in Corvallis
Educator
69. 33 yr. old public school teacher/musician
01 year ago
1. Higher Ed and housing need to be affordable. People need debt relief, not self-righteous condemnations.
2. Too many people believe the propaganda that school privatization is the way to reform. Standardized tests are marginalizing students, and teachers are scapegoated; an easy excuse to ignore the real issues of childhood poverty.
3. We need to end aggressive banking and monopolizing practices. Income and wealth inequality are ruining us.
4. We need to stop criminalizing the poor and mentally ill. Stop imprisoning, start helping.
5. Racism, sexism, bigotry, homophobia, and other Rankisms need to be addressed. Prior movements made progress, but we have a long way to go.
6. Health care needs to be freed from the market. We need single-payer universal care, affordable medical school, and an end to insurance racketeering both patients and doctors. OB insurance is so high that few Dr.’s are willing to practice it, making access to proper care difficult for women.
7. We need to divorce politics and profits, end corporate personhood, restructure campaigning and elections, stop corporate bailouts, regulate the finance industry, and end war profiteering and American Imperialism.
8. Our environment needs better care. Stop the over use of fossil fuels and invest in a truly clean energy future.
9. Our food supply has been poisoned by the likes of Monsanto and GMOs. Agribusiness subsidies need to stop, and small farms need support.
10. Attacks on open and free speech need to stop. Media fears truly investigative reporting, net-neutrality is in severe peril, and assemblies are being stopped with the use of excessive force.
62. 41 yr. old School Teacher
01 year ago
1. We need a more diverse economy, with more heavy industry in the city to produce the shoes, the tires and all these things which don’t fall from trees, locally, closer to home.
2. We need to radically reduce consumption. I just dropped off shirts, shoes and a bathrobe I haven’t worn for years. We need to get out of this rat race where we “run fast, consume more, reproduce.” We all just die, in the end.
3. We need to hold students accountable. Funding should be based on the number of students in the district, not on the number of students who attend because they haven’t been flunked out or expelled. Vouchers are an idea which need tossed out. Private schools and home schooling don’t have to abide by the rules. Wheel chair bound students, for example, or students with any disabilities, don’t have to be accepted by private schools. Do we really want to be funding them?
4. We need secure borders.
52. 59 yr. old Retired K-12 Teacher
01 year ago
1. Income inequality needs addressed, and specifically poverty and homelessness
2. Education is huge. Teachers endure a great deal of blame unfairly. Standardized testing isn’t working well. Every child is different and the money and time used would be best spent on motivating children to learn. Many children’s problems begin at home and that is beyond the control of the kids. We need to build fewer jails and put more money into schools instead. Children need more knowledge about geography and other cultures. Class size needs reduced. My daughter is a school teacher and she has 31 kids, of whom 4 are perennially in the trouble for non-classroom activities. She simply has no time to give those 4 the attention they need.
3.The rights of employees need to be protected.
5. Everyone, and especially children, need access to healthcare.
48-49. 39 yr. old University Dean, NGO worker (unemployed)/ spouses
01 year ago
1. The middle class was no accidental creation. It needs to be nurtured to exist and at present there are no measures being planned for sustaining it.
2.CEOs’ salaries are out of control, yet teachers are being trashed for their modest salaries. People say the teachers’ salaries are tax money, yet CEO salaries are coming from the public’s pensions. That’s our money too.
3. The population is growing poorer with fewer services. The poor are migrating to Occupy encampments for free health care and hot food. That’s not the problem. It’s a symptom of the problem.
4. Attitudes need adjusted among those who think that the poor “deserve” their poverty somehow, and the rich “deserve” theirs somehow. People of lower income levels put in the same amount of work as those paid well, often in jobs more useful.
34. 61 yr. old Retired Professor
01 year ago
1. Literacy – not only reading but comprehension remains the fundamental problem which needs to be addressed in government.
2. Information, and especially the development of responsible media needs to be nurtured. The disappearance of investigative reporting is to be lamented.
3. There needs to be a limit on the number of home run hitters who can be deliberately walked by a pitcher in a World Series game.
32. 55 yr. old Schoolteacher
01 year ago
1. Jobs are the main issue, and Capital needs to be encouraged though I’m not sure how to ensure that increases jobs in the U.S. rather than abroad – a tariff would be hard to enact. Americans love cheap goods from abroad and until they’re willing to pay higher prices for local goods, there will be no tariff.
2. Education needs to be reformed. Vouchers need to be available. Too many parents are using the public school system as a means of procuring personal tutors for their kids by having them declared special needs students. Parents need to be made more accountable for the behavior of their children.
4. The issue of crime needs to be dealt with early, with parents, again, needing to be held accountable for the behavior of their children.
21. 64 yr. old professor, retired
01 year ago
1. Everything wrong in the country is related to the lop-sided income inequality that exists.
2. Health care access is too limited. A physician’s wife told me that if the doctors at the clinic accepted medicare, which they won’t, the doctors wouldn’t get paid enough. I’ve never known a poor doctor.
17. 83 yr. old retired school teacher
01 year ago
1. Things in this country are not going to get better because the people in control of the economy and the government are only interested in their personal gain, not the interests of the country. The president has some interest in the betterment of others, but is mostly interested in is own power and control.
2. It’s getting worse. When I was young, people put the country first. A small percentage still do. Today 80% of those in power put themselves first, believing that “in this country, we are the strongest. We count first.”
9-10. 66 yr. old K-12 teacher and 51 yr. old spouse
01 year ago
1. Higher education, both at the community college level and in the universities, has become so expensive, when it is free in Australia, much of Europe. Loans are compounded with interest by banks.
2. Ageism has taken on new significance in hiring.
3. The Extension Service needs to be re-funded.
4. Child care support – and generally support for those in need of assistance – needs to be re-financed.
5. Quality public transport needs to be available across the country.
6. End corporate citizenship.
7. End the patenting of life and force the labeling of genetically modified food.