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Wednesday, August 3, 2016 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
O
P
I N I O
N
Robert B.
Reich
American Voices
Letters to the Editor…
The Nugget welcomes contributions from its readers, which must include the writer’s name, address and phone number. Let-
ters to the Editor is an open forum for the community and contains unsolicited opinions not necessarily shared by the Editor.
The Nugget reserves the right to edit, omit, respond or ask for a response to letters submitted to the Editor. Letters should be
no longer than 300 words. Unpublished items are not acknowledged or returned. The deadline for all letters is noon Monday.
To the Editor:
“Complainers, whiny, narrow-minded,
curmudgeons, NIMBY attitude...”—just a
few phrases from recent letters regarding the
increased airplane noise.
It’s fine to say the noise doesn’t disturb
you. You can say that you are willing to trade
quiet for economic development. This is a
personal decision that every Sisters resident
should be allowed to make.
But why the name-calling? Do we need
to demonize each other? Wanting a peace-
ful backyard or a quiet bedtime for your
kids does not equal being “anti-growth,” and
business development doesn’t have to mean
“anti-environment.”
Are we really unable to listen to each
other’s concerns and come to some kind of
compromise?
Whether the noise bothers you or not ... the
name-calling should.
Sarah Moulton
s
s
To the Editor:
This has nothing to do with noise pollu-
tion or airport controversy, this has to do with
a local business stepping up in true Sisters
fashion.
As you may or may not know, Justin Veloso
is battling cancer and we are hosting a fund-
raiser for him at The Belfry on September 15
at 6 p.m.
In addition to music, drinks and food, we
are hosting a live auction.
I have been seeking donations to put
together some amazing packages for the
auction.
One such item is an adventure package.
I contacted Skydive Awesome to see if they
might be willing to assist us in some way.
Without a moment of hesitation, Cara at
Skydive Awesome donated two tandem sky-
dives for our cause.
This is what it’s all about, being in business
in Sisters, Oregon — stepping up to the plate
s
See LEttErS on page 14
Sisters Weather Forecast
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In her speech accepting
the Democratic nomina-
tion for president, Hillary
Clinton said the nation was
at “a moment of reckoning.”
She’s right, but the reck-
oning is not simply the
choice voters face this fall
between her and Donald
Trump. The real reckoning
is larger, and it will extend
beyond Election Day.
Yet Washington insiders
expect a return to politics as
usual.
I’m already hearing
Republicans dismiss Donald
Trump as a weird aberration.
“Ordinarily, Trump wouldn’t
have stood a chance,” a
Republican operative told
me. “He won because he
didn’t have a clear opponent
until the very end.”
I get a similar story from
Democrats trying to explain
Bernie Sanders. “His cam-
paign was a freak,” a long-
time Democratic adviser told
me. “Hillary will be elected
and then Washington will go
on as if nothing happened.”
They want to return to
business as usual because
many of them make their
bread on that business —
working for big corpora-
tions, Wall Street or wealthy
individuals as political con-
sultants, lobbyists, corpo-
rate lawyers, government-
relations specialists, public-
relations specialists, trade
association staff and paid
experts.
But Trump isn’t just an
aberration, and Sanders
wasn’t just a flash in the pan.
Both of them, in very differ-
ent ways, reflect a crisis in
our political economy.
In a Gallup poll taken in
mid-July, before the con-
ventions, 82 percent said
America was on the wrong
track. In an NBC News/
Wall Street Journal poll just
before that, 56 percent said
they preferred a candidate
who would bring sweeping
changes to the way the gov-
ernment functioned, no mat-
ter how unpredictable those
changes might be.
The major issue the pub-
lic is reacting to isn’t terror-
ism or racism. We didn’t see
these numbers after 9/11. We
didn’t even get these sorts of
responses in the late 1960s,
when American cities were
torn by riots and when the
Vietnam War was raging.
It’s the rigging of our
economy — the increas-
ingly tight nexus between
wealth and political power.
Big money has been buying
political clout to get laws
and regulations that make
big money even bigger. As
Clinton said in her accep-
tance speech, “I believe that
our economy isn’t working
the way it should because
our democracy isn’t working
the way it should.”
She’s correct, but she
didn’t finish the logic.
Democracy is not working
the way it should because
it’s being corrupted by big
money. That big money
is altering the rules of the
game to generate even big-
ger money.
Americans now pay more
for pharmaceuticals than
the citizens of any other
advanced nation because
Big Pharma is setting the
rules.
We pay more for Internet
service, health insurance,
airline tickets and bank-
ing services because the
increasing market power of
key players in these indus-
tries lets them raise prices.
Antitrust enforcement
has been systematically
weakened.
The biggest Wall Street
banks continue to reap the
financial benefits of being
too big to fail. Hedge fund
partners make bundles from
confidential information,
trading on which used to be
illegal.
CEOs cash in their stock
options and grants just when
they pump up the value
of their company’s stocks
with buybacks. It’s allowed
because laws and regula-
tions have been loosened.
Trade agreements are
now designed to protect the
intellectual property and
foreign assets of giant cor-
porations, but nothing is
done to protect the incomes
of Americans who lose their
jobs to foreign competition.
This is business as usual
in Washington.
Clinton has a long list
of good proposals for help-
ing average working people,
but none of them will go
anywhere if Washington
stays the same and the
economic game remains
rigged.
© 2016 By Robert Reich;
Distributed by Tribune
Content Agency, LLC
Opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer and
are not necessarily shared by the Editor or The Nugget Newspaper.