While Rome Burns #3 112 degrees yesterday 6-27-21 in Portland breaking the record set the day before at 108 degrees. The following day it would reach 114 degrees. When I read of the unusual weather in other places I feel some empathy but I know I am not feeling the impact of the monsoon rains, the tornado, the stifling heat there. When it hits home whether the scorching heat or the tree devastating ice storm last winter it has an immediacy. I begin to think about the political entities and geographic divisions we humans have created. They have served but now they seem so inadequate for the challenges of the climate, in fact counter productive. There is not any quick fix or vaccine for an intervention to make things right. Now here in Portland, the “heat dome” A heat dome is caused by a strong ridge of high pressure that traps warm air underneath it. This weather today makes the obvious case for “climate change”. This is not a politic...
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Michael Cannarella 1565 SW Highland Pkwy Portland, OR 97221 The Honorable Senator Jeff Merkley 531 Hart Senate Office Building Washington, DC 20510 Dear Senator Merkley: June 1, 2021 I am writing to you to share with you my biggest concern. I am seventy-two years old and although I lived through the late 1960’s with the Vietnam war and I was present in Detroit for the 1967 riots I have never in my life felt that our democracy was more at risk. When I read that the income inequality in the U.S is equal to that of the Soviet Union or China the rise of an authoritarian despot, what we endured for four years, is easier to understand. I know that it can be lost in the twenty-four hour news cycle or dismissed by Fox news commentators, but, in this country we have reached an incredibly important moment in our history. I believe either we begin to address the inequality; plus the infrastructure and immigration issues or we will be sowing the fields for another despot....
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Bessemer Fails Union Organizing 101 The best article I have read about the union election at Amazon in Bessemer, Alabama was by Jane McAlevey in the Nation, “Blowout in Bessemer: A Postmortem on the Amazon Campaign”. The article details the steps, missteps the union took in the campaign. It was hard for me to read about this campaign. There should never have been an election. The missteps and utter ineptitude of the union effort in Alabama was torture for me to read about. More about that in a moment. Now retired, I was a union organizer here in Oregon for over fifteen years, and pretty successful, with over thirty successful campaigns for AFSCME, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and several successful campaigns for the ILWU, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, the most notable one the Union at Powells Books, Local 5. My union electio...