One would hope it's to adopt emergency measures to address the climate crisis, including removing funding from huge highway expansions like the CRC boondoggle, strengthening our clean fuels commitment, and boosting clean energy and efficiency investments.

As, heck, the World Bank is projecting a 4 degrees C bump and pushing for leaders to turn down the heat.

"A 4°C warmer world can, and must be, avoided – we need to hold warming below 2°C," said World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim. "Lack of action on climate change threatens to make the world our children inherit a completely different world than we are living in today. Climate change is one of the single biggest challenges facing development, and we need to assume the moral responsibility to take action on behalf of future generations, especially the poorest."

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Maybe he wants to talk about Washington making marijuana legal on Thursday and the impact it may have on Oregon.

Is he trying to sneak through another increase in the state's CRC contribution with the clock ticking?

Gov. Kitzhaber is a closet Doomsday Prepper. He wants to convince the legislature to liquidate the State's assets before the Mayan apocalypse.

Screw Nike. What a ridiculous thing to do, call a session to help one company avoid taxes. If Phil Knight is really threatening to go elsewhere, he can penetrate himself with an Air Jordan.

Kitzhaber may have done a good job couching the situation - but this is a power grab by Phil Knight, plane and simple. Nike is looking after it's bottom line, and has promised to take itself and its toys with them if they don't get their way. Their message to Oregon - Just Screw You.

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Well, Orwell would approve of the double-speak employed, where "Tax Stability" really means a tax break shake-down. There is a vacant villa in Belize I think, Phil Knight could look into that if he needs tax stability that badly.

To put that into perspective, Oregon's total labor force is just under 2 million. So this one deal which could bring 12,000 new jobs into the state, will moves the unemployment dial by 0.5% to the good.

Given those facts, are people seriously saying they believe that Kitz should just let Nike walk?

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Maybe no one reads the New York Times these days. Just published (Dec 1st): "As Companies Seek Tax Deals, Governments Pay High Price"

In the end, the money that towns across America gave General Motors did not matter.

When the automaker released a list of factories it was closing during bankruptcy three years ago, communities that had considered themselves G.M.’s business partners were among the targets.

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Oh no!--at first glance this looks like a gigantic tax giveaway that Nike has already extorted from the gov. In addition, it endangers our future by trying to give this special giveaway power, this "economic investment act," to future governors as well.

Worst of all, I suspect that it plans the giveaway along the lines of, say, the notorious BETC, where the state gets no legal guarantee that all those imagined jobs will ever come to be, and yet the corporate boss gets to keep the tax breaks no matter what. Is there any wonder that the state lacks money for Oregon education and vital services?

Is there perhaps any hope, if this should get the nod from our elected representatives, of at least getting some legal guarantees regarding the grand corporate speculations about future jobs, which we have heard so many times before, but which always seem to make legislators drool?

Fortunately, Kitzhaber has the intelligence and political chops to not ignore Nike. For the sake of almost nothing, Portland let Columbia Sportswear move its headquarters. Under any view of it, a single employer adding 12,000 is huge. This beats economic gardening by a mile.

Well, the divided opinion here makes it seem likely that this will pass. Too bad.

I'm more concerned about what an agreement not to change Oregon tax law for Nike will mean for those who want tax reform?

What message does this send to other Oregon Businesses? The small 20 employee business who can't get special promises from the State? What incentive do we all have to reform, and perhaps increase taxes, knowing that if you're big enough, then you can be excused from "common sacrifice"

As Evan pointed out, the New York Times ran a series on tax deals for big businesses that concluded they just don't pan out and cost the states way more money that the jobs generated. Maybe Kitz is calling this session because he's afraid the more Democratic legislature next year won't go for it.

I really haven't ruminated on this enough to say whether I think the proposal is a good idea or not. But can I just say that the timing of this sucks.

I'm tired of special interests creating a crisis and then demanding that government do something to fix the very crisis they created and that they do so in short order so that the fix will be subject to only a minimal review process.

It stinks of "Crisis Capitalism" and is just a smaller version of what we are seeing with the whole "fiscal cliff" nonsense.

This is what I see as having happened. Nike over the decades has used its political will to force its favoritism on the state. Not even in matters relating to its own business, but the way that the Oregon university system is ran, and the ways that county and cities themselves are ran.

So Nike has used the latest set of elections, to empower the Governor to overstep the separation of powers, and control the congressional purse strings. This is so that Nike and others, have essentially less resistance, in order to get and maintain sweetheart deals, for essentially promises and not obligations.

So the governor calls an emergency session, running up to the Christmas holiday, and before the makeup of legislature changes. On the premises that this issue materialized instantaneously, and that it shouldn't have to go through either legislative procedure or public opinion.

Any governor would capitulate to this. Still it sucks that this kind of extortion racket can be laid upon state or local govt.

I have no problem with the state granting a time-limited (say, seven year) guarantee of the single sales factor for a company that invests, say, a minimum of $1 billion of new money and creates a minimum of 10,000 NEW FULL-TIME Oregon jobs -- AS LONG AS the company maintains that level of employment through the entire seven-year period. If, during the seven year period, the company lays off enough workers to fall beneath the X + 10K threshold, the favored treatment should vanish. And if they want to extend the guarantee beyond that time, they can add another billion dollars invested and another 10,000 brand new jobs.

Nike now wants not only a guarantee of its lucrative profits that are paid by taxpayers, but it wants to circumvent democracy altogether. It is seeking a prior guarantee from the State of Oregon, in a hypothetical belief that the state is about to reform its tax code (a rare event in itself), that will exempt it from normal legislative processes that other citizens and corporations are subject to as the legislature goes through the democratic practice of deciding what is best for Oregon. In a democracy, in open debate, the legislature takes into account the balance of needs in the state, the proper means for achieving them, and a reasonable plan for paying for these needs among all the constituencies of the state. (I know it doesn’t happen this way, but it’s a dream.) Nike, however, wants its corporate handouts to be special to them, taken up on an emergency basis, democracy be damned. This desire to undermine democracy is even more dangerous than the bribes they are offering.