http://www.ThePortlandAlliance.org/dupay






"I remember their names: Bessie Staley, Zebedee Manning, Donald Holbert, Barbra Jean Carico, James Wooten. All murder victims. I can’t forget them. My mind won’t let me. Some names I don’t remember, but I still see the bloody mess in the way they died. The young woman in St. John’s murdered by her boyfriend, shot point bank with a .30-30 rifle in her bathroom and her naked mother fleeing down the street into my arms, the one who escaped. The stinking rotten body of a man stabbed to death in Sellwood and left dead for three days in the stifling heat of summer. The bloody suicide of a man in Columbia Villa who put a 12 ga shot gun in his mouth and blew his brains out thru the ceiling of the apartment. The father who locked his garage and turned on his car, dying from carbon monoxide poisoning just in time for his school age son returning home from school trying to store his bike in the garage.

There are more but I will stop for now and dry my tears. Things I never wanted to see or smell and now can not forget." 

Don Dupay  
 
Stop Police Corruption!
 

The Friday 9-25-15 Oregonian gives us another story by Maxine Bernstein about the elitist Portland police and how they don't give a shit how they look to Portland's citizens.

Assistant Chief of Investigations Donna Henderson and Detective Division Commander George Burke, have invoked the 48 hour rule to the MAX by letting three officers involved in a fatal shooting, (June 28th) to view video surveillance from a private business before they were interviewed by investigators. This is the classic "get your stories straight, boys," agenda, before you have to face investigators, a privilege never allowed to poor john Q citizen. Chief Larry O'Dea, said "I find it shortsighted at best and offensive to our ongoing work on this." Well then Chief O'Dea DO something about it instead of wringing your hands and complaining. Henderson should be demoted and reassigned. Burke should be reassigned to patrol work on the graveyard shift. These two cops and the Chief that will do nothing about it are what is wrong with the Portland Police Bureau.

We have an election coming up and we need a mayor that will supervise the police and not be beholden to them. The police are not accountable to the citizens they work for and that MUST change in the near future.

Mr. Constantin Severe, of the so called "Independent Police Review Division" complained that showing the video was "against investigative best practices." Hell yeah it is! It is another example of police privilege that is disgusting the citizens and contributing to their lack of faith in police honesty. Stay tuned for another "white wash" showing the police once again have done nothing wrong and will not be held accountable, to anyone.

I have been writing a plan to reorganize the police and return them to citizen control which I have been talking about on "Oregon Voters Digest" a cable access TV show, hosted with Bruce Broussard and I will be posting here for all to see, the details of my ideas. My hope is that whoever becomes mayor uses some of my common sense ideas to reform the police, for the better. If you want your police department back...I can show you how to get it back.


Do you Feel Minimum?

September, 2015

Do you feel minimum? What is minimum? The dictionary defines it as "the least possible amount." Is that the amount of money you should be making at work? I don't feel like a "minimum." And I don't like the term. Do you? How about the term decent wage? Or how about livable wage? All of these terms are confusing as all things in life are relative. What is a livable wage? When Donald Trump famously went bankrupt one of several times years back, the banks determined that he needed $30,000 a month to live on at his current and accustomed lifestyle. Donald DuPay doesn't need quite that much money to live on comfortably. I like the term decent wage the most. It seems more realistic and fairer, somehow.

Many words evoke a mental image, a picture in your mind. What comes to mind when you see the words hotel maid? What comes to mind when I use the term minimum wage employee? Do you see a pimply teenager behind the counter at McDonald's? Do you see a brown-skinned person speaking English as a second language? Do you see an older person, an adult, bent over and past sixty? The truth is, many minimum wage employee's today are middle-aged and much older folks willing to work in fast food restaurants because they cannot afford to retire, and are in their fourth or fifth "career choice." This is essential not just supplemental income in many cases. Do you see those people in your mental image? Do they come to mind?

The term minimum is in many ways a classist term that evokes negative imagery. It does so because it seems that one group is looking down on a group they consider lessor than themselves. The term minimum is by its very nature, elitist. It says “I can't get mine if I give you yours.” It says "I need two cars but you can’t have one." It says "I must have money to pay my bills and to get braces for my kid’s teeth." It also says "I don’t care about you or your bills or your kid’s teeth."
It says "I so don’t care about you that I can legally avoid paying you any benefits by keeping your working hours at thirty nine hours a week, instead of the historically accepted forty hours per week." Minimum is the Walmart-Mc Donald’s business plan. It also says employees are expensive, but a business expense to be kept at a minimum. It says you are not human; you are just an expensive object, basically a robot, inhuman and non-sentient. Punch in on time please and punch out on time too, but don’t dare ask for a livable wage.

Minimum wage is corporations’ way of dehumanizing the time clock robots that they think we are.

I suggest that if a small business cannot afford to pay its employee's a decent wage then they should not have employees to trample on in the first place. They should not be in business. Big business can afford to pay a decent wage, but they don’t. They don’t because those at the top enjoy more perks, and more wealth when they underpay those at the bottom of the employment food chain.

“There are people that care about people and people who don’t care” says Rachael Maddow, host of the MSNBC Rachel Maddow show. I believe she is correct. Big corporations just don’t care. They don’t have to care. They have that power.

We hear a lot about the earning power and benefits from getting an education. Education is the way out of the minimum wage rat race the university administrators tell us. Well, yes, better educated people statistically do earn slightly more money in their lifetime, and better educated people are a benefit to themselves and those around them in many other ways too. But is an expensive degree, a master’s degree or a doctorate actually worth the time, hard work and enormous cost when so many university professors still continue to live below the poverty line?!

My wife Theresa, has a master’s degree and is $131,000 in debt, and will likely spend the rest of her life paying that debt off. Simply because she wanted and needed to get an education. Look at it this way. Colleges and Universities are a business. Their product is education. Their customers are students. The laborers are adjuncts. Administrators are the CEO's. As a business, the top few keep the bottom few at minimum wage and this pattern is becoming more and more accepted, as more professors are denied tenure and more women professors are passed over for male professors for tenure. Too many adjunct professors are paid so inadequately they qualify for food stamps and other benefits that generally are given to poverty-stricken people. The ideology of these American corporations and universities seem to say...if I share equally with you then I as the administrator won’t get as much.

The top few get the big money because the bottom few are kept at low wages. My step daughter, Amelia, worked for over two years at Portland’s Café Yumm on SW 4th and Morrison Street. Her employers allowed Amelia and their other employees to often work only 38-39 hours a week so they, the employers would not have to pay benefits. This practice  became commonplace in the early 1990s and in some companies, like Café Yumm, it continues and as a result, their employees continue to struggle, live in poverty and are denied medical and dental benefits. Where is the morality or the justice in a company knowingly allowing employees to work for only 38 or 39 hours per week solely so they can deny their employee's benefits?

In the university business, adjunct professors are offered three-month term contracts that must be renewed each term. Neither fast food employees nor adjunct professors can ever be happy employees living with such felt jeopardy and uncertainty. They are always on the edge because of income insecurity. Will they be hired next term? Will they not be hired next term? They are on the edge of losing their tiny studio and one bedroom apartments, as they live paycheck to paycheck. They are on the edge because they do not eat regularly or have the money to buy quality food or produce. They are living on the edge; with their masters and their doctorate degrees gathering dust on a wall somewhere.

In this unsettling employment environment, worker's wonder what will happen if they get sick? What will happen if they lose their job? What will happen if they can’t pay the rent? My question is, how can we maintain an insecure population of minimum wage earners, whether at Walmart or at our local university, and expect our country to grow economically, culturally and socially?
 
This is a moral and a social issue. We have a moral obligation to fight for better working conditions for an insecure population of the minimum people in our midst every day. Our friends, our coworkers, our neighbors and our family members.

I am a full-time undergraduate student at Portland State University, in Portland Oregon, and my university is a prime and disgusting example of employment inequity in how it treats it's adjunct professors. In an editorial I wrote in 2014, which was published in The Spectrum, a University authorized magazine, entitled “Let Them Eat Tuition,”  

I noted that university president Wim Weiwel collects the enormous annual salary of $540,000, plus a free luxury residence in a fine neighborhood, and a $750. 00 monthly car allowance. President Weiwel’s office is not located on PSU campus (thus further isolating him from students and faculty) but elsewhere, several miles away from PSU campus. His robot minions, the adjunct professors that actually teach students, get their one term contracts and are paid about $39.000 annually if they get their contracts renewed. 

The lesson here tells anyone interested enough to examine the issue, or any Education major, that your degree in education may be essentially worthless when the time comes for you to seek employment. It also states loud and clear that there is certainly no money in teaching. The real money in education is in administration. And administrators don’t teach.
Thank you university president Wim Wiewel for a lesson well taught and being an example of greed and elitist indifference. No wonder you're always smiling, your life is set. Sadly, the people who provide the PRODUCT for the university, their lives are NOT set.

By Don DuPay


Visit Don's site for this essay and much more writing?  https://sites.google.com/site/dondupaysite/what-is-minimum
 


A Portland Policeman's Memoir "Behind the Badge in River City" by Don Dupay.
Depicting the aura of the Police department from the early 60's to the late 70'...

Published on Jun 1, 2015  Checkout this interview An Interview with Don Dupay




A Portland Policeman's Memoir "Behind the Badge in River City" by Don Du pay. Depicting the aura of the Police department from the early 60's to the late 70'...
Published on Jun 1, 2015

A Portland Policeman's Memoir "Behind the Badge in River City" by Don Du pay. Depicting the aura of the Police department from the early 60's to the late 70's. How has the department changes since then?  Category  News & Politics  License  Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed)





 



Hypocrisy Rules; the State of the Pot Business in Oregon
http://www.ThePortlandAlliance.org/dupay

 

By Don L. Dupay

June 2012

I've been smoking, buying, selling and advocating for (in print and on cable TV) the availability of marijuana (for medical and casual use) for about 35 years right here in River City. I don’t like the word “pot” because of its negative connotations. But pot is still the most recognizable name for marijuana; which is by the way, a Spanish word for cannabis, the Latin word for pot. But since most folks wouldn’t know “cannabis” if it ran over them, “pot” is the word I use, so we’re all on the same page.

From a 35-year, local expert, here is the truth: pot is not a "drug." It's an herb with unusual properties. Only big pharmaceutical companies make synthetic drugs. The first untruth is that pot is a drug! The feds want you to believe it's a drug, so they list it as schedule one: right up there with cocaine and heroin. The other hypocrisy is it's against the law to sell pot. But which law are we talking about? In California it's sold openly
in so-called “dispensaries.” For $17 a gram, for example, at Harborside- in Oakland.

Federal law says you can't buy or sell pot, California included. States with medical marijuana laws say you can purchase it, grow it, and smoke it. Federal law still says no, that it's a schedule one drug. So since you can't buy it, sell it or smoke it, this forces word games, codes and whispers. We “donate” money to the seller, for something they can't sell and they “donate” pot to the medical patient for something they can't afford to purchase. We evade, we avoid, we form cannabis clubs and collectives. Anything to get around the letter of the law. We users are then forced to participate in the hypocrisy with these word games and made up co-ops, making the situation worse.

Oregon jacked up the fee it charges qualified medical patients from $100 to $200, so the state has doubled the fee on something that the feds say we can't have at all! How is that for a little hypocrisy? Who the hell is in charge? What law are we supposed to follow? What am I supposed to do or shall I just ignore it all?

Also damn few politicians in Oregon favor marijuana. It was not politicians who made pot legal for medical use, citizens took action through initiative petitions to make the law. And now that the program has made money over the past several years, the same politicians who didn't want pot in the state, now don't mind taking a couple million dollars from the program to fill holes in the state budget.

This is a defacto tax on sick people and more hypocrisy. Now, lets talk about demand. Unless you're in a local pot business, you don't have a clue about the absolutely insatiable appetite for pot. The demand astounds even me and grows everyday! Ten years ago, when I first obtained my medical marijuana card, we were closing in on 2,000 patients. Dr Leveque, Paul Stanford and myself talked about it on a cable TV show, “Cannabis Common Sense.” Now, ten years later, we are closing in on 60,000 patients! How is that for an increase in demand?

Pushing the demand higher are various cultural ties to pot from within our increasingly diverse ethnic populations. Just try to separate the Jamaican community from their “ganja,” black folks from their good-old “weed,” Mexicans from their “marijuana,” Hawaiians from their “pacalolo,” or Samoans from their “maluaga.” It's like trying to separate the Chinese from fireworks. It doesn't work. Give it up. Stop trying.

The demand for marijuana is increasing and there is nothing the government can do about it. The law of supply and demand is more powerful than the government's ability to control. The laws of supply and demand, gravity, and averages are all beyond our ability to control.

Now lets talk about doctors in the pot business. Physicians swear to the Hippocratic oath when they become doctors. The oath says first, “do no harm.” Now doctor, if you know about a medicine that might help my chronic pain and you don't tell me about it because of personal reasons or
the federal government saying you can't recommend it, then you are guilty of malpractice and in violation of your Hippocratic oath. Ignoring the Hippocratic oath is hypocrisy!

Dococrit is my newly invented word for doctors who ignore the Hippocratic oath. The most evil of these dococrit's are the ones who operate so-called pain management clinics for folks in chronic pain. They dispense addictive narcotic pain killers like Oxycodone. Once addicted, their pain patients are like slaves. I call the addicted patients 'slaves to the drugs' but dococrit's call them repeat customers. Dococrit's do not tell their addicted patients about pain-killing benefits, CBC's and the Cannabinol in pot nor about attitude improvements due to the THC.

And isn't medicine supposed to make you feel better? Rather than numb and confused? A dococrit is any doctor who does not follow the oath he/she took to Hippocrates and instead follows Big Pharma and allows those corporations to dictate their business. There is a big steaming load of hypocrisy in the dococrit business! Amen to that!

Now lets talk about growing pot. The cultivation is hard, heavy, hot, dirty, frustrating, and time-consuming work. When it's a labor of love, this makes it better but not much. In my ten years of growing pot, I've grown in five-gallon buckets, 35 gallon garbage cans, bathrooms, bedroom closets, closets under the stairs, and a variety of places indoors with dozens of hundred thousand watt lights. And in multiple locations outdoors
on Sauvie Island and in buckets of water in my garage. (They call this hydroponics.)

I've grown it all ways and all different ways. “Aeroponic cloning” which is growing plants in a water mist, without any dirt must have come from the space program. They knew they had to have plants in space but they didn't want to haul all that dirt up there. My advice is to stay away from hydroponics! Every bucket, every hose connection, every nutrient reservoir, every pump is one more thing that can go wrong. Put your plants in dirt; there are enough problems in this medium.

Additionally, every 1000 watt light bulb you add will increase your light bill about $20 per month, along with encouraging spider mites, which are an everyday threat to your crop. Spider mites like your pot about 10 times as much as you do and can envelope your plants and destroy them. Although they are tiny, they really are spiders and they really do spin webs.

All growers are in a hurry to harvest. This encourages over-fertilization of the plant to get it to hurry up and at the same time encourages an early harvest to get the pot on the market.

I've looked at dozens of pounds of pot under my magnifying glass and seen spider mite damage and signs of over fertilization. Too many crops are harvested before the tri-cromes have become mature and turned amber. This will certainly get the recreational user high but is not the best medicine for patients because the pot was harvested before its time. Growers need to sell, to recoup their investment in soil, fertilizer, power and time. Growing medicine is a money-driven operation. The medical patient is not the first priority; cash is the first priority and always will be.

Now that you can see the difficulties and contradictions in law and principles, newcomers to the medical marijuana program must be aware of the next hypocrisy. Beware of any grower you may meet at an Oregon Normal meeting or other members-only meetings, who says “I will give you free pot, up to two ounces a month or a pound in the fall and a pound in the spring. All you have to do is give me your medical card so I can legally grow for you, some serious cash so I can buy the equipment, fertilizer and soil, and then of course you must wait for the plants to grow and be harvested (a three or four month wait.) If you hear this promise from anyone, run, don't walk, to the nearest exit and hold tight to your wallet. With my advice, you've just escaped being ripped off.

What must the new patient do then, to get their medicine? Sadly, the only real way, the only safe way, is to grow your own. Failing that, perhaps your mother can grow it for you, but then only if she has the soul and compassion of Mother Teresa with a green thumb. In the ten years I've been growing pot and active in the pot business, not once (I repeat not once!) did I ever see a good relationship or a good outcome for anyone with a hired grower. The patients always get ripped off, the grower walks away claiming spider mites got the crop, the plants died, the cops took them, the plants were stolen, etc. He got his and you got screwed.

Perhaps, just perhaps, if you can't grow it yourself and Mother Teresa is not available, you might be just as well-off buying your pot from the guy you always bought it from. Chances are your old dealer gets his supply from a medical grow. There is a lot of “leakage” of medical pot into the black market and I'm okay with this. I think every adult should be able to use the plants God gave us. Government officials falsely think they can legislate away or take away a natural right! I consider this to be arrogance beyond belief! Legalize pot, yes or no? No, no, a thousand times no! Emphatically no! Does my answer surprise you? I'll tell you why.

Let me bring in the Dandelion analysis; both pot and Dandelions are weeds. Both groups have a support group and a hate group. Some folks like Dandelions and eat the greens, like they would mustard greens or collard greens; a food source. Some people think Dandelions are a pesky weed, growing in their front lawn and in cracks in the driveway. They buy poison and kill them. One weed, with two different points of view. Now suppose the government made Dandelions illegal and a schedule one drug. An ounce of Dandelion leaves and flowers will get you federal prison time.

So, now the pro Dandelion folks get up in a huff and say “Well! Since the government made it illegal, we have to make it legal!” No, you don't! You make an end-run around the law and remove the word Dandelion” from the statute. This returns that weed to a simple status of neither legal or illegal.

Its the same with pot. Just because the government made it "illegal," we proponents don't need to make it legal. Make an initiative petition end-run around the law and remove the words “Marijuana/cannabis” from the statute. Tear the teeth out of the law and the balls off those who dared to propose it. Return the plant to the simple status of 'weed.' Just like it was, when George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew it and smoked it. Washington was purported to “require” it. (Require was a word he used in a letter to one of his employees.} And who does a person who “requires” it smoke it with? Probably Tom Jefferson and his cronies. Pot has always been a social thing. They smoked pot with their cronies. I don't know what they drank; probably something strong!

Fast forward to now. Remove the word “cronies” and insert the word “homies.” Now we smoke pot with our “homies” and drink whatever. It's how we roll today. It's how we chill today. The epiphany here should be, although the culture between our forefathers, (the old white guys) and the ethnic mix of cultures today has changed dramatically, what has not changed is the weed! It's the same pot! I don't support the Oregon Cannabis tax act or any legislation that seeks to legalize pot. It's the wrong legislation.

But what if this does become the law in Oregon? What if pot becomes legal? How does this brilliantly successful multi-million dollar black market pot business integrate itself into a legal system where only a few select growers can compete? There are thousands of growers in Oregon and they are all used to selling their pot for $200 for an ounce and up. The $50 an ounce price, bandied about by some proponents of legalization is just a guess. I think its unrealistic.

The demand for pot that exists today will not go away if legalization occurs. It will increase. How many growers are going to be willing to sell their $200 ounces for $50? None that I know of and I know a lot of them! The only thing I see bringing down the cost of pot, is cheaper growing costs.

Is the price of pot growing equipment going to come down? No. Is the power company going to give pot growers a cheaper electric rate? No. So what happens? Pot will not be cheaper. Remember the law of supply and demand? No profit, no product! If Fred Myers couldn't make money selling bananas, there wouldn't be any bananas in the store!

The DEA strategy to enforce federal marijuana laws in Oregon, (if they ever had a strategy) has failed badly. They could not anticipate the voracious demand for pot or the equally voracious supply chain. They could have arrested each medical marijuana patient for violating federal law; that would have been a big chill. They could have told the IRS about pot doctors taking their payment for services rendered in cash. Crisp $100 bills are hard to trace and doctors know that. They could have arrested the doctors for “conspiracy to facilitate access to a federally-controlled substance.” They could have arrested medical marijuana clinic owners for “facilitating access to a federally-controlled substance.” They could have arrested state workers in the medical marijuana program for “facilitating access to a federally-controlled substance.”

                                But they didn't.

And now with almost 60,000 medical marijuana patient's its too late. The DEA lost the battle in Oregon, just as they have in California. Too much demand and too much supply for these authorities to deal with. This doesn't mean they're not still dangerous because they are! They want you in prison.

If I've left you in a swirl of hypocrisy, it's because I've told you the truth. And if pot becomes legal in Oregon and you don't like what the government is selling at their store, then perhaps you should buy it from the same guy you've always bought it from.

Failing that, there is always “that guy” sitting on a park bench on Waterfront Park, down by the public restrooms. Wear a shirt or hat with a marijuana leaf on it so he knows you're cool. And no, I don't know his name.

By Don DuPay




"Behind the Badge in River City: A Police Memoir"
by Don DuPay

http://www.ThePortlandAlliance.org/behindthebadge

            
"Behind the Badge in River City:
  A Police Memoir, is a revealing,
    unique and important book."



Don Dupay Personal Website



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