanded three things: the garbage cleaned up, the public safety system strengthened, and people experiencing homelessness moved from the streets into shelter.

The campaign caused a collective shudder among many Portland progressives, who speculated the campaign was a vehicle for more than public venting perhaps a set-up to pave the path for gubernatorial candidate Betsy Johnson, whose campaign both consultants later joined, or a plan to redirect tax money from Metros $250 million homeless services measure, which Looper himself helped pass in 2020. A top director for Loopers political consulting firm who worked on the measure promptly left the company, blindsided by the effort. Polling company FM3 Research, which conducted the campaigns first poll, soon said theyd no longer be able to work with the campaign as its strategies conflicted with their other clients.

Questions quickly arose over who was backing the campaign. The organizers chose to structure People for Portland as a 501 (c)(4), meaning donors to the campaign arent made public. Consultants and contributors have bristled against the association with dark money, arguing there was nothing nefarious about the decision to file as a social welfare organization, the same designation used by Basic Rights Oregon and the political arm of Planned Parenthood.

Yet the dark money branding has lingered with few early backers choosing to put their name behind the effort. Columbia Sportswear CEO Tim Boyle told the Oregonian/OregonLive he had donated when the campaign was announced, and Harsch Investment Properties president Jordan Schnitzer said he supported the effort. No other donors followed. OPB reached out to nine people rumored to have backed the campaign from the onset. Three said they were not donors. Three didnt respond to a call and two emails. The head of a private equity firm agreed to speak, but then went silent.

Goodman responded immediately. He said he was part of a small group of people who felt that a vocal minority, dominated by more radical progressives, was driving politics in the city. Lifelong liberal friends of his, he said, were not feeling represented by Portlands left. Through polling and letter-writing campaigns, campaign backers wanted to prove there was significant support for more centrist politics in Portland. Goodman said the group was not driven solely by business interests, though he declined to say who else was involved.

With only the names of Portlands most prominent businessmen attached to the effort, homeless advocates quickly portrayed People for Portland as the latest in a long string of attempts by the citys business establishment to push the houseless population from the citys core, in line with the Portland Business Alliance-backed push in 2013 to get Salems help barring people from sitting or lying on city sidewalks.

Donors say activists are directing their ire at the wrong targets. Its the class of elected leaders, they say, who deserve the criticism for responding with bureaucratic sluggishness and befuddlement to a situation on the streets that becomes more inhumane by the day. Portland saw a record number of people die while living on the streets in 2020 and an all time high number of houseless people killed by cars in 2021. And yet, when the federal government gave the county emergency housing vouchers last May to prevent people from losing their houses, the public housing authority struggled for months to get them in the hands of renters teetering on homelessness, as Willamette Week reported.

It would be different if we were lobbying for tax breaks for the wealthy, and it would be different if we were lobbying to sweep the streets and get rid of these horrible homeless people. Thats not what were about, said developer David Gold, a contributor to People for Portland. Were about trying to get the city to humanely heal the problems on our streets and the plight of these people who somehow we have determined that its better to have people live in our gutters, literally, than it is to have them live in available housing.

Gold said hed donated about $15,000 to the campaign. The consultants have declined to say how much theyve raised in total, though city lobbying reports show them spending over $1 million.

Goodman would not say how much hes contributed to the effort, but considers the unspecified sum well-spent.

I think its been tremendously successful. Its taken on a life of its own, and I hope it keeps going, he said. The purpose is to create a grassroots army.

At this point, the army largely shows up in town halls and form emails. Over 6,000 people attended the groups town hall on homelessness Thursday night, according to the event moderator. Inboxes of elected officials have been flooded with thousands of emails from supporters. With one click on People for Portlands website, frustrated Portlanders can fire off a pre-written email that gets blasted to elected officials in Portland, Multnomah County and Metro, the regions land-use government, as well as state legislators who represent Portland districts.

From the time the campaign launched in August 2021 through Jan. 27, People for Portland supporters sent as many as 8,000 emails to city officials, according to records requested from council offices by OPB. The main thing differentiating each message is the name and address at the bottom of the email. According to an OPB analysis of those addresses, residents of the central city are firing off the most emails per capita. Residents in Portlands eastern neighborhoods Parkrose, Gateway, Lents, Montavilla send the least. There was no statistically significant correlation between the neighborhoods median income and the number of letters sent.

The concerns voiced by the campaigns so-called grass-roots army run the gamut. A 77-year-old longtime Portland resident told OPB she wants to change the commission form of government. A Lewis & Clark administrator is alarmed at the rising catalytic convertor theft in her Southwest Portland neighborhood. A veterinarian who lives on Marine Drive wants someone to do something about all the cars abandoned on the levees that stop the Columbia River from flooding the city.

But nearly every conversation winds toward the same subject: the growing number of people living on the street in clear crisis and the politicians they no longer trust to help.

Just look around Portland is a disaster right now, said Sean Farrell, a 38-year-old social services worker who has sent three of People for Portlands form emails. The city is doing nothing. The city does nothing like nobodys business.

FILE: A homeless encampment perched along southbound I-5 in Portland in January 2022.

Kristyna Wentz-Graff / OPB

When it comes to addressing outdoor camping, Portland leaders tend to assign themselves to one of two philosophical groups.

Homeless advocates and providers, alongside many elected officials, have long advocated for the Housing First model an approach that prioritizes providing permanent housing to people as the most effective way to end homelessness. Until there is available housing to move people into, advocates of this model often argue, it is inhumane to force people to move from their camps on public land. Services must meet people where they are. Portlanders have passed three ballot measures in recent years aligned with this housing first direction: a $258 million Portland Housing bond for affordable housing; Metros $653 million housing bond; and a tax to generate $250 million-per-year to provide supportive services that help people remain in housing.

Critics of this approach say it takes far too long and believe leaders need to prioritize building shelter alongside housing. The status quo of allowing streets to stay lined with tents until there is enough housing, they say, is untenable.

People for Portland is firmly in the latter camp. Recently, the mayors office has been planting bigger and brighter flags showing Wheeler is too.

In a traditionally slow-moving mayors office, theres been a jolt of activity in the last month around outdoor camping. A few days after Adams wrote out his proposal for three, 1,000-person shelters, Wheeler unveiled a plan to ban homeless camps along dangerous roadways. A week after that, Wheeler pushed Gov. Kate Brown to fund temporary shelters across the state.

Adams, the Wheeler aide and former mayor, said recent public polling separate surveys paid for by both People for Portland and the Portland Business Alliance has shocked elected officials from their echo chambers and showed the public is shifting toward where Wheelers staff says the mayor has always stood: a belief that unsanctioned camping is dangerous and temporary shelter presents a solution.

From what I read, that change in emphasis that deeper and deeper level of frustration and anger is also happening in cities up and down the West Coast, Adams said.

Last year, one Seattle suburb made it a crime to sleep on public land if there was available shelter and another banned public camping outright. San Franciscos liberal mayor declared a state of emergency this winter on the nasty streets of the citys Tenderloin, where overdose deaths have exploded and outdoor camping is common. Los Angeles banned sleeping, sitting, and lying down at 54 places in the city.

But its Austin, Texas, that some city officials are watching most closely.

Camping along the 2300 block of Southwest Naito Parkway in Portland last year. It was the site of the second of now six "Safe Rest Villages" in the city.

Kristyna Wentz-Graff / OPB

The liberal enclave shares more in common with Portland than a slogan and a branch of Voodoo Doughnut. As homeless camps proliferated across the city, a county GOP chair and a Democratic activist united to form an advocacy group called Save Austin Now. With familiar messaging of a failing city, they circumvented a city council they viewed as out of touch and got a measure on the ballot last May to reinstate a ban on outdoor camping and impose fines on those who did not go to shelter. Despite vehement opposition by the citys homeless advocates, politicians and ice cream company Ben & Jerrys, the voters in the progressive oasis approved it handily.

A similar story is playing out in Sacramento where voters are considering a ballot measure proposal that would ban outdoor camping and allow residents to sue the city to force them to clean up campsites.

Adams believes Portland could be next.

The political class in Portland and Oregon and well-intentioned advocates are so disconnected from the anger and frustration and concern over the outdoor camp-less housing situation that we are headed for an Austin moment, what appears to be a Sacramento moment where ballot measures are put on the ballot that are blunt and can be counter-productive, but get passed because were not paying attention, said Adams. Were on the road to losing it to somebodys initiative petition ballot measure unless we all wake up and pursue the win-win: better places for homeless folks to camp.

Though People for Portland distributed materials to donors early on showing they were interested in a measure to ban public camping, the campaign has not taken public steps toward such a measure. That fact has done little to dampen the speculation among elected officials that they may one day harness their long list of angry voters toward something bigger than a mass email campaign.

Theyre herd animals, and weve put fear into the herd, Looper said of the cohort of local politicians they are targeting with their ads and emails. Theyre absolutely reacting.

The organizers of People for Portland have rarely claimed victory over the past six months. The message directed at local leaders is consistent and consistently negative: do more, do it better.

But, in an interview, the consultants said that while progress has been slow, they credit the campaign with influencing several policies: the city councils decision to increase the police budget in the fall; the unanimous vote to expand Portland Street Response (a non-police unit that responds to some 911 calls); and a shifting conversation about the correct way to address outdoor camping.

Some see this conversation shift extending beyond Portland City Hall. A member of the Here Together coalition, a group of nonprofits, businesses and elected leaders that campaigned for the Metro homeless services measure, said that a year and a half ago, discussions of sanctioned campsites would have been shouted down by some in the coalition as criminalizing homeless, implying there are places where camping should not be allowed. They say thats no longer the case and believe People for Portland is the reason.

The consultants and supporters say public officials are just reacting to the facts they have presented: a sizable number of constituents appear to support expanding shelter options and require rather than encourage people living on the streets to move into them.

The campaigns most recent poll found 58% of respondents from Multnomah County supported requiring people living on the streets to move into available shelters. Officials have received People for Portlands recent form letter imploring city leaders to build more shelter and housing and phase out camping in public areas over a thousand times.

Allowing people to live and sleep outside in public spaces is inhumane and dangerous for everyone, the email reads. Sadly, as long as we allow people to violate the ban on public camping, many will not choose to go to safe shelters.

Some advocates have accused the campaign of manufacturing this sentiment, flooding the air waves with divisive TV ads that malign homeless service providers and the people theyre trying to help.

Theyre using peoples legitimate frustration and worry and sadness about whats going on for folks who are unsheltered and tapping into that with what is a marketing campaign, said Jenny Lee, deputy director at racial justice advocacy group Coalition of Communities of Color and one of more than 700 people to sign a letter protesting the campaign. What we see with People for Portland is this strong push for something that we know is going to fail.

Shelter providers themselves have been some of the most vocally opposed to the push for more shelter. Andy Miller, head of the nonprofit Human Solutions, says he sees the campaign drumming up undirected populism toward a solution that will not make a dent in the problems, bucking years of research showing the only true path out of this crisis is moving people into housing.

We have not heard the voice of people on the streets, or in our shelters already, saying we would like to see the city build more shelter beds and force people to go sleep in them, Miller said. So if this is an attempt to respond to the humanity thats on the streets, where are the voices that represent that humanity asking for this as a solution?

But perhaps critics and supporters are all giving People for Portland too much credit. After all, much of the city looks exactly as it did when the campaign started.

For that reason, Columbia Sportswear CEO Tim Boyle says he has given up.

Boyle said he donated north of $25,000 to People for Portland with the understanding that the campaign would harness public pressure to improve the conditions of the citys homeless population and get the trash picked up. He says he no longer sees any light in this effort.

If the concept was to have action done by members of elected officials in the government, theres been virtually no action, Boyle said. Its raised the issue, but raising the issue is a small percentage of solving the issue.

Pollster John Horvick with DHM Research said People for Portland looms large in the minds of participants in his focus groups. People tend to feel their concerns about the state of the city have been validated by the effort. But theyre puzzled about where its all going and what they are supposed to do. As is he.

For all that theyre doing, it seems like their policy requests are really insignificant, and theyre not taking actions to really change what matters, which is who your representatives are making these decisions, Horvick said. Theyre not running ballot measures. I just find it odd. I find it confusing. I dont get that.

People For Portland consultants Looper, in particular have nothing nice to say about the regions elected officials. Commissioner Mingus Mapps, who Looper says he sees actually trying, is an exception.

In an interview, Looper painted local elected leaders with a broad brush: He called them fools gold and not advanced vertebrae. He said the city is losing to a bunch of elected officials who cant beat their way out of a wet paper bag.

These people are toast, he said. We tried to tell them, they werent listening.

But aside from battering local officials in campaign ads and interviews, the consultants say they have no plans to quicken their fall by endorsing other candidates in the city, county or Metro races this May. As a 501(c)(4), the advocacy campaign is not allowed to support candidates as their main activity, and Lavey and Looper dont intend to change forms. They are adamant the campaign was not set up for an electoral strategy, despite the rampant speculation that the effort was a way to assist gubernatorial candidate Betsy Johnson, a longtime Democratic state lawmaker running as an unaffiliated candidate for whom they have consulted for since October. While both campaigns may sing from a hymnal hypercritical of Portland, the consultants say their work for the two efforts remains separate.

Instead, they say, People for Portland will focus on trash. Lavey said the group is considering a lawsuit against the city and state for failing to remove garbage on roadway corridors that includes Interstate 405, I-5, Lombard Street and Powell Boulevard. Theyre currently sorting through 350 potential plaintiffs.

Past is prologue. If you look at what weve done, its a pretty good indicator of the things were gonna keep doing, Lavey said. Were not going away.

See the article here:

People for Portland is spending big to change the citys approach to homelessness. Is it working? - Oregon Public Broadcasting

Three years on, no one within the government has been held accountable for a program that is 40 per cent over budget, way behind schedule, politically skewed and failing to deliver on its stated aim of making it easier for people to get to and from work.

Loading

The minister who oversaw the programs creation, Alan Tudge, has been shifted out of the portfolio in late 2020 so cant face questions in Parliament over the saga. Freedom of information requests for the role of the Prime Minister are rebuffed on flimsy grounds or only contain sheets of black ink.

Scott Morrisons miracle election victory was built on promises of commuter car parks, roundabouts and sports grounds. All to be funded with taxpayers money.

It remains to be seen whether the government has learned the merits or otherwise of splashing cash around to win over increasingly cynical voters when it has no control over the land to be used or the planning processes involved.

Excerpt from:

Voters left stuck in the electoral traffic as car park fund falters - Sydney Morning Herald

news, local-news,

An Australian first set to create almost 4000 new jobs and deliver around $5.2 billion of investment in the region will revolutionise the way energy is generated across NSW. The Central-West Orana Renewable Energy Zone (REZ) will boast an improved transmission corridor that minimises impacts on landowners and maximises options to unlock more renewable energy in the future, NSW Treasurer Matt Kean said. The area - which incorporates Dubbo and stretches from south of Mumbil to as far north as the Warrumbungle local government area, then Narromine to the west and Cassillis in the east - will be Australia's first renewable energy zone. Mr Keen said the Central-West Orana REZ is pivotal to the NSW Government's plan to make the state's electricity system cheaper, cleaner and more reliable. He added renewable energy zones are modern day power stations that will change the way energy is generated and then transmitted across NSW. "The revised study corridor for new transmission infrastructure will minimise impacts on prime agricultural land in the region and enable us to deliver greater capacity for the Central-West Orana REZ to meet future energy needs," he said. That new route will accommodate additional transmission lines and, Mr Keen says, will give NSW options to deliver "nearly four times the amount of renewable power to the grid with the same infrastructure". Minister for Western NSW and Member for the Dubbo electorate, where the bulk of this new REZ will be located, Dugald Saunders said the Central-West Orana REZ will attract around $5.2 billion of private investment and support around 3,900 peak construction jobs and 500 ongoing jobs. "This is about getting the balance right in a way that boosts the economic and employment benefits for local communities, without compromising the assets that make this region so unique," Mr Saunders said. Member for the Upper Hunter David Layzell said the NSW Government has redesigned the eastern part of the corridor to avoid significant areas of high-quality agricultural land. "The majority of the revised corridor is now located on land owned by mining companies or alongside existing transmission lines, minimising the impact on prime agricultural land," Mr Layzell said. "This new route is a win for the Upper Hunter community and reflects the Government's commitment to building new energy infrastructure in the right places." The Energy Corporation of NSW (EnergyCo) will lead a competitive process to appoint a network operator to design, build, finance and maintain the new transmission infrastructure in the REZ. EnergyCo will undertake extensive community consultation and technical studies to refine the transmission alignment prior to lodging an Environmental Impact Statement for the project in early 2023. Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can continue to access our trusted content:

/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/GHcbaSNijNeVS4SULWDX8n/a533bffa-e63d-4d91-82b2-e57118bb389d.jpg/r0_4_1020_580_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg

February 25 2022 - 4:30PM

An Australian first set to create almost 4000 new jobs and deliver around $5.2 billion of investment in the region will revolutionise the way energy is generated across NSW.

The Central-West Orana Renewable Energy Zone (REZ) will boast an improved transmission corridor that minimises impacts on landowners and maximises options to unlock more renewable energy in the future, NSW Treasurer Matt Kean said.

The area - which incorporates Dubbo and stretches from south of Mumbil to as far north as the Warrumbungle local government area, then Narromine to the west and Cassillis in the east - will be Australia's first renewable energy zone.

Mr Keen said the Central-West Orana REZ is pivotal to the NSW Government's plan to make the state's electricity system cheaper, cleaner and more reliable.

He added renewable energy zones are modern day power stations that will change the way energy is generated and then transmitted across NSW.

"The revised study corridor for new transmission infrastructure will minimise impacts on prime agricultural land in the region and enable us to deliver greater capacity for the Central-West Orana REZ to meet future energy needs," he said.

That new route will accommodate additional transmission lines and, Mr Keen says, will give NSW options to deliver "nearly four times the amount of renewable power to the grid with the same infrastructure".

Minister for Western NSW and Member for the Dubbo electorate, where the bulk of this new REZ will be located, Dugald Saunders said the Central-West Orana REZ will attract around $5.2 billion of private investment and support around 3,900 peak construction jobs and 500 ongoing jobs.

The majority of the revised corridor is now located on land owned by mining companies.

"This is about getting the balance right in a way that boosts the economic and employment benefits for local communities, without compromising the assets that make this region so unique," Mr Saunders said.

Member for the Upper Hunter David Layzell said the NSW Government has redesigned the eastern part of the corridor to avoid significant areas of high-quality agricultural land.

"The majority of the revised corridor is now located on land owned by mining companies or alongside existing transmission lines, minimising the impact on prime agricultural land," Mr Layzell said.

"This new route is a win for the Upper Hunter community and reflects the Government's commitment to building new energy infrastructure in the right places."

The Energy Corporation of NSW (EnergyCo) will lead a competitive process to appoint a network operator to design, build, finance and maintain the new transmission infrastructure in the REZ.

EnergyCo will undertake extensive community consultation and technical studies to refine the transmission alignment prior to lodging an Environmental Impact Statement for the project in early 2023.

Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can continue to access our trusted content:

See original here:

Central-West Orana Renewable Energy Zone (REZ) to deliver billions of investment and almost 4000 jobs - Daily Liberal