Yes, I too am sicker than sick of all these folks who’ve moved into my hometown and, rather than embrace it for what it was, have forcibly molded it into a strange, sickening and unnatural creature. Filled with condos, boutiques, arm dogs, and arrogant snooties that were never a real part of this quiet and poor little town. Under the umbrella of anything is good as long as it: looks hip, wastes government money and slowly wears down whatever positive regulations and ways we had established. People are chomping at the bit to get rid of the urban growth boundary, they obviously don’t understand what a “deposit” bottle is, and they think that buses are for the dregs of society so if they can’t have infrastructure sapping lightrail/streetcar lines all over the place, then they’ll just drive their cars (drive like complete a-holes, I might add), and ride bicycles in a fashion that almost makes me embarrassed to have been a full-time cyclist around here for 15 years… And I just feel that one of these days some of these jerks are going to start thinking that they should be able to privately own the beaches.

Of course, when our wonderfully cheap abodes started going up at 20%+ a year (due to people realizing how horrid they had made California so they thought they would buy out the naive locals and spread the sprawl up here), the easy living withered away and it was obvious that something horrible was about to happen. But now, fifteen years later? I never would have imagined houses costing four times as much (or more, much, much more), than they did then, all the nice old apartments being converted into condos, the wasteland of sterile and shallow pretension that is the Pearl district. And the population booming to such an extent that native Portlanders are less than half of the population. As this wears away our old ways, it has some bad effects. Yes, aside from having to put up with these people everywhere and not being able to easily afford to live anywhere anymore… The thing that first got people starting to talk about Portland was building the bus mall downtown and banning cars from most of it. Such a anti-car and pro-mass transit and pedestrian development was widely hailed. Now, after all those years and all that effort, they are spending vast sums of money to add lightrail to the buses on the mall (as most of the “new Portlander’s are too fancy for the bus) and cars! It really ticks me off and it a terrible step back to the bad, pro-car (pro-pollution, pro-traffic and anti-people) planning of the sixties. Then this week I’ve been noticing that (downtown even) they are adding “pedestrian crossing buttons” to the streetlights downtown. So now we won’t even have the right to cross the street unless we get there before the cars going in our direction start moving so that we can hit the button. No more “a greenlight brings a walk signal that means that all traffic going that direction can move”. Now a green light means cars can go. People can go, if they happen to get there in time to hit the button.

It’s a terribly anti-pedestrian (and anti-people, as all of us are pedestrians sometimes, though only a lucky few of us are pedestrians all of the time), and I find it all to be a rude insult and a slap in the face to Portland. Honestly, I know there is no stopping this deluge now (short of my long wished for complete recession), so all I want to do is get the hell out of here and never come back (going to some quiet little place that I won’t change anything about), and have these people change the name of this damned city!

I blame most of it on Vera Katz, and her “hollow out the coffers and strip the services if we can spend the money on something that looks good in magazines instead” policies. But too late to worry about that. And yes, I say to hell with progress. Sure it generates more money, but all that does is require more money and it’s a dumb worldview that just spirals to everything costing more and making more and producing more and it just makes everything worse, drives people into debt and filled the world with landfills filled with garbage that no one needed anyway.

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But I just can’t get behind Obama. Well, I haven’t tried too, either. I am still stuck on Nader or or Gravel or maybe even Kucinich (except that apartment by mine with the stupid “Kuchinich, the eyes that see through the lies” poster in the window irritates me to no end).

Certainly, I would rather have Obama than Mccain or some other blatant fascists, as I would rather have had Clinton. But both parties are uninterested in presenting an actually meaningful candidate. Yes, both Clinton and Obama are meaningful in the sense of what they imply about the improving lot of women and minorities in this country, but politically? Certainly not. Dean was the only decent candidate who both would have made a serious impact and who also had a chance of getting the nomination since Jimmy Carter first rolled on the scene. I could hardly believe that the Republicrat machine put Kerry and Gore up as candidates… Gore especially, the democrats Quayle.

Luckily the candidate that they put up on the other side was such an obvious bad choice that he hadn’t a chance in hell of winning… Sad that Justice and the Democrats opted to let the Republicans get away with the theft of office… Twice! Another sign that the Demo’s don’t want to do anything that might challenge our little two-party system.

No matter how much the Democrat’s and Republican’s spar at each other, they are two halves of the same coin. Their attempts of them to ridicule and sideline third parties (and to get the media and public too also) are because they are a political version of the christian god and satan ideas. Godboys love to gripe about satan, and satan folks love to gripe about god, but most of them don’t want to be involved in discussions about other beliefs. Why? Because belief systems like that are based on being the only game in town and once people start looking at other systems, the fallacies become too apparent for any thinking adherent to stomach. It’s the same with politics. it’s a mindlessly easy comparison to look at the “good” Democrats and the “bad” Republican’s, but there aren’t that many differences to them, and those differences are more of degree than of content. They are both power oriented, capitalist organs who, while in power, continue to permit corporations to exist in a fashion that was illegal here not that long ago, keep a military supremacy over the world, dictate the policies of foreign nations, maintain profits for the rich, maintain the IRS and the fed’s ability to tax any and everything, maintain the corrupt system of lobbyists, and repressive “justice and education” systems that make things worse, work to support and spread the mentally and culturally sapping powers of the mass media, etc.

If the press or public started to give more attention to socialism, or greens or libertarians or whomever, then they people would be able to actually judge these politicians objectively rather than by standards that they have created themselves, and some might actually start to say. Hey politicians, why don’t you actually pull our military out of all the countries of the world, why don’t you actually throw out the tax system and reinvent it in a way that is clear and sensible, not garbled by talk and weighed down by mass designed to ensure that only the government can really translate, instead of continually making it more obtuse and manipulated by special interest groups?

Anyway, Democrat/Republican and god/satan. In a country as obsessed with “freedom” as this one, it is shocking how little freedom there is if you want to exist outside of these two control obsessed autocratic systems, who instill fear and ignorance in the people so as to ensure their continued survival and power.

I know that most people out there can’t stand Nader, mainly due to the terribly inaccurate misrepresentation of him by the media and the government, especially around the 2000 election. One statistic that people don’t like to point out is that way more Democrats in Florida voted for Bush than voted for Nader. I don’t see how that puts the blame for Bush’s preidency on Nader… Bush’s victory was just plain fraud, or if you don’t believe those kind of theories, then it was becuase the Democrat’s couldn’t get their own voters behind their chosen candidate. Either way, it certainly has nothing to do with Nader. but both parties will stop at little to demean and misrepresent third party or independent candidates, as they are a threat to the two party powershare of the Democrat and Republican machines.

The more votes Nader gets, the better. The two party system has to go. Anyone who has the moxie to watch “An Unreasonable Man”, will learn a lot about how the republicrats aren’t just the two biggest parties, this country’s government is set up to have those as the only viable parties, and their joint control of the “Official” Presidential debates is just the tip of the problem. There is a lot at stake in keeping it that way. Especially for the corporate interests who are the backbone of the big parties.