So the other month I mentioned Betsy Johnson, the Columbia County airport pest currently running for governor as an "independent".
Now.
First, ol' Bets is about as "independent" as I am the fucking Dragon King of Bhutan.
She's a bog-standard pre-Trumpian Oregon Republican. She owns a fucking machinegun, for fuck's sake, and checks all the GOP low-tax/pro-plutocrat boxes. She's a wholly-owned subsidiary of the big business interests that ran the Oregon GOP before their voters ate the culture war monkey brains and developed the prion disease that has now lobotomized the national Republican party
So the only point in her favor is that she's just not as looney as the actual Republican candidate, who is exactly what you'd expect from the sort of person the GQP wants to rule the libs with an iron hand; a fucking goofy QANut.
No, what's irritating to me is that as a supposed "independent" she's got nothing, and none of the usual media suspects is willing to lay that out to the voters.
The whole point of a third party/independent candidate is that they're outside the whole system, right? They're not beholden to the institutional interests of the two big parties that our electoral system inevitably produces.
If the states are, in fact, the "laboratories of democracy" as Justice Brandeis is supposed to have claimed then Bets is that heroic lone researcher, working tirelessly in her basement to produce the results of ideas that Big Pharma or Big Chem have intentionally left untried.
She's the one who's supposed to break the bounds of conventional U.S. politics with new ideas and new plans.
So.
How's she doing with that?
Let's take a look at just one issue: homelessness.
I talked at length about it in the link at the top of the page. My conclusion?
"Portland, like a lot of the rest of this country, has too few places for poor people to live.
Seriously.
That's it.
It's hard to be poor and find a place to live because your supposed fellow-Americans have either made it hard to find places for poor people to live, or don't care."
So let's go to Bets' campaign page - it's the second link at the top - and see what new ideas and new plans she proposes. We'll start with a screenshot of her "homelessness" issue tab:
Here's her lead-in:
"Under Kate Brown and Tina Kotek, the number of unsheltered homeless has grown; there are more dangerous tent cities in many more locales; more people using, buying, and selling drugs openly on the streets; more people in desperate need of mental health services; more waste and garbage piling up in public areas; and more people dying or being killed on our streets. No issue demands bolder leadership and change than Oregon’s homeless crisis.
As Oregon’s independent governor, I will lead on homelessness with straight-talk and no-nonsense urgency. I will hold state and local officials accountable for achieving results. Having helped establish the Bybee Lakes Hope Center in North Portland, which provides a broad array of services to people experiencing homelessness, I know that homelessness is a complex issue."
Having admitted that "homelessness is a complex issue" Bets' signature achievement on the subject, what she touts as her reason for "knowing" about the complexity of homelessness, is the "Bybee Lakes Hope Center in North Portland".
Let's look into that a bit, shall we?
First of all...North Portland! Ma hood! Wassup, brah! Where you at, Hope Center homies? Hopies, testify!
Wait...the fuck?
Where the fuck IS this joint??? What? THERE???
Y'see..."Bybee" is the giveaway.
Bybee Lake is a remnant of the old Columbia River floodplain, now locked in by diking and filling.
It's waaaaaaay the fuck out on what's called "the Thumb", miles away from the city center - where things like jobs, SROs, mental and physical health treatment services are - and even too far from "downtown" St. Johns for anyone but a race walker to hike to without getting gassed.
It's buttfuck nowhere.
Here's what Bets' idea of a terrific place to put homeless people so they can "achieve results" looks like:
And here's what's around it:
This is one of the worst industrial deserts in Portland.
There's literally nothing there but miles of empty streets, warehouses, and docks. The bus service is pathetic: the #11 runs a whopping total of 8 times a day on weekdays, neither before 5am nor after 7pm, and not on weekends.
That's Betsy's idea of "helping" solve the homeless problem; an industrial shed in the middle of the least-peopled part of North, impossible to reach without a car, and miles from any sort of human need-fulfillers ranging from food to shelter to a pack of American Spirit.
This is just fucking ridiculous.
But this is Bets' "plan".
In the text she goes into detail:
"Set a plan to end dangerous and unregulated camping in public places by creating more safe, designated camping areas and more emergency shelters with access to life-saving services. Oregon cannot continue to use public places as a waiting room for services and/or housing. This failed approach is dangerous and inhumane."
Bets is just lying again here. Oregon law as it now stands forbids the local authorities to use force to remove camps unless the campers already HAVE "designated camping areas and...shelters" to go to. It's not that her opponents WANT the situation. It's that it:
1) costs tax money, which Bets' plutocratic owners and her wingnut voters don't want to give, and
2) means putting the hoboes amongst the Good People of Portland, which those people don't want to see, either.
All of which means that places like the cities of Portland and Salem are in binds; they want to move the campers out - because nobody likes nutters living in trash heaps - but they know that without the money and the political capital to have somewhere better to go they're just chasing them around the open spaces.
And the "shelters" are, still, the worst "answer". People hate them, and 9 of 10 will immediately run back out to the streets.
So. Stupid games for stupid prizes, Bets.
How about the rest of her "ideas"?
Like any Republican, Bets luuurves her some coppers, and her "plan" includes the usual copaganda about how the problem isn't that Portland Police Bureau is a wretched hive of scum and villainy but that the coppers don't get enough "support" (i.e. head-to-toe tonguebathing) from the local pols.
She also loves some developers, so there's the usual GOP boilerplate about "...outdated rules, regulations, and fees..." which is more than likely the usual GOP-speak for "all that fucking bugs-and-bunnies-enviro-shit".
Bottom line? The result of 86ing "rules and regulations" is not going to be more affordable housing, but more McMansions in the 'burbs and spendy single-family homes.
Developers make money building that stuff, and they won't build low-cost units for low-income people unless "rules and regulations" (and development bureaus and tax measures) force them.
And that ties back into her other homelessness "plans"; if she really meant them to work they'd all mean more taxes, more top-down forcing neighborhoods to accept low-cost housing and other residential options, more support (meaning, more money) for things like treatment, medical, psychiatric, and economic assistance.
Helping get anything like close to "solving" the problem of poor people without homes takes fucking time and money. LOTS of time and money.
Is Bets down with ANY of this?
Don't make me laugh.
She wants to let cops jail hoboes, and she wants her developer friends to make lots of lovely money.
That's it. That's all. Everything else is smoke, mirrors, and bullshit.
So:
Because unlike this post, the Oregonian and all the other "news" outlets refuse to do what it took me about twenty minutes to do - expose "Betsy" as nothing more than the same fucking sort of airport pest she was thirty years ago
And that is part of why we can't have nice things.
Here in Oregon...or anywhere else in this fucking country.
No comments:
Post a Comment