Government Documents/Maps

Election Day
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
http://www.thurstonvotes.org/

By this time you should have already received your 2009 Primary Election Official Local Voters’ Pamphlet: Thurston County Local Voters’ Pamphlet in the mail.

There will be a number of items for you to vote affecting voters in Thurston County.

*  Elections for Thurston County commissioner, Port of Olympia commissioner, City of Olympia City Council, and City of Tumwater Mayor.

*  Measures include propositions on various fire districts throughout the county.

Arrival of Ballots

Ballots should begin arriving on Saturday, August 1.  If  you haven’t received a ballot by Wednesday, August 5, please be sure to call the Thurston County Courthouse at:

*  Phone:  360.786.5408
TTY:     360.754.2993

You can also call this number if you have lost or destroyed the ballot you received.

Of course, you can stop by the Auditor’s Office located at Building One of the Thurston County Courthouse at 2000 Lakeridge Dr. SW to get a replacement ballot

Accessibility Voting Location

Voters with a disability can go to the Thurston County Auditor’s Office located at the Thurston County Courthouse, 2000 Lakeridge Dr. SW, Builiding One from:

*  July 29 – August 17:         Monday – Friday, 8 am – 5 p m
*  Election Day (August 18):         Tuesday, 7 am – 8 pm

to make use of the AUTOMARK.

The AUTOMARK is a voting assistance machine who cannot read or mark their ballot to vote independently and secretly.  Voters with visual impairments, cognitive or learning disabilities, who have literacy issues, or mobility impairments can use the machine to have their ballots read to them, magnify the print on the ballots, display the ballots in high contrast, and mark their ballots.

Drop Boxes
http://www.co.thurston.wa.us/auditor/Elections/Dropsites/dropboxesMAIN.htm

Olympia Area Drop Boxes are located at:

*  Olympia Fire Station 1 (Downtown), 100 Eastside St. NE

*  Gloria Dei Lutheran Church, 1515 Harrison Ave. NW

*  Church of the Good Shepherd, 1601 North St. SE

*  Thurston County Courthouse, 2000 Lakeridge Dr. SW, Building One
(only location where you can get replacement balltos)

*  Westside Top Foods, 1313 Cooper Point Road (at the far end of the parking lot)

Click on the link above for drop boxes throughout the county.

Drop boxes will close precisely at 8 p.m. on Election Day.

Registered to Vote in WA State?

Have you recently moved to WA State?  If you have never registered to vote in WA State, you can fill out a voter registration form and register in person to the Thurston County Courthouse, Auditor’s Office to vote in the August 18 primary.  Deadline for new registrations is:  Monday, August 10.

More information on whether you can vote on this election or not:

http://www.co.thurston.wa.us/auditor/Elections/voter_reg/late_reg.htm

Information for college students:

http://www.co.thurston.wa.us/auditor/Elections/outreach/fact_sheet_college.pdf

Check and see if you are registered to vote:

http://wei.secstate.wa.gov/OSOS/VoterVault/Pages/MyVote.aspx

Voter Registration Forms are available at the GovDocs/Maps Office in the 3rd Floor of the Library.  Pick one up soon.

Lots more information can be found at:

Washington Voter Information
http://www.vote.wa.gov

Thurston County Voter Information
http://www.thurstonvotes.org/

Voter Registration Information
http://govdocs.evergreen.edu/voting-info.html

June is National Men’s Health Month and the highlight of the month is National Men’s Health Week (June 15 – 21, 2009). The event was created as a result of Senate Joint Resolution 179 on March 25, 1994 in order to bring awareness of men’s health issues.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ National Center for Health Statistics the life expectancy at birth for men born in 1950 is 65.6 years as opposed to women’s 71.1 years; for those born in 1960 it is 66.6 years as opposed to women’s 73.1 years; and men born in 2005 will live 75.2 years as opposed to women’s 80.4 years (Health, United States 2008, Table 26 ).

Top 10 Leading Causes of Death for Men

Source: Leading Causes of Death in Males, United States, 2004

For more resources on Men’s Health and health disparities, go to our hot topics webpage for further information.

Today I am giving a huge shout out to the most recent addition of Adbusters magazine, for giving me fodder for continued hope that humanity can actually overcome its own self-inflicted demise, unlike those who have promised it [hope] in the past and have so far failed to deliver.

Adbusters has, obviously, for a while been opposed to the universal ad campaign that has come to pollute much of our world since advertising became the modern Bible and consumerism became moral in the post-WWII period.  Well, it turns out that if the Old and New Testaments, and all those documents that are accepted or denied as “Bible,” make up the greatest story ever told, advertising is a giant pornographic picture book whose lessons for humanity tell us more about how to get into debt than how to live a noble or pious life.

I’m not trying to pass judgment here, really.  If you like advertising, in its current repetitive, mind-numbing form, then you’re the last of a dying breed according to Douglas Haddow, (former adman and) contributing freelance writer in the July/Aug ‘09 Adbusters.  Word under the street is that all those artist friends you left for lost to fill our public (and yet heavily privatized) spaces with their renditions of the newest Nikes are destroying advertising as we know it and hopefully forever.

Now how is this possible?  All you artists and analysts and admirers out there already know the answer!  What makes art avant garde?  When it identifies and seeks to destroy its own medium!  Now when all those artsy folks who have been getting sucked into advertising really start to take over the industry (like they are now), what kinds of ads will we end up with?  Well, Haddow cites “Whopper Sacrifice” as one such example: “Facebook users were rewarded a free Whopper for deleting ten friends from their account, [this] has been the most precise incidence of ‘pop nihilism’ to date.”  Get it yet?

With the economic crisis came people’s return to the only public we know to entertain us, and in our beloved internet we can slash our way through the jungle of ads with a click of our machete mouses, meaning that advertising has to step up its game to more complex campaigns if it wants us to even give them a second look.  In addition, these artists don’t want to be soul-stomped by the ancient adages that annoy and are evaded by consumers; they want to intrigue and innovate with their art and engage post-modern audiences with interactive and edgy campaigns.

With print media already under attack, and advertising (even on the cover, tsk tsk) as a last ditch effort, we are left questioning what else this wacky world that we’re creating will become.  Will journalism become a purely nonprofit effort?  Is this prediction wrong, and we’ll all continue gobbling up these intelligence-insulting images that have sold us out for our increasing credit limits?

We’re already discovering there’s no money for text-based publications; many magazines (like Vogue for example) already only print pictures of pretty bodies and products.  And content, if you still want some, is becoming a web exclusive.  If the values of the ad industry are changing (like it or not), then I sure hope all us anxious writers, political economists, and aspiring journalists are gearing up for a full-blown return to real, grassroots media that sells because it’s worth buying.  (Ironically worthwhile products and fewer ads trying to convince us to buy the crappy ones might actually make capitalism work a little better.  See Gary S. Becker’s Microeconomics and Economic Sociology.)

And while I have your minds on images, advertising, and grass, what do you think of the new roundabout?  When I think of Evergreen, which I do on a daily basis, I’d really like to think of the beautiful native plants and flowers of Western Washington, not sod.  This is just a sign of the “complexity” creeping into our consumer minds that’s leaving some people in the compacted soil.

http://pblks.com/2009/06/pop-nihilism-advertising-eats-itself/

Check out the original article at the above link or by clicking on Spongebob.  Douglas Haddow’s blog can be found at http://pblks.com/

I could go on about this most recent issue of Adbusters, including the emphasis on rebuilding economics education (replacing Neoclassical economics with behavioral and other more empirical forms of economic theory) in the universities of the world and the need for student activism in this respect.  I’ll let you pick it up yourself and support some printed word, ad-free.

Cheers to my last day of the year,

Robyn Adair
Gov Docs/Maps Assistant

The New York Times mentioned Haiti in their recent article about the impact of the economic crisis on Venezuela.  President Hugo Chave of Venezuela, and other Latin American allies, have taken steps in past few years in a project to unify Latin America through ALBA, the Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America, a trade agreement that emphasizes solidarity as a means of developing the participating nations of the region.  Through this agreement, as the article notes, countries from Argentina to Cuba have received loans and/or priority prices for oil from Venezuela  in order to help these countries avoid selling their souls to the international financial institutions (IFIs) like the IMF (International Monetary Fund). Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, is in need of assistance.

In the 1990s, the political party Fanmi Lavalas was founded with the leadership of then-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti and a firm anti-privatization platform as its base.  The IFIs as well as the imperial influences in Haiti (US, France and Canada) did not like this and suspended humanitarian aid, and by 2004, a coup had been orchestrated to overthrow Aristide, who had been re-elected in 2000 with an overwhelming 91.6% of the vote.

The Haitian election was cause for concern, according to Bush, who faced a similar scandal in his own election,  but it was no surprise to much of the international community, including the international group Global Women’s Strike, that such a large constituency supported the president.  Haiti has a history of strong, decisive action; it was the first in the hemisphere to abolish slavery and achieve independence in 1804.

In 2007 President Chavez visited Haiti for the first time since his election in 1998.  In front of a large crowd of Haitian, Venezuelan and Cuban spectators, Chavez spoke about the duty of his nation and the others in Latin America to the Haitian people for their leadership and support: “Bolivar came here and received the support of the people and of President Pétion, and was supplied with the weapons and soldiers that built the force that would go to Venezuela to liberate it once for all in 1817. All of this has to do with why I am here today. There is much history behind it. Today I feel I am paying part of our historic debt to Haiti. And I say this, after more than 8 years in government, this is the first time I visit Haiti. I should have come here earlier,” he said.

Cuba and Venezuela sponsored the construction of health centers as well as supplying doctors to staff them, and Venezuela also began to supply subsidized food and oil to the impoverished Haitian people. In 2009, despite the effects of the economic crisis, Venezuela will be giving $9 million to support the development of the rice industry in Haiti.

Haiti: in the Middle

As of right now, the U.S. and other countries, including France, Brazil and Bolivia, supply troops to the UN military forces MINUSTAH that act as the national police of Haiti.  The U.S. has also been heavily influencing politics and culture in Haiti through “civil society” organizations, funded through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the International Republican Institute.  These groups have been criticized abroad for supporting U.S. economic interests and repressing local popular movements through the media, military presence, and corporate investment.  They have also paid proportionately very high salaries to organization employees, creating an odd dynamic as the wealthy are loyal to the US and identify with their standard of living rather than their own nation’s struggle.

In January 2009, however, a California Representative and 16 co-sponsors brought a bill, H. R. 417, to the House to supply a new form of aid to Haiti.  The plan proposes an Exchange Program similar to the Peace Corps that would “assign qualified Haitian Americans and others to provide technical assistance to help Haiti improve in areas vital to its growth and development, which may include education, energy, environment, healthcare, infrastructure, security, transportation, and disaster preparedness.”

I’m as skeptical of this as many of you probably are, but there are several aspects that give me the slightest glimmer of hope: 1. “Individuals may participate in the Exchange Program for not longer than 27 months.”  This to me eliminates the chances of corruption, as program participants don’t really have time to become embedded imperial bureacrats.  And 2. “COMPENSATION- An individual who participates in the Exchange Program shall receive monthly compensation equal to the average monthly salary of such individual’s professional Haitian counterpart.”  This stipulation is nice because often such employees receive the salary equal to the US counterpart in a country with a very different (in this case less expensive) cost of living, contradictory to their function in that country, as I mentioned earlier.

I’m particularly skeptical of this part: “Consultation With Haitian Civil Society Organizations- The democratically elected Government of Haiti should consult with Haitian civil society organizations to identify the needs and priorities of Haiti to outline the sectors or professional fields to which Exchange Program participants may provide technical assistance and the objectives to be achieved, including specific projects or programs.”  These groups are also responsible for nominating individuals to hold these positions.  As I mentioned earlier, the civil society groups that the U.S. tends to communicate with over these sorts of matters are usually of its own creation, US-funded and loyal to US interests.

Here are a few resources should you want to investigate Haiti and this further.

Letter from Global Women’s Strike to Bolivian President Evo Morales asking that he support Haiti, but not with military occupation
http://www.globalwomenstrike.net/Haiti/lettertoEvoMoralesMarch09.htm

The International Community and Haiti: Testing the Water or Sinking the Ship?
http://www.haitianalysis.com/international-relations

Chávez and Venezuela: Duty, not Charity, to Haiti
http://www.haitianalysis.com/2007/3/19/ch%C3%A1vez-and-venezuela-duty-not-charity-to-haiti

NY TImes: Venezuela’s Hope of More Sway Dims as Riches Dip
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/world/americas/20venez.html?_r=1

Full Text of Hr 417: Next Steps for Haiti Act of 2009
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h111-417

Leave us a comment letting us know if you think this signals a change in US policy toward our neighbors to the south or more of the same.

Que siga la lucha

Robyn
Gov Docs/Maps Assistant

Some resources you might find fun and useful.

• Congressional Research Service Internships and Special Hiring Programs

• Gallup.com’s State of the States
includes information such as consumer confidence and job market status

• Fire Management and Invasive Plants, A Handbook
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

• GeoTube
Is a collection of geography videos from YouTube & other online sites.

• Nursery Manual for Native Plants: A Guide for Tribal Nurseries,
v.1: Nursery Management

• American Artist and Water Reclamation
Library holdings

• GovDocs/Maps Blog

• Historical Electronic Videos

• Maps of the 50 States

• Maps and Atlases (USGS)

• Invasive Species

• Climate Change

• USGS Science Resources for K-6

• USGS Science Resources for 7-12

• USGS Science Resources for Undergrads

• GIS Lab

• Schoolyard Geology

• USGS Multimedia Gallery