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approved by members of the
Capital Press Editorial Board.
Friday, February 5, 2021
All other commentary pieces are
the opinions of the authors but
not necessarily this newspaper.
Opinion
Editor & Publisher
Managing Editor
Joe Beach
Carl Sampson
opinions@capitalpress.com | CapitalPress.com/opinion
Our View
U.S. can’t take on climate change by itself
“
The U.S. can’t go it
alone.” For many years
policy wonks in Wash-
ington, D.C., and elsewhere
have told Americans the U.S.
shouldn’t take on major inter-
national issues by itself.
Whether it’s fighting ter-
rorism or procuring fair trade
deals, we’ve been told that the
U.S. should join coalitions and
not go it alone.
Add climate change to that
list. President Joe Biden is
making the battle against cli-
mate change a signature issue
of his administration. He has
formed a high level climate
office, canceled the Keystone
XL oil pipeline from Can-
ada, stopped oil and gas drill-
ing on federal land, rejoined
the Paris Climate Agreement
and injected
climate into
almost every
policy-level
discussion in
the federal
John Kerry government.
Fair enough
— as long as the U.S. econ-
omy in general and agriculture
in particular aren’t sacrificed.
Farmers and ranchers are
especially worried. On the one
hand, they are told by some
climate and anti-agriculture
activists that they are a major
contributor to climate change.
Such accusations have been
proven wrong, by the way.
On the other hand, farm-
ers and ranchers are told they
are a best hope for fighting cli-
mate change. By using their
land and crops to sequester
carbon, they will keep it from
getting into the atmosphere
and intensifying the green-
house effect, trapping solar
heat.
As a result of the mixed
signals, farmers worry their
voices — and their livelihoods
— could be lost amid the cli-
mate change rhetoric.
A recent statement puts the
climate issue in a completely
different light.
John Kerry, the adminis-
tration’s lead person on cli-
mate issues, told the BBC that
the U.S. could reduce its car-
bon emissions to nothing and
it wouldn’t have a significant
impact on the climate.
“He (Biden) knows Paris
(climate agreement) alone
is not enough,” Kerry was
quoted as saying. “Not when
almost 90% of all the plan-
et’s global emissions come
from outside of U.S. borders.
We could go to zero tomorrow
and the problem isn’t solved.”
Unnamed in that conversa-
tion was the largest source of
atmospheric carbon: China.
According to the website
Investopedia, China is the
largest carbon polluter — by
a long shot. It produces 28%
of the atmospheric carbon —
almost double the amount pro-
duced by the U.S.
And China’s contribution
to the problem continues to
grow. Its carbon dioxide emis-
sions are up 270% from 1992,
and according to its statement
in the Paris accords will not
Our country is in
a fight for its life
Our View
Retroactive OT will
bankrupt Washington ag
I
W
ashington farmers
and ranchers must
be protected from
having to retroactively pay
overtime as a result of a recent
state Supreme Court ruling.
Without that protection, many
farming operations could be
bankrupted.
The Fair Labor Standards Act,
passed by Congress in 1938,
established a federal minimum
wage and provided for overtime
pay for work over 40 hours. The
act provided a host of job clas-
sifications, including farmwork-
ers, that are exempt from the
overtime rule.
Washington lawmakers in
1959 adopted a similar provision
into state law.
Though critics have posited
that the exemption was the prod-
uct of racism and the pandering
to the needs of special interests,
farmers noted that farm work is
distinct from factory production.
The seasonal nature of some
farm work makes it difficult to
schedule in 40-hour increments.
“May I say that the cow can-
not be regulated by any law
you may pass here,” Rep. Fran-
cis Dugan Culkin, R-N.Y., said
during debate on the measure.
“She gives down her milk at 6
o’clock in the morning. You can
pass law until hell freezes over
and you cannot change that.”
While the Washington
Supreme Court did not change
the schedules that govern cows
in the Evergreen State, in a
case filed by two former milk-
ers from Yakima County it did
strike down the exemption. The
DON JENKINS/Capital Press File
An American flag waves over the Temple of Justice in Olympia. A Wash-
ington Supreme Court ruling says farmworkers should be paid overtime,
but left other questions unanswered.
court ruled 5-4 on Nov. 5, in
Martinez-Cuevas v. DeRuyter
Brothers Dairy, that farmwork-
ers labor under dangerous con-
ditions and are constitutionally
entitled to time-and-half pay for
hours worked over 40 in a week.
The ruling left room to inter-
pret its scope. Narrowly read,
the decision says that in the
future dairy workers must be
paid overtime. More broadly, the
decision points to making the
state’s roughly 160,000 farm-
workers eligible for overtime.
And many of them are filing
lawsuits to collect and want to
apply a separate state law that
allows underpaid workers to
reach back three years to collect
wages. But that law was aimed
at employers who evaded a legal
responsibility.
Farmers should not be pun-
ished for following the law as it
was written and understood at
the time. Ag groups say that ret-
roactive payouts and lawyer fees
could bankrupt producers. The
Washington State Dairy Fed-
eration calculates dairies alone
peak for nine more years.
By comparison, U.S. car-
bon emissions are up 1.8%
since 1992.
That means China has
had its foot on the gas — lit-
erally — while the U.S. has
slammed on the brakes.
The next largest source of
carbon is India, at 7% of the
world’s total. Its emissions are
up 253% since 1992, accord-
ing to a 24/7 Wall Street report
published in USA Today.
Biden says the U.S. “must
lead” the effort to slow cli-
mate change.
But he must also make sure
other nations, including China,
are following and will do their
part so a meaningful reduction
on atmospheric carbon can be
achieved.
could be on the hook for $90
million to $120 million in back
wages.
The majority opinion did not
address the question of applying
the ruling retroactively. Writing
for the minority, however, Jus-
tice Charles Johnson said farm-
ers shouldn’t risk bankruptcy
“because they paid what the law
required of them at the time.” A
subsequent ruling could clarify
that question, as well as estab-
lish the scope of the original
ruling.
In the meantime, Senate
Republicans are backing a bill
that would prohibit farmwork-
ers from collecting overtime on
past work.
The court’s original ruling
was wrongheaded, but allowing
newly minted victims to retroac-
tively collect overtime would be
disastrous.
The court’s ruling will lead to
more automation and less farm
employment. The misapplica-
tion of the law governing back
pay will lead to less farms.
generally read your
Editorial Opinion
piece and find you to
be fairly on target. How-
ever, I think your conclu-
sion in your editorial in
the Jan. 15 issue missed
the mark when you closed
with “we must stop this
now,” obviously referring
to the tone of the public
discussion of government
administration.
My wife and I were
discussing at lunch how
our nation has become
so politically, or should
I say philosophically,
divided. We began think-
ing back through the past
presidents, say beginning
with President Carter, and
determined that yes, there
have been ups and downs
during the terms of both
parties but no national
division of this magni-
tude until the Obama
administration.
The difference has been
that during the course
of the eight-year Obama
administration the poli-
cies took a hard turn to the
philosophic left. The Dem-
ocratic Party was riding
high and was prepared to
keep moving in that direc-
tion with the election of
Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The voting public
stepped in and said, “Not
so fast!” and elected Don-
ald Trump in 2016. Presi-
dent Trump being a busi-
ness person instead of a
politician, recognized a
mandate to move to the
country back to the philo-
sophic right, and did so to
the satisfaction of the vot-
ers, receiving 10 million
more votes in the 2020
election than he did in the
2016 election.
However, the Dem-
ocratic Party, with the
full undivided support of
the print media and most
of the electronic media,
fought the hard turn back
to the right from day one
and all through the presi-
GUEST
VIEW
Don
Schellenberg
dent’s term in office. The
media (I read the AP arti-
cles) for four years have
constantly used demean-
ing and descriptive words
in front of his name when
reporting on something the
president did or said.
In my view they pur-
posely did this in order to
“incite” anger toward him,
instead of just reporting
the news. Sometimes the
media just plain made up
some things. Case in point,
the daily news repeat-
edly reported that Presi-
dent Trump “incited” the
attack on the U.S. Capi-
tal in his speech to his sup-
porters that morning. It
all depends on how you
interpret his words. In this
case, the media extrapo-
lated his words to say what
the “press” wanted his
words to say. And support-
ers of what the president
has accomplished in the
last four years are not sup-
posed to be upset?
The bottom line now is
that there are two strongly
divergent philosophic and
political views, social-
ism and government con-
trol verses capitalism and
democracy. Regarding this
issue there is NO “mid-
dle ground” so there is
no “Can’t we just all get
along.”
Our country is in the
fight for its life! Our coun-
try was founded as a
democracy and has served
us well, becoming the fre-
est, most wealthy, most
healthy and safest nation
on earth. I, for one, do not
want that to change.
Don Schellenberg of
Dallas, Ore., was a lob-
byist for the Oregon Farm
Bureau from 1980 to 2008.
READERS’ VIEW
Beware of
manipulation
People are manipulated
through fear.
• Fear of Saddam Hussein.
• Fear of terrorism.
• Fear of climate change.
• Fear of the corona virus.
The politicians and the media,
with the help of academia and
other recipients of money from
the government, fan the flames
of fear. People react to this fear
by doing what the so-called
“experts” tell them to do:
• Destroy Iraq, bombing them
into the Stone Age and kill-
ing hundreds of thousands of
people.
• Hang humanity on a “Cross
of Iron” by spending trillions of
dollars on the military-indus-
trial complex.
• Support alternative energy
production that actually harms
the environment without pro-
viding one kilowatt of baseload
electrical generation.
• Surrender the Creator’s pre-
cious gift of individual rights.
The beauty of the Ameri-
can system is that it uses the
principle of individual rights to
counter the evil in this world.
The more individual rights are
respected, the more justice pre-
vails. Deny people their rights
and injustice flourishes.
The solutions of the
so-called “experts” always
involve violations of indi-
vidual rights. For example,
the “experts” state that Cana-
dian gray wolves are needed
in America. The result of their
flawed opinion is that the ranch-
er’s right to protect his herd has
been stolen. What was once a
right now requires permission
from government.
Recently, our rights to work,
to associate, to attend church, to
be in control of our health care
decisions, and even our right to
hold an honest election have all
been stolen from us. This theft
has occurred because fear was
invoked, followed by “experts”
telling us that these violations
of our rights are necessary.
It is complete manipula-
tion. The people are once again
conned. The result is a loss of
individual rights along with
a corresponding increase in
injustice.
Beware of manipulation.
Despise the fear mongers.
Remove the hollowness of the
words “the Home of the Brave.”
Roger Whitten
Deer Park, Eastern
Washington