Living Behind Enemy Lines, Tale #43: Again, Democrats Dump On Rural Oregon

Remember back when the Clinton Administration began to export our country’s means of production to Mexico, China and Canada? Americans didn’t scale back on consumption, but we got to pretend that the western lifestyle was environmentally sensitive because we’d shipped the unpleasantness of fabrication and manufacturing out of sight to other countries. Of course, Oregon lost most of its timber industry, and its manufacturing base crashed, but the pretense of clean air and water seemed more important than a strong working class, managed forests, or cohesive communities.

Oregon’s Democrat leadership is up to the same thing with recent green energy and affordable housing scams. Western Oregon progressives residing in the Portland, Salem, Eugene corridor get to enjoy the virtue-signaling of their policies while dumping the unpleasant byproducts on eastern and small town Oregon.

The State of Oregon recently declared it will convert to 100% clean energy electrical sources by 2040, the earliest of any state in the nation. Windmills and banks of solar panels are dotting and gridding the eastern Oregon landscape to supply energy-thirsty Progressives on the westside. These are the same Oregonians who cheered on and voted for perpetual domestic terrorism by Black Lives Matter and Antifa. At the same time, electricity demand surges as state policies smile upon data center development and frown upon gas, diesel, and natural gas.

With their sparse populations, eastern Oregon earns relatively few representatives in the state legislature, so western Oregon’s agenda passes unimpeded by their common sense protests. For example, when the Biden Regime approved the Western Solar Plan, Oregon’s Democrats, who own the House, Senate & governorship, passed complementary legislation, which would result in solar field production on over a million acres of public land in EASTERN Oregon. State agencies were directed to harmonize their policies with the Biden-era plan and streamline solar field permitting, which effectively silences any critics. Of course, no one is thinking about who will rehabilitate the sites when a summer hailstorm or wildfire turns them into toxic rubble or melted gunk.

THE HOMELESSNESS INDUSTRY GRIFT

After a decade of sucking up tax dollars in the name of decreasing homelessness, Oregon has declared a statewide emergency for its lack of affordable housing. [NOTE: The homelessness industry spent most of the money on luxurious living for themselves and to pay off their political cronies.] Instead of reducing regulations on its existing landlords, Oregon’s solution is to build public housing throughout the state as outlined in the Oregon Housing Needs Analysis. But the report’s details contradict the narrative when it admits that eastern Oregon has already been meeting recent housing demands, but still, in the next 20 years it must produce 899 homeless units in northeast Oregon and 538 homeless units in southeast Oregon. Oregon’s over-funded homeless services industry, combined with western Oregon’s mild climate, has attracted tent cities full of welfare clients over the last decade, most suffering from a complex assortment of mental health or addiction issues and criminal pasts. Recognizing how unpleasant it is to witness untreated human misery, Democrats want to ship some of these unfortunate souls to eastern Oregon where they don’t have to look at them.

Oregon’s housing plan mirrors its carrot and stick approach to Covid. Covid policies started as “let’s all shut down for 14 days to flatten the curve” but then became, “take the vaccine or lose your job.” This time around we’re hearing “we’ll help you build affordable housing so your young people can stay in your communities” but it’s beginning to look like “now that we’ve built you housing, we’re shipping you some of our homeless people to fill it.”

A planned public housing project in downtown Astoria demonstrates Oregon leadership’s unwillingness to grasp reality as it attempts to house seniors, the disabled, and homeless all in the same building. Using state funding, the Northwest Oregon housing authority will develop and manage a 50-unit apartment building in Astoria’s downtown historic district. How they will manage physically vulnerable residents amidst potential meth addicts remains to be seen. Oregon’s housing plan means eastern Oregon communities will have to assume responsibility for the homeless but without funding for their mental health or addiction treatment.

WELCOMING BIDEN’S “NEWCOMERS”

Like so much of the cow manure that escapes from the months of arrogant, virtue-signaling Democrats, “affordable housing” is likely just a euphemism for something that sane people don’t want. In a recent meeting of the Housing Actions Work Group on how to create vibrant inclusive neighborhoods (“inclusive” is another term for “no whites”) by inserting multi-unit housing into established neighborhoods, state employees and real estate developers congratulated themselves on their cultural sensitivity. They agreed that new units should have fully opening kitchen windows for east Africans to vent odors from cooking their traditional spicy foods. East Africans? There are no “east Africans” currently residing in Astoria! With this remark, they let the cat out of the bag. They have no interests helping homeless Americans. They not only plan to ship in “east Africans,” they plan to force American taxpayers to house them, feed them, et al.

The Biden Regime had enticed third world settlement into the country with outlandishly generous taxpayer-funded benefits. According to this work group, which contains only Left-wing activists who feel the need to declare their pronouns, Oregon will be resettling members of the third world into eastern Oregon communities under the name of affordable housing, as well as into Astoria, a beautiful town of 9,986 at the mouth of the mighty Columbia River. This strategy mirrors how the Biden Regime disseminated small, Red communities across America by moving in massive numbers of “newcomers.”

PROGRESSIVES’ DISDAIN IS NOT NEW

Oregon’s tendency to dump its unpleasantness on eastern Oregon dates back to at least 1976 when the waste disposal site at Arlington opened. As the state’s only commercial hazardous waste landfill, it accepts and monitors the long-term storage of the state’s industrial, superfund, medical, military and government waste. The site also accepts as much as 2 million tons of municipal waste from cities like Portland and Seattle each year.

Eastern Oregon’s five state prisons house over 62% of the state’s prison population. With only 9% of the population and its low-crime communities enforced by conservative values, eastern Oregon supplies very few of its own inmates to the prison system. Once again, Oregon seems intent on sending its less-than-desirable exports to eastern Oregon.

The reason eastern Oregonians resist the state’s latest progressive boondoggle is that they still have relationships with our people and landscapes based on a culture and character worth protecting. They don’t live in cookie cutter suburbs or spend their days in cubicles working on computer spreadsheets. They spend both work and play time on their landscapes, which gives them a secure sense of place. Some of their families are descendants of original settlers who named the local creeks and mountains. Their community connections were forged through bad times, which they enjoy in good times. They resent western Oregon’s assumption that they are just empty space to dispose of whatever they don’t want.

Everyday that western Oregon Democrats come up with yet another way to dump on eastern Oregon, can you blame them for wanting to move the border and join Idaho?

Thank you to Alicia Zinni with Greater Idaho for allowing me to edit and publish her article.