Commentary Update for June 17, 2002: Eisenberg, Pugsley on Gov's Race, Fast Track, Square D, New Urbanism, TIF I Was A Rich Man, Harwood Bought Out, Nuclear Waste Transport, Environmental Studies

Friends:

Libertarian Party candidate Ed Thompson has gotten a truckload of state and national press heralding him as the Jesse Ventura of this year's race for governor of Wisconsin. Most of the pundits forget that The Body ran not as a Libertarian, but as the candidate of the Reform Party. This week on Commentary Jim and I interview the actual candidate of the Reform Party, Milwaukee attorney Alan Eisenberg. Eisenberg's a colorful figure who is perhaps Wisconsin's most controversial and well known lawyer. Last year he took the issue of whether dogs are people or mere property all the way to the state's Supreme Court. Alan's half-Italian (cool!), and if you've ever seen "My Cousin Vinny" you might agree with me that he's a bit of an older version of Vincent Laguardia Gambini.

Eisenberg wears his trademark red fedora during the interview. In his honor, I wore my pork pie hat I got at last year's Oshkosh Redneck Days (some call it Sawdust Days) for 5 bucks at a table run by a guy who looked exactly like Tommy Chong from the 1970's classic "Up In Smoke." Rumor has it that placing Tommy Chong look-alikes at summer festival pork pie hat tables nationwide is a key component of the new FBI war on terror.

Anyway, here's Alan Eisenberg's website:
http://www.alaneisenberg.com/

Pugsley Krasny-Palmeri has seen all of the Commentary governor candidate interviews, and he offers some canine punditry:
http://www.uwosh.edu/faculty_staff/palmeri/pugsley.htm

Last week's guests, globalization activists Steve Watrous and Mike Prokosch, were both cited in a Lacrosse Tribune story about the effort to get Representative Ron Kind (D-LaCrosse) to oppose "fast track" trading authority:
http://www.lacrossetribune.com/rednews/2002/06/04/build/news/z1.php

Meanwhile, Jackson St. resident Joel Klussendorf read the essays about Square D from the last update and shared some information about the heart wrenching concern that corporation showed for the people of Oshkosh before they took the low road out:
http://www.uwosh.edu/faculty_staff/palmeri/kluss.htm

In this month's Valley Scene, the excellent northeast Wisconsin alternative monthly, Tom Breuer gives us an outstanding cover story on the "New Urbanism" that ought to be required reading for government officials at all levels:
http://www.uwosh.edu/faculty_staff/palmeri/newurbanism.htm
If you don't have time to read the entire lengthy piece, at least check out Breuer's interview with sprawl critic James Howard Kunstler:
http://www.uwosh.edu/faculty_staff/palmeri/newurbanism.htm#interview

Here's some representative Kunstler:

"Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading – the jive-plastic commuter tract home wastelands, the Potemkin village shopping center plazas with the vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the ‘gourmet mansardic’ junk-food joints, the Orwellian office ‘parks’ featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chain-gang guards, the particle-board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandize marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call ‘growth.’"
-- James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere

In Oshkosh, as in many cities nationwide, some of the uglification is aided and abetted by questionable uses of "Tax Incremental Finance" (TIF) districts. As reported by Karl Ebert yesterday, Oshkosh has had 18 such districts created since the TIF law went into place in the 1970s (at the height of Cheech and Chong's popularity). Naturally, the Chamber of Commerce apparatchiks in City Hall have mostly great things to say about the TIFs:
http://www.wisinfo.com/northwestern/news/archive/local_4505622.shtml

I have a slightly different view of the city's (ab)use of TIFs, as communicated in an updated version of "(T)If I Were A Rich Man" from "Fiddler on the Roof":
http://www.uwosh.edu/faculty_staff/palmeri/TIFIwerearichman.htm

Turns out that Ken Harwood, one-term Mayor of Neenah booted out by the voters in April, also like to update old songs. Harwood recently became an "adviser" to governor Scott McCallum, even though when the guv last February announced his plan to eliminate the state's shared revenue program, Harwood went apoplectic and led the charge to defeat the initiative. At that time Kenny H. even came up with a new version of the Beatles' "Yesterday" to express his displeasure with the guv:
http://www.wiscities.org/newsletter26.htm#poetry
Getting voted out of a $60,000 a year job has a way of changing one's perspective a tad, I reckon.

I'm sure all of you by now have heard of the US Congress' brilliant idea to transport all the nation's nuclear waste to the Yucca Mountains in Nevada. The Environmental Working Group has done a great public service by creating a website that allows every American to know how far they will be from the transport routes should the plan go through:
http://www.mapscience.org/
Here's an article from the Chicago Tribune for some context:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0611-01.htm

Finally, for those of you in Winnebago County I am forwarding a note from Adrian J. Ivakhiv of the UW Oshkosh Environmental Studies Program:

Two foreign students from Ukraine, Olesya Savchenko and Iryna Depenchuk,
are looking for a host family (or families) to live with in the Oshkosh
area.

Both are exemplary students: they studied at UW Richland last year
(through the Youth for Understanding Program), were the first students there to
obtain Certificates in Environmental Studies, made the Dean's list in both
semesters, were active in student clubs, etc., and have now decided to
enroll in the new Environmental Studies Major just approved here at UW
Oshkosh.

Unfortunately, neither can afford the costs of living at the dorms. (One
of them, incidentally, is from the Chernobyl area and her family was affected
by the nuclear accident there 16 years ago. The other is from the
multicultural Black Sea metropolis of Odessa.)

If you are interested or may know of anyone who may be able to take these
students in (they are willing to cook, clean, etc. if need be), please let
me know. I can provide further details about them, as well as contact
references for their host families at Richland.

It would be a loss to UW Oshkosh, and especially to the fledgling ES
Major, if we were to lose these two excellent students!

Adrian Ivakhiv


Adrian J. Ivakhiv
Environmental Studies, Religious Studies & Anthropology
University of Wisconsin Oshkosh WI 54901
Tel: 920.424.0848 Fax: 920.424.1418 E-mail: ivakhiv@uwosh.net

Best,

-Tony