Tactical urbanism, bicycle rebellion, Right to the City.

The Sound and Fury of Portland on November 29th 2014

It took over a year for Portland’s Citizen Review Commission to issue a ruling regarding the police action of November 29, 2014. In January of this year, the panel came to a 5-3 decision stating that orders issued by the Portland Police Bureau to hundreds of Black Lives Matter protesters were in fact unlawful.

CRC’s investigation was the result of some 40 complaints filed with the city auditor’s office the Monday morning following a weekend of unrest in the wake of a grand jury decision to not indict Darren Wilson, who shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson earlier that summer.

The Oregonian reported on the night of Nov 29, 2014 hours after a rally attended by Rev. Jesse Jackson, over a hundred protesters were kettled by police and told they were under arrest. The entire crowd was held for almost an hour along with members of the media, while just 10 protesters were taken into custody for booking on disorderly conduct charges.

During the CRC’s hearing, one member asked how the 10 were chosen to be placed in custody. “That I can’t speak to, how the 10 were chosen,” Capt. Bryan Parman of the PPB replied.

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Where Would George Hayduke Bike?

Earlier this month the LA Times reported dozens of luxury cars were torched in Berlin by a group calling itself the Social Democratic People’s Bicycle Commando. Clearly this sort of over-the-top name was meant to be cheeky, but their tactics were quite serious.

The Bike Commandos claimed they “wanted to remove the windows from the luxury cars and scrap them the warm way,” according to a statement RT News linked to IndyMedia. The vandalism was in response to rapid gentrification in the city, and to recent police raids targeting squatters and other homeless people.

The Times claimed all 50 “masked left-wing extremists” were in fact on bicycles, but didn’t cite an eye-witness to confirm this. But let’s assume they were, and that a brigade of cyclists torching bourgeois automobiles has an implied environmental connotation beyond mere housing politics.

I shared the article in several online bike forums, and as you’d expect responses varied from “Hell yeah, fuck cars!” to “That’s terrible, it makes bikers look bad, violence is always wrong!”

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How Corrupted Is the Oregon League of Conservation Voters?

[Editors note: Former Oregon state rep Jules Bailey (D) is currently running for mayor of Portland, Oregon and has routinely congratulated his own legislative record on environmental issues. I thought it would be prudent to take a look back on Bailey’s actual voting record, and the monied environmental groups who award Democrats for portions of their voting records. Originally published February 2014 on Mismanaging Perception, Earth First! Newswire, and Nature News Network.]

Last week at a public hearing over the proposed Columbia River Crossing freeway expansion, Oregon League of Conservation Voters executive director Doug Moore sat down in the capitol building in Salem to testify against the bloated mega-project. After refusing to oppose the CRC during the 2013 legislative session, and after refusing to even sign on to a letter of opposition last fall for a renewed ‘Oregon-only’ push by state Democrats, OLCV was finally ready to come out swinging against the costly, ecologically disastrous boondoggle.

Moore thanked the hearing committee, mentioned how his group “holds legislative leaders accountable”, then spoke about how OLCV views CRC-supporting Dems as allies. He barely got out the words ‘opposed to this project‘ before concluding his testimony. In total, Doug Moore spoke for about 35 seconds.

As the state chapter of the national League of Conservation Voters, OLCV is among the most powerful and influential environmental groups in Oregon. Their endorsements and legislative scorecard rankings are coveted by politicians, and often set the overall tone for smaller enviro-groups. In a state that prides ecology, voters pay attention to what OLCV has to say. As an organization that brings in hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual donations, OLCV is as well funded as they are politically well-connected.

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The Radical Urban Agenda of Bernie Sanders

Urbanists are always complaining presidents and other federal officials don’t focus enough on urban issues. They’re right to. National politics is framed around the Heartland of America, not dense urban centers where most of us actually live.

That could soon change. Bernie Sanders is currently waging an insurgent campaign for president inside the other corporate militaristic party, much to the shock of the Democratic establishment. And I was wrong. Other writers were too. We predicted Sanders would be a sheepdog who’d herd the Left to the doorstep of Hillary’s Starkiller Base, drop out, and promptly endorse her.

Instead we have the tie in Iowa, the record 3.5 million individual donations, the 84% youth vote.

And Sanders accomplished this by having two things Hillary can’t buy: authenticity and likability.

The other rare qualification Sanders has is being a former mayor. The only president in US history to ever have that in their resume was man-walrus Grover Cleveland.

Why does this matter? Because as a mayor, you’re far more engaged (hopefully) with the complexities of human nature and need, and likely less partisan or ideological. Liberal and conservative might be opposites in rural Ohio, but in cities such labels become meaningless. This might be why his proposed climate action plan includes increasing funding for transportation by a staggering 250%.

Screen Shot 2016-02-07 at 5.55.51 PMWhen you realize the guy feeding pigeons in his sandals might become president of America.

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