DECEMBER 8, 2017, KEIZERTIMES, PAGE A5
KeizerOpinion
KEIZERTIMES.COM
Tis a gift…
The fortunate among us will
wake Christmas morning and open
presents. The day will continue with
breakfasts, brunches, dinners, fam-
ily and friends. As we anticipate
the holidays and what they mean
to each of us, we would do well to
think of those less for-
tunate.
Regardless of the
reason, some families
will not have a full ta-
ble during the holidays;
there will not be toys
for the boys and girls to
open. Despite positive
economic news there will always be
families who have been passed by.
Families struggling to stay together,
to stay healthy, to stay fed, to stay in
school.
Our minds understand that hun-
ger and insecurity know no season;
if a family is food insecure in De-
cember it might be food insecure in
March or April or August. But our
hearts tell us to reach out during
the holidays to those less fortunate.
Tis the season of caring and sharing
after all.
How can we help those less for-
tunate? That’s the easy part, there are
many organizations that aid those
in need. Marion-Polk Food Share
and the Keizer Community Food
Bank are instrumental in feeding
hundreds of people. The people
that patronize a food bank are not
bums or lazy, they are families who
have fallen on hard times and need
a hand up. More than 80 years ago
that’s what Americans were doing
for each other during the depths
of the Great Depression—everyone
seemed to be in the same boat.
That is not the case these days.
Everyone is not in the same boat,
some are thriving while others
struggle. We show what kind of so-
ciety we are by how we treat the
weakest and neediest.
It doesn’t take much to change
the daily lives of people. Donating
cash instead of food allows the food
bank to purchase more than we can
give. We should all endeav-
or to see that the shelves
of the Keizer Community
Food Bank groan from the
weight of all the food that
is available for families in
need.
Food is important, but
so is personal security.
We implore Keizer households to
look through their closests for un-
used coats, shoes and other cloth-
ing items. A little child doesn’t care
what the label says or what color
the coat is, they will be over the
moon because they have a coat that
will keep them warm.
What do you do with items you
want to donate? Contact the Salva-
tion Army, St. Vincent de Paul or
any church. The Closet at McNary
has been very successful at match-
ing students in need and donated
clothes and accessories.
We all have things we don’t use
that can easily be donated to make
life better for someone else. Tis the
season to do that. Let us do our
spring cleaning now, in December,
to gather unused items and give
them a second life. Let us add a few
more food items to the food cart
when shopping to donate along
with cash to the Keizer Community
Food Bank.
Be generous this season, be kind
to those in need. When we give we
receive the warmth of being good
humans.
—LAZ
our
opinion
Preparing students for work
It has been a few years since we
fi rst visited the Career and Techni-
cal Education Center (CTEC) on
Portland Road in north Salem.
Initially, there was residential
construction and welding classes
only in the massive building. Now,
hundreds of students from Salem-
Keizer high schools are taking class-
es in manufacturing, engineering,
cosmetology, auto body repair and
painting, and—most stunning—
drone technology, robotics and vid-
eo and game design animation.
These are classes that prepare our
students for tomorrow’s jobs. Sa-
lem’s CTEC is the fi rst public-pri-
vate partnership of its kind. Dozens
of tours each month show off the
center to educators from around the
state and around the nation. Innova-
tion, thy name is Salem-Keizer.
The Career and Technical Edu-
cation Center is preparing students
for high-skill, high-wage, high de-
mand careers while developing the
skills, technical knowledge, academ-
ic foundation and real-world expe-
rience to assure their success once
they graduate.
At full strength CTEC will edu-
cate about 1,100 students. The stu-
dents will travel from their home
high schools. Aside from the tech-
nical classes students are also taking
classroom courses in science and
math that correlate to the skill they
are learning. For example, home
construction students take math to
learn about angles and ratios, the
type of math used in construction.
The Career and Techinical Edu-
cation Center is exciting for every-
one. Students are engaged (their
graduation rate is above average),
the teachers are focused and com-
mitted. Principal Rhonda Rhodes
and the other CTEC leaders can
hardly contain themselves when
discussing the center.
The school district and the de-
velopers of CTEC deserve huge
kudos for making their vision come
to fruition.
—LAZ
Republicans reveal inner plutocrat
By MICHAEL GERSON
Some political moments are like an
X-ray—revealing down to the bone.
Here were Senate Republicans,
poised for their fi rst (and only) real
legislative victory of the year. Tax over-
haul, they knew, would be their main
shot at shaping public perceptions of
the GOP in the Trump era.
The bill they were in the
process of passing was ut-
terly typical of Republican
economic thinking—large
tax reductions for corpo-
rations, broad income-tax
relief for individuals and
an increase in the child tax
credit (deductible against income tax-
es). None of this surprising in the least.
Which was a problem. Insofar as
blue-collar voters in places such as
Pennsylvania and Ohio delivered uni-
fi ed Republican government, you
would think their economic needs
and struggles might fi nd some central,
or at least symbolic, place in the Re-
publican agenda. So when Sens. Mike
Lee, R-Utah, and Marco Rubio, R-
Fla., proposed an amendment to make
the child credit fully deductible against
payroll taxes (which are the taxes actu-
ally paid by the working poor), it was
clearly good policy and good politics.
The measure ended up getting
only 20 Republican votes and was de-
feated 71-29.
How is this for symbolism: In their
tax bill, Senate Republicans gave a
break to private jet owners, but re-
fused to increase the corporate rate
by 0.94 percentage points to cover
the cost of helping an estimated 12
million working-class families. The
20 percent corporate rate, Rubio and
Lee were told, was sacrosanct, nonne-
gotiable—until the day after the vote,
when President Trump conceded it
may need to rise anyway. What drives
many elected Republicans to embody
every destructive, plutocratic stereo-
type? Do they really need to wear
spats and a top hat every time they ap-
pear in public?
A good case can be made for re-
ducing the corporate tax rate below
the 24 percent global av-
erage, making America a
more competitive place to
do business. And it is true
that, in a progressive tax
system, broad tax cuts will
go disproportionately to
people who pay a lot of
taxes in the fi rst place. But
Senate Republicans were presented
with a clear and conservative way to
both seem and be more favorable to
working-class families. And they re-
jected it decisively.
It was foolish of Senate Republican
leaders not to see the obvious political
benefi t of this change to a bill that is
currently unpopular. It was offensive
that most Senate Democrats voted
against the amendment, on the crassly
partisan theory that nothing they op-
pose should be improved. It is even a
bit disappointing that Lee and Rubio
did not threaten to blow up the tax bill
—any two Republican senators plus
Bob Corker, R-Tenn., an announced
“no,” could have done so—in order to
get their amendment included.
It is true enough that many liberals
would only be happy with tax-code
changes that are frankly redistribu-
tionist—designed to decrease inequal-
ity, even if overall economic growth
were undermined. They think of the
tax code as one way of addressing a
structural injustice—the injustice
of modern capitalism, which favors
wealth over wages.
In contrast, compassionate conser-
other
voices
Wheatland Publishing Corp. • 142 Chemawa Road N. • Keizer, Oregon 97303
phone: 503.390.1051 • web: www.keizertimes.com • email: kt@keizertimes.com
SUBSCRIPTIONS
MANAGING EDITOR
Eric A. Howald
editor@keizertimes.com
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Derek Wiley
news@keizertimes.com
One year:
$25 in Marion County,
$33 outside Marion County,
$45 outside Oregon
PUBLISHED EVERY FRIDAY
ADVERTISING
Publication No: USPS 679-430
Paula Moseley
advertising@keizertimes.com POSTMASTER
Send address changes to:
PRODUCTION MANAGER
& GRAPHIC DESIGNER
Andrew Jackson
graphics@keizertimes.com
LEGAL NOTICES
EDITOR & PUBLISHER
Lyndon Zaitz
publisher@keizertimes.com
Keizertimes Circulation
142 Chemawa Road N.
Keizer, OR 97303
legals@keizertimes.com
BUSINESS MANAGER
Laurie Painter
billing@keizertimes.com
Periodical postage paid at
Salem, Oregon
RECEPTION
Lori Beyeler
INTERN
Random Pendragon
facebook.com/keizertimes
twitter.com/keizertimes
(Washington Post Writers Group)
Fact vs. fi ction in today’s news cycles
By GENE H. McINTYRE
Number 16, Abraham Lincoln,
wisely pontifi cated more than 150
years ago that one cannot fool all the
people all the time. However, we’ve
got number 45 president now who’s
doing quite well at fooling
something between 30 and
40 percent of them. His
tactic is the use of “fake
news” to have his way with
these folks. So does the
fake news syndrome bother
you, the reader here, or you
don’t mind if truth and ac-
curacy become quaint and
irrelevant?
A whole lot of the fake news contro-
versy started with Donald Trump’s ad-
versarial relationship with the press.
His diehard supporters heartily de-
vour the “fake news” claims he makes
every day now but these same folks
claim also that they never trusted any
news in the fi rst place. Yet, there are
those who think the president is doing
lasting damage by way of his dumb-
ed-down tweets by condescending
to his followers, making enemies of
the press and vilifying the system of
checks and balances the press provides,
important enough back when to be
number one in our Constitution’s
First Amendment.
Meanwhile, mainstream media, and
the public’s opinion of it, has been
at a low point for years and contin-
ues to be. A Gallup poll in Septem-
ber 2016 found that American’s trust
and confi dence in the mass media “to
report the news fully, accurately and
fairly” had dropped to its lowest level
in polling history with only one in
three of Americans polled saying they
have even a fair amount of trust in the
media. And that level was down even
from the previous year.
During Trump’s candidacy he was
given inordinate attention by the
media, receiving what some assessed
as blanket coverage for most weeks
of his candidacy. Initially, journal-
ists embraced him and his ratings
were a bonanza for cable news. Then
came his inauguration and thereaf-
ter, with Trump receiv-
ing more negative cover-
age than his predecessor,
Barack Obama, his time
in offi ce has been marked
by far more missteps, of-
ten self-infl icted, actu-
ally than any presidency
in memory.
But it’s Trump’s use of
Twitter, his bypassing the press and
communicating directly with the
public, that’s viewed as unprecedented:
twittering used by him like a bull-horn
of inaccurate White House propagan-
da. His crude take-downs, threats and
his lies have proven not only outra-
geous and never-ending, but idiotic,
too. The bottom line though is that
he’s a cagey fellow who feeds his core
supporters: in a divided nation where
voters live in alternative political uni-
verses, it remains to be seen what hap-
pens to a 230-year old democracy af-
ter his off-the-cuff, gut-spawned, and
supporter-bamboozling becomes the
end for truth.
Trump is manipulating media in
disruptive maneuvers and one of his
victims is trust in the media. What
Trump is doing may have been what
other presidents wanted to do, but,
it’s surmised, didn’t think they could
get away with it such as Trump has
generally succeeded to date. Thomas
Jefferson wrote during his presidency,
“Were it left to me to decide whether
we should have a government with-
out newspapers or newspapers with-
out government, I should not hesitate
a moment to prefer the latter.” The
translation: Jefferson as president had
strong disagreements with the press
guest
column
Keizertimes
vatives (the few of us who remain)
view healthy, sustained economic
growth as a moral achievement—just-
ly rewarding effort and enterprise and
allowing society to be more gener-
ous to those in genuine need. (What
poor and stagnant nation would un-
dertake Medicaid or the President’s
Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief?)
But this is different than saying that
economic freedom is always identical
to the common good. Particularly in
an increasingly high-skill economy, it
requires positive effort to (1) train as
many people as possible for economic
participation, (2) ensure that lower
skill work can still result in a digni-
fi ed life (through measures such as the
earned income tax credit), (3) encour-
age the stability of families (through,
for example, the child credit) and (4)
increase the scale of private and reli-
gious efforts to meet society’s desper-
ate human needs (addiction, home-
lessness, etc.).
The goal of a compassionate con-
servatism is not economic leveling but
social solidarity—an economic sys-
tem that allows everyone to live lives
of dignity. On the best historical and
economic evidence, this is achieved
through a mixed economy—allow-
ing the freedom to create wealth, but
depending on government and civil
society to humanize an imperfect hu-
man system (as all human systems are
imperfect).
The balance here is not always easy
to determine. But most elected Re-
publicans don’t seem moved or mo-
tivated by either equality or solidar-
ity -- at least if the damning defeat of
Lee-Rubio is any indication.
but recognized the importance and
value of the media. Trump, it’s argued,
does not respect this view and, if not
talking to himself, takes advice from
destructive forces the likes of Steve
Bannon and others like him who want
to nuke our Constitution, institutions,
values and way of life.
When a large part of society starts
to believe that real truths cannot be
found, they tend to grow cynical
about everything and instead, as histo-
ry discloses in multiple examples, put
their trust in one person such as is true
of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Putin, who
it’s believed Trump admires and seeks
to emulate, does not have to convince
Russians he’s telling the truth; no, he
must only force-feed his people into
accepting that everyone else is a liar.
Object to Putin and certain death
follows. Truth died in Russia under
Joseph Stalin’s U.S.S.R. while it’s an
established fact that Putin was one
of his most loyal followers, a higher
up in the K.G.B.
The view this writer holds dear
is that our nation, and its serious ef-
forts at developing a working repub-
lic through democratic principles
and practices, depends upon an in-
formed citizenry where its sources
of information are trusted as fac-
tual because its people are confi dent
in how information is collected and
processed. When the public does
not have trust in the media to keep
them informed, truth in absentia, on
which daily life and public interac-
tions are foundational, presents a clear
and present danger. When a huge and
growing segment of a nation’s popula-
tion surrenders itself to a leader who
seeks absolute, authoritarian rule, as
examples abound form the 20th cen-
tury, then there’s soon a violent end to
freedoms and civil rights.
(Gene H. McIntyre lives in Keizer.)