Night Cabbie | Murmurs Night Cabbie BY Willie Milkis willie_milkis@hotmail.com TEXACO STATION, 33rd and Broadway, 1:45 am. I pull in and see my fare sitting against the wall of the gas station, a fine young gentleman, white guy about 20. He gets in carrying an extra-large soda and tells me he's going to 112th and Division. As we drive I find out that his truck broke down and stranded him, so I'm saving his ass. He seems like a pretty nice kid. I turn right on 112th and after a block he has me pull up behind a car on the right side. I turn the light on and he digs in his pocket, then hands me the soda. "Here, hold this." I take it and he's out the door and running down the unpaved side street behind me. Goddamn I'm pissed! I saved his spoiled little white ass! I throw the car in reverse and screech backwards, then shoot forward and after him down a dirt road full of deep holes and big bumps. I take that road at about 30 mph and I can see him in my lights running in front of me, feet kicking up dirt. He doesn't know it, but people who run from cabs are taking their lives in their hands. If I catch him during the first 30 seconds while I'm full of red righteous rage, I'll run him down I'm so angry. I'll visit him in his wheelchair when I get out of jail, but at least my own inner sense of justice will be satisfied, for once in my life. Fortunately for him, when I start to close the distance, he veers off into a construction yard and disappears. I entertain dark visions of catching and throttling him, but eventually I just drive away. SMOKE AT THE FIRE BUREAU In a stinging rebuke to the Portland Fire Bureau, a federal judge declared Oct. 6 that Chief Bob Wall and other top brass had for two years blocked the promotion of a firefighter who blew the whistle on the bureau. Federal District Court Judge Janice Stewart ruled that Wall and the City of Portland had in effect retaliated against firefighter Gordon Hovies for his part in previous lawsuits against the bureau and that he'd had his rights violated under the Oregon whistleblower law. Stewart found that Wall and his inner circle of deputy chiefs had engaged in behind-the-scenes shenanigans. She quoted Deputy Chief James Klum, referring to Hovies' previous legal challenges, as saying that "'if Hovies had stayed out of it and kept his mouth shut, he would have gotten the promotion.'" "It's a bittersweet victory, but I feel vindicated," says the 17-year bureau veteran. For his part, Wall says the judge blew it. "I disagree with the decision," he says. "It's not the truth. It's not true that we retaliated against Mr. Hovies because of complaints or lawsuits. It's just not true." Stewart ordered the city to promote Hovies to the next open lieutenant's slot, pay him $900 in back pay and a token $500 in compensatory damages. Even though there is an open slot, neither Wall nor the city is likely to promote Hovies anytime soon. City Attorney Jeffrey Rogers says the city will most likely appeal the decision to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Portland Firefighters Association president Tom Chamberlain says that's crazy. "There's a message from the judge that you'd better have some damn good reasons for jumping over someone," he says. He adds that the way Wall is running things is "very elitist. They're saying, 'If you want to get along, you have to go along.'" The ruling comes at a time when several bureau insiders are vying to replace Wall, who is retiring next February. Klum is considered to have a shot at the chief's job. --Philip Dawdy VOTING ON A VENDETTA You won't find this in any ballot statement, but the story behind one of the most controversial constitutional amendments slated to go before voters next week is intensely personal. Measure 7, which would require government to reimburse landowners for any decrease in property value due to regulation, was written by Becky Miller, assistant to "Mr. Initiative" Bill Sizemore, and her husband. In 1989, the Millers bought a house on two-thirds of an acre on Fanno Creek in Southwest Portland for $65,000. By the time they resold it nine years later, the property value had almost doubled to $127,000. But Miller says they would have made $25,000 more if the city had not imposed an environmental zone to protect the creek's water quality and fish. "They should have purchased our land instead of stealing it," she says. Miller was so outraged she wrote a proposal and started to gather signatures. Later, she handed the initiative off to property-rights activist Larry George of Oregonians in Action. George, meanwhile, had his own measure headed to the ballot--Measure 2, which would give the Legislature the opportunity to strike down any state administrative rule if 10,000 voters signed a petition. Opponents are linking the two together, arguing that they constitute a recipe for chaos, hobbling not only land-use laws but laws affecting worker safety, the environment and even abortion clinics. "They want to turn Oregon's constitution upside down," says Robert Liberty of the conservation group 1000 Friends of Oregon. Local and state officials say the total costs for Measure 7 could top $5 billion. But George questions these dire warnings. "They are being so intellectually dishonest," he says. "They are whipping people into a frenzy." --Nick Budnick BIG INK FOR MR. LOOPHOLE After years of hounding journalists and regulators around the country with outraged pleas for attention to a strange paradox--that the most profitable companies in the world pay almost no taxes--local tax master Bill Parish is finally getting some ink. In June, The New York Times ran a front-page article built on Parish's criticism of Microsoft's accounting practices. This month, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News devoted major space to Parish's analysis of Cisco, the Internet monolith that he says paid no federal income taxes last fiscal year despite posting more than $4 billion in pre-tax profits. (All articles are archived at www.billparish.com.) And last month, after what Parish says was a half-hour conversation between the two men, Ralph Nader joined the fray, standing on the steps of Cisco's San Jose headquarters and lambasting the high-tech company's tax holiday. Parish, an accountant turned financial advisor, first happened onto a huge loophole when he began studying Microsoft's financial statements two years ago ("Window Dressing," WW, March 10, 1999). In a nutshell, tax law allows companies to deduct the value of options that its employees exercise, even though the options don't actually cost the company anything. In last year's fourth quarter, for instance, Microsoft reported pre-tax income of $3.320 billion; employees exercised options worth $3.471 billion, thus wiping out the company's federal tax obligation. High-tech companies such as Microsoft and Cisco depend heavily on options to compensate their employees, and with the phenomenal performance those two companies have posted until recently, their options have generated enormous tax deductions--on the order of $22 billion combined for the two companies last year. Parish feels vindicated by the recent coverage--with one exception. Even though wire services have picked up the recent California stories, nary a word has appeared in Portland's daily paper. "Who's publishing The Oregonian, [Fred] Stickel or Pam Edstrom [Microsoft's publicist]?" Parish asks. "To this day, they've never printed a word about the fact that Microsoft pays no taxes." --Nigel Jaquiss ENGINEERING NADER'S ZENITH Greg Kafoury was sweating. On Friday the 13th, the Portland lawyer would either be a hero or a fool--and he didn't know which. More than two months ago Kafoury and his partner, Mark McDougal, virtually shut down their local practice to organize Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader's first rally in Portland. The stadium blowout--which drew 10,000 supporters at $7 a pop--made Green Party history. It also propelled the two Portlanders into a key role in the Nader campaign. After orchestrating a string of successful mass rallies in Seattle, Minneapolis and Boston, Kafoury flew back to Portland to see to his day job for a spell. But last week he got a phone call. The rally, scheduled under a full moon on Friday, Oct. 13, in New York City's cavernous Madison Square Garden, was in trouble. In spite of the draw of big names like Eddie Vedder, Patti Smith, Phil Donahue and Michael Moore, who were slated the share the stage with Ralph, the $20 tickets weren't moving, and the campaign was nowhere near covering its break-even cost of $300,000. The prospect of filling Madison Square Garden was remote, and the stakes were high. "You can't imagine how big the place is," Kafoury says. "We knew the New York Times was lying in wait to use the word 'disappointing' in the first sentence." Task one was to ramp up the publicity. "They had a poster with a photograph of Ralph looking 102 years old and deceased," he says. Kafoury replaced it with a shot of Nader at the Seattle rally with fists raised in Rocky stance under the caption, "Nader Rocks Madison Square Garden." Hastily recruited volunteers plastered the Big Apple with 12,000 posters and handed out 175,000 postcards. It worked. The New York Times wrote: "From the standing-room-only logjam near the stage to the nosebleed seats near the championship banners of the Knicks and Rangers, about 15,000 people of all ages, hair colors and political backgrounds filled Madison Square Garden on Friday night for the biggest rally yet supporting Ralph Nader's presidential bid." "It was overwhelming," Kafoury says. "I called my wife on the cell phone. I knew we were home." --Patty Wentz RIP: Josiah Hill African Americans and low-income kids in Portland lost one of their most effective advocates last week with the death of Josiah Hill, who died of a heart attack at age 61. A longtime leader of the Coalition for Black Men, Hill brought a voice of quiet dignity to often-inflammatory discussions of race in Portland. But he devoted himself to more than just deepening Portlanders' racial understanding. As a leader of the local chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility, Hill, a physician's assistant, worked tirelessly to address the problem of lead paint in Portland's aging housing stock. Along with Dr. Rick Bayer, Hill personally tested hundreds of low-income kids and brought the epidemic of lead poisoning to the attention of the media and health authorities. "A lot of people have had their heads in the sand," Hill told WW in 1998. "They think lead is a problem in the South or the East but not in the Pacific Northwest. People think this is God's country. They think we can't have high lead levels here." Hill worked on other aspects of children's health as well. In 1998, he received the highest national award given by Physicians for Social Responsibility for co-chairing a conference called "The Developing Child in a Violent Society." --Nigel Jaquiss MiXeD SIGNALS It may not be the Gdansk shipyard uprising, but Oregon Public Broadcasting quietly defected from the National Public Radio party line last week, becoming one of the few public broadcasters in America to declare its solidarity with "micro radio." In the bitter fight over the future of a new class of tiny nonprofit radio stations established by the Federal Communications Commission, NPR has teamed up with big-time commercial broadcasters to get Congress to crush the low-power stations, arguing that the upstarts will interfere with existing signals. But last week, at the end of an on-air news segment on the low-power controversy, OPB voiced its support for micro-broadcasting. "While NPR opposes low-power FM and has lobbied against it, OPB's management has chosen to support low-power FM," the announcer said. OPB radio vice president Virginia Breen has carefully avoided taking on NPR directly but sees no direct conflict with low-power, so long as no signal interference occurs. "It's a good opportunity to get more people trained in radio," Breen told WW. "Frankly, public radio has become a professional medium that works with a limited amount of time. There are groups that should be served that we simply can't." To many low-power advocates, NPR's opposition to opening the FM band is the most galling aspect of the fight. "NPR keeps raising a technical issue that's completely moot, so it's frustrating to keep confronting that stance," says Andrea Vargas of the Portland-based Microradio Implementation Project, a national pro-low-power group established by the United Church of Christ. Vargas hails the OPB announcement as proof that public opinion is starting to pull the high-power coalition apart. NPR spokeswoman Siriol Evans says the public broadcaster is not philosophically opposed to low-power stations, but objects to the specifics of the current FCC plan. The big broadcasters succeeded in getting a bill to strangle micro-radio through the U.S. House of Representatives, but it bogged down in the Senate, thanks largely to low-power pal John McCain. However, the broadcasters boast powerful allies in the upper house, including Oregon's Ron Wyden. In the waning days of the congressional session, they're trying to attach an anti-low-power proposal to a must-pass appropriations bill. --Zach Dundas Murmurs PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN! * Portlander Larry Colton, author of Counting Coup, seems to be doing just that. Colton's book about girls' high-school basketball near Montana's Little Big Horn has been named a finalist for a Frankfurt eBook Award. Winners will be announced Friday, Oct. 20, at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the premier event of the international publishing industry. Colton faces stiff competition: best-selling historian Stephen Ambrose and Pulitzer Prize winner David Maraniss. * With school board meetings stretching to nearly four hours, the district has taken decisive action. This week officials placed a device with one white and one yellow lightbulb in front of the public comment desk. Any citizen whose speech exceeds the three-minute limit gets the yellow light--but not detention. * Looks like firefighter and state Rep. Randy Leonard is tossing his hat into the ring to become the city's next fire chief. What's unusual--and a death knell for his chances--is that he's a former Portland Firefighters Association president and not one of the bureau's top brass. * Word is that Susan Sarandon is interested in a movie based on the yet-to-be published Rolling Stone series about adoption-rights activist Helen Hill and birth-mother Dolores Teller. * Upon learning last week that she was cancer-free, Mayor Vera Katz whooped it up by returning to the office and putting in one of her 14-hour days. * Coming to your doorstep next February: Bob Pamplin's new weekly, The Portland Tribune. * Portland writer Jeff Meyers, the former Chicago theater artist who has just been nominated for an Oregon Book Award for poetry, has resigned as Theater Vertigo's director. Meyers, a co-founder and the guiding force behind Vertigo's successes, resigned due to conflicts within the company. * With three weeks until the presidential election, Oregonians are less than thrilled with Al Gore, according to a poll released Tuesday by KPAM (AM 860) radio. KPAM's poll showed that if the election were held now, 41 percent of respondents would vote for Bush, 37 percent would vote for Gore and 6 percent would give Nader the role of spoiler. Pollster Mike Riley says the margin of error is 4 percent--so the race could be even. Then again, Gore could be even further behind.