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‘You may want to consider relocating’ – Oregon police too broke to prevent crime
It was last August, and a woman was brutally raped and sodomized by her abusive ex-boyfriend after unsuccessfully pleading with a 911 dispatcher for over 10 minutes.“I’m not letting him in, but he’s, like, tried to break down the door, and he’s trying to break into one of the windows,” the woman is heard telling the operator in the calls.“He put me in the hospital a few weeks ago, and I’ve been trying to keep him away,” she said.Four times during that call, the operator told the woman that she wasn’t able to provide assistance.“I don’t have anybody to send out there,” she kept saying. “Once again, it’s unfortunate you guys don’t have any law enforcement up there.”At the county jail, staffing cuts caused by a lack of funding has formed a revolving door system where inmates are released sometimes right after being arrested because there’s seldom enough money to keep facilities functioning at even the bare minimum. There are only six deputies in the Josephine Sherriff’s Office, and recently the department’s canine unit was cut to a single dog.“You may want to consider relocating to an area with adequate law enforcement services,” the department cautioned the county’s 80,000 or so residents last year.Although a Wild West-like scenario has spiraled out of control in the Pacific Northwest, residents voted against a measure Tuesday that would have funded much-needed law enforcement operations at the cost of only a 3 percent tax levy.The measure would have bumped the county government tax rate — currently the lowest in the state — to $1.48 per $1,000, in turn costing the average homeowner in Josephine around $85 a year extra.But even after news of last year’s rape went viral, residents narrowly decided this week to halt any attempt to milk mere pennies on the dollar for an added sense of security. On Tuesday evening the decision was too close to call in Josephine, but by Wednesday afternoon the county clerk acknowledged to RT that the public safety levy was voted down by a margin of 51 to 49 percent, with barely 500 ballots deciding the fate of a county where calling 911 is no longer the way to handle an emergency.“There isn’t a day go by that we don’t have another victim,” Josephine County Sheriff Gil Gilberson told Oregon Public Broadcasting last week. Speaking to OPB, Gilberson directly blamed the ongoing inability to fight crime on budget restraints.”If you don’t pay the bill, you don’t get the service,” he said.Policing Josephine County wasn’t always a problem. In 2000, Congress passed the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act and as a result began sharing revenue made off of timber grown on public land.“Federal forests make up 60 percent of the land in many rural Oregon counties. Because federal land isn’t subject to property taxes, the federal government for decades shared timber sale revenue with the counties,” the Oregonian recently noted.Those funds were until recently divvied up among rural counties to help line the pockets where sparsely inhabited towns were losing out on taxes brought in by more densely populated regions. The act has expired, however, and the result has been the rapid defunding of public programs in some areas, including the Josephine Sherriff’s Office. Since the expiration of the bill, the county has lost millions of dollars in revenue that for more than a decade was a routine handout.In the case of last August’s rape, a 911 dispatcher stayed on the phone with the soon-to-be victim for over 10 minutes, instructing her to hide in her house while emergency options were considered.“None of the sheriff’s deputies in Josephine County were on duty,” explained Amelia Templeton of OPB. “So dispatch transferred the call to the Oregon State Police, but they also didn’t have anyone available.”“And four times in total, she says there isn’t anyone who can help,” she said.The expiration of the act that provided the city with timber revenue forced the Sheriff’s Office to cut its budget in half and most law enforcement operations have ended. Had voters agreed to a tax hike on Tuesday, the county expected to raise $9.5 million during the next year and slightly more annually through 2016. Those funds, the voters were told, would be used to increase inmate capacity at the county jail, provide the resources for the District Attorney’s office to prosecute more criminals and, generally, bring the force back up to snuff.“I’m not going to vote for it,” Josephine County convenience store owner Les Monk told Templeton. “Things are no worse or better now than they were when they were fully funded.”For Monk — and presumably the 13,365 other “nay” ballots casted on Tuesday — things are just fine in Josephine. Monk told Templeton that he carried a knife for his own protection and suggested that paying money for an inefficient police force wasn’t worth his tax dollars. “People have to understand you will, and are able, to defend your property,” he said.According to Templeton, an attorney for the rape victim said the woman felt hopeless, alone and very scared when she waited, unsuccessfully, for police assistance last year. Sheriff Gilbertson admitted that it’s a very real problem.”It’s devastated law enforcement,” Sheriff Gilbertson told The Oregonian. “The criminals now act with impunity and a sense of entitlement.”"It’s been a deteriorating situation for a long time,” added Greg Wolf, intergovernmental affairs director for Gov. John Kitzhaber, “and we can see that we’re going to hit a wall unless we come up with some dramatic solutions.”Nearby on Tuesday, voters in Curry County voters rejected a $4.5 million effort that aimed to reverse the dastardly trend there. And in Lane County, a five-year, $ 80 million property tax levy was approved amid similar circumstances — but only after eight previous attempts stretching all the way back to 1998 were rejected by voters.”We’ve essentially eviscerated law enforcement staffing over the last 45 years,” Lane County District Attorney Alex Gardner told a legislative committee earlier this year. With this week’s vote, Lane County can start to pick up the pieces. In Josephine, however, residents have a long ways to go.Speaking to OPB late Tuesday, reporter April Baer said Gov. Kitzhaber is now expected to declare a public safety emergency and likely and impose a temporary tax to keep at least some law enforcement operations functioning through the end of 2014. … Read More
Upcoming Trans-Pacific Partnership Looks Like Corporate Takeover
Leaked documents appear to show that negotiators are writing provisions that will set rules that are binding on Congress and our state legislatures tell us what laws and regulations our own country can pass or enforce. … Read More
How the TPP can rewrite US domestic laws
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WW2 ‘mines’ threaten global politics
Every Victory Day, the day Russians celebrate the defeat of Nazism, is not only another defining moment to commemorate the millions of WWII victims and to lay wreaths to the war monuments, scattered all over Europe, vast territory of the former Soviet Union. It is also a time, at which we draw the lessons from the past and try to put a full stop in the decades-long debate on who was on the right side of history and who was on the wrong. And, respectfully, who owes whom (and what, if anything) to finally settle the score and the bills of history.The history of the Second World War still hurts. It explodes in many ways – by creating new dangerous, divisive myths in the relationship between neighbors and reproducing old hatreds in modern societies. Each region of the world has its own set of explosive devices, inherited from the bloodiest war in human history. Therefore, let us roughly identify them as “West European”, “post-Soviet” and Asia-Pacific”.As for Western Europe, Germany, which unequivocally denounced fascism in 1945, is again in the news (don’t get surprised). This time it is over the reincarnation of Aryan supremacy ideas, promoted by the ideologists of the Third Reich and these days manifested by the young followers of classical WWII Nazi, trying to fit into the present-day reality of pacifist Germany.It is highly symbolic, that this year the Victory Day anniversary coincided with the opening of the trial in Munich of a group of ultra-right wing thugs calling themselves the National Socialist Underground (NSU) accused of a hate crime killing spree. The chief defendant, is 38-old Beate Zschape and is one of three charged with the murder of eight ethnic Turks, a Greek immigrant and a German policewoman between 2000 and 2007. It is reported the NSU’s accidental discovery in November 2011 has already forced Germany to reassess the lessons the country has learnt from her Nazi past.However, when it comes to Western Europe the problem of neo-Nazi is not restricted to Germany. It is an open secret that ultra-right forces are on the rise, with their popularity growing, allowing them to contest seats in local and European parliament elections. As during the Second World War there is a high temptation to pin the entire gamut of problems, related to looming economic crisis and eroding European identity on outsiders – immigrants from the troubled Eastern world, “people with dark skin”, “second rate humans.” So, this is a WWII time bomb which is ticking in modern Europe.Meantime, former Soviet countries have to defuse its own explosive devices of the war history. It is not only about annual Waffen-SS veterans marches through Riga the capital of EU member Latvia. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union – the country which once crushed fascism, it turned out that the Great Victory cements newly-independent states no more. Some of the former Soviet republics in their new search for self-identity proved to be the countries with an unpredictable past. Moreover, by depriving their nations of the right to celebrate the victory over fascism, local ruling elites are trying to lay the foundation for new “post-Soviet patriotism”.No surprise, that the mayor of Ukrainian city of Lviv Andrei Sadovy called V-Day a tragedy to commemorate “the victims of Nazi and communist terror”, thus, equalizing the two confronting forces of WWII. It is reported that this year there will be no celebrations in Lviv – one of the most beautiful East European cities. So, this is another mine of history, laid under the foundation of Russian-Ukrainian relations. And I don’t think that anybody has forgotten about a tragedy of Katyn involving Poles, Germans and Soviets, with emotions running and disagreements flaring up again.And finally, the mines of WWII are ticking in the Far East far beyond Russia’s borders. As Japanese politicians are visiting the Yasukuni temple – a controversial Tokyo shrine to commemorate millions of soldiers killed in Japanese wars, Japan’s neighbors – China and South Korea warn of the possible revival of a new Japanese nationalism. This year 168 Japanese ruling and opposition party lawmakers paid tribute at the shrine – it was the largest group of politicians ever to visit the Yasukuni temple. No surprise, that Beijing and Seoul protested, with China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying saying that Japan’s actions “merit vigilance by its Asian neighbors and the international community.”In its clouded relations with South Korea Japan has not yet settled the problem of the compensation for the Korean women, used for Japanese WWII brothels as sex slaves.An in addition to that, Tokyo is still in disagreement with Moscow over Peace Treaty, which is still not signed due to the disagreement over the Kuril Islands.This is another mine of WWII history – this time on the Pacific shore, thousands of miles away from Moscow and Berlin. So it is high time to de-mine the history the way the emergency services in Russia, acting with extreme caution, de-mine corroded WWII bombs and shells, still found during excavation works – sinister parcels from the past.Looking around at the present day war and peace situation one feels an urgent necessity to de-mine the last war’s mines and to be watchful about the new ones being daily planted all around the world right now. … Read More
Japanese Movement Against TPP Growing
Critics of the Trans-Pacific Partnership say it’s an attempt to impose an American system on Japan and would threaten Japanese public healthcare system … Read More
California wildfire burns 15-mile path to Pacific
BUTTE MEADOWS, Calif. (AP) — A Southern California wildfire carving a path to the sea grew to more than 15 square miles and crews prepared Friday for another bad day of gusting winds and searing weather.”We’re going to be at Mother Nature’s mercy,” Ventura County fire spokesman Tom Kruschke said.The wind-whipped fire erupted Thursday in the Camarillo area, damaging 15 homes and a cluster of recreational vehicles in a parking lot. About 2,000 Ventura County homes remained threatened and evacuations remained in force although the fire line edged southwards toward Malibu. It was about 20 miles from the coastal enclave at daybreak.The blaze was 10 percent contained but the work of more than 900 firefighters and deputies was just beginning, fire officials said.The weather forecast called for parching single-digit humidity, highs in the 90s in some fire areas and morning winds of 20 to 30 mph with gusts to 45 mph — slightly down from a day earlier.There’s still a chance of “explosive fire spread” before winds begin tapering off in the afternoon and cooler weather begins to kick in, said Curt Kaplan, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Oxnard.Continue Reading… … Read More
