By Nicholas Caleb Senator Ron Wyden held a “listening session” in Portland on Monday to discuss the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, the latest in a line of sneaky, corporate, anti-democratic policymaking. Although the US Trade Representative is currently keeping all the details of negotiation secret from the public and most of Congress, we know (from leaks)…
Category: Nicholas Caleb
Hey Portland, Let’s Give Nature Some Rights and Create A Movement in the Process
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[A]t bottom, it seems, it all comes down to a simple but profound truth: that as long as ecological governance remains in the grip of essentially unregulated (liberal or neoliberal) capitalism—a regime responsible for much if not most of the plunder and theft of our ecological wealth in the last, roughly 150 years—there never will…
Irreformable Corruption, Rebellious Cities, Commerce, and Coal Trains
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By Nicholas Caleb Through a process of losing confidence that has spanned my twenties, I’ve finally given up on national politics and find it incapable of being reformed through existing institutional reform mechanisms (except maybe a constitutional amendment coming from a state driven convention; different can of worms for a different post). The lack of…
M1: Fire a Cop, Hire Two Teachers
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This story is part of our feature about the many protest events on May 1, 2012. Visit the feature page to see more. by Nick Caleb Dear Occupy Portland, local activist community, and broader Portland, On May Day, we witnessed the lengths to which the Portland Police Bureau, and by extension the City of Portland…
Portland Police Prove the Point of Anti-Police Brutality March
by Nicholas Caleb and Adam Rothstein When the Portland Police tell you that your language is “hostile and escalating,” it is probably a cause for concern. This is what happened on the evening of February 6th, when many people from Occupy Portland first found out about an Anti-Police Brutality March via a Porland Police Bureau…
Money is Not Free Speech
by Nicholas Caleb “MONEY! IS! NOT FREE SPEECH!” “MONEY! IS! NOT FREE SPEECH!” I spent three years of my life at the University of Oregon School of Law painfully internalizing the finer details of the tortured pro-corporate / anti-human tripe that passes for judicial legal reasoning in the Supreme Court. Outside of some significant decisions…
An Ordinary Injustice (Averted)
by Nicholas Caleb Every once in a while, you get to witness firsthand the sterilized, mechanical, inhuman, and ultimately ordinary injustices of our system’s procedures. On Friday, December 23rd, I received my latest exposure to this melancholy-inspiring fact of life by way of a trip to a property auction. Every weekday at 10 and 11…