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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 6, 2016)
OPINION 4A THE DAILY ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2016 Founded in 1873 DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager CARL EARL, Systems Manager JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager HEATHER RAMSDELL, Circulation Manager OUR VIEW Inviting fraud in road repair State transportation agency resists better quality control A dd potential fraud to the lengthening list of problems with Oregon’s Department of Transportation. Well known for its exaggerated forecasts and increas- ing bonded indebtedness despite higher taxes, a recent article shed light on the agency’s vulnerability to fraud in road repairs. Nick Budnick of Pamplin Media reported that ODOT’s road-paving inspection program has more cracks than the Port of Astoria’s Pier 2. The report revealed that: • Asphalt contractors can game ODOT’s inspections and com- promise road quality, leading to premature potholes and further costly repairs. • Oregon does not track asphalt quality results systematically or use testing methods common in other states. • Contractors often know in advance where and when ODOT will conduct asphalt inspections. Worse, these vulnerabilities have been well known to ODOT management since at least 2005. That’s when the Federal Highway Administration pointed out these issues in a nation- wide report and made recommendations for improvement. Eight years later, the feds conducted a new study and reached the same conclusions. Another federal report described the quality checks used by Oregon as “very weak,” saying they “will only detect severe problems with contractor test results.” Former ODOT employees also have called attention to the agency’s lax oversight system. “Quality control was not taken seriously,” a long-time qual- ity control specialist told Budnick. A former internal auditor for ODOT said there is a “huge risk of fraud.” A former quality assurance specialist said that while there are plenty of good road contractors, “it is easy for a contractor to falsify documentation.” ODOT managers downplay these concerns. They claim there is no evidence that contractors are gaming the system. But they note that the state has suspended several contractor technicians, one of whom was suspected of fraud. Doing nothing and refusing to acknowledge the potential for fraud despite repeated warnings is a glaring example of wrong at ODOT — an agency that will collect $4.6 billion in revenue this biennium. Legislators should keep that in mind as they craft a new trans- portation spending bill. Taxpayers ought to remain skeptical when ODOT asks for higher taxes and fees. Reform must come before more revenue. Identity politics is running amok By DAVID BROOKS New York Times News Service O nce, I seem to recall, we had philosophical and ideological differences. Once, politics was a debate between liberals and conser- vatives, between different views of government, different views on values and America’s role in the world. But this year, it seems, everything has been stripped down to the bone. Politics is dividing along crude iden- tity lines — along race and class. Are you a native-born white or are you an outsider? Are you one of the people or one of the elites? Politics is no longer about argu- ment or discussion; it’s about trying to put your opponents into the box of the untouchables. Donald Trump didn’t invent this game, but he embodies it. His advisers tried to dress him up on Wednesday afternoon as some sort of mature sum- miteer. But he just can’t be phony. By his evening immigration speech he’d returned to the class and race tropes that have deined his cam- paign: that the American government is in the grips of a rich oligarchy that distorts everything for its beneit; that the American people are besieged by foreigners, who take their jobs and threaten their lives. It’s not that these two ideas are completely wrong. The rich do have more inluence. There are indeed some foreigners who seek to harm us. It is just that Trump (like other race and class warriors) takes these kernels of truth and grows them into a lie. Less violent crime Trump argues that immigration has sown chaos across middle-class neigh- borhoods. This is false. Research sug- gests that the recent surge in immigra- tion has made America’s streets safer. That’s because foreign-born men are very unlikely to commit violent crime. According to one study, only 2 or 3 percent of Mexican-, Guatema- lan- or Salvadoran-born men with- out a high school degree end up incar- cerated, compared with 11 percent of their U.S.-born counterparts. Trump argues that the lood of immigrants is taking jobs away from unskilled native workers. But this is mainly false, too. There’s an intri- cate debate among economists about this, but if you survey the whole liter- ature on the subject you ind that most research shows immigration has very little effect on native wage or unem- ployment levels. That’s because immigrants low into different types of unskilled jobs. Unskilled immigrants tend to become maids, cooks and farmwork- ers — jobs that require less English. Unskilled natives tend to become cashiers and drivers. If immigrants are driving down wages, it is mostly those of other immigrants. Trump claims the rich beneit from immigration while everyone else suffers. Doctors get cheap nannies, everyone else gets the shaft. This is false, too. The fact is, a vast majority of Americans beneit. A study by John McLaren of the Uni- versity of Virginia and Gihoon Hong of Indiana University found that each new immigrant produced about 1.2 new jobs, because immigrants are producers and consumers and increase overall economic activity. A report from the Partnership for a New American Economy found that immigrants accounted for 28 percent of all new small businesses in 2011. Between 2006 and 2012, over 40 per- cent of tech startups in Silicon Valley had at least one foreign-born founder. The cities that are doing best eco- nomically work hard to attract new immigrants because the beneits are widely shared. As Ted Hesson points out in The Atlantic, New York, Chi- cago, Houston and Los Angeles account for about 20 percent of U.S. economic output, and in those places, immigrants can make up as much as 44 percent of the total labor supply. Light and dark Identity politics distorts politics in two ways. First, it is Manichaean. It cleanly divides the world into oppos- ing forces of light and darkness. You are a worker or an elite. You are American or foreigner. Seeing this way is understand- able if you are scared, but it is also a sign of intellectual laziness. The real- ity is that people can’t be reduced to a single story. An issue as complex as immigration can’t be reduced to a cartoon. It is simultaneously true that immigration fuels American dyna- mism and that the mixture of mass unskilled immigration and the high- tech economy threatens to create a permanent underclass. Second and most important, iden- tity politics is inherently the politics of division. But on most issues — whether it is immigration or the econ- omy or national security — we rise and fall together. Immigration, even a reasonable amount of illegal immigra- tion, helps a vast majority of Ameri- cans. An economy that grows at 3 per- cent would help all Americans. Identity politics, as practiced by Trump, but also by others on the left and the right, distracts from the reality that we are one nation. It corrodes the sense of solidarity. It breeds suspicion, cynicism and distrust. Human beings are too complicated to be deined by skin color, income or citizenship status. Those who try to reduce politics to these identities do real violence to national life. Win, lose, but no compromise. Nothing else matters By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN New York Times News Service A nyone who says it doesn’t mat- ter whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton wins this election needs their head examined. The damage that Trump could do to our nation with his blend of intellec- tual laziness, towering policy igno- rance and reckless impulsiveness is in a league of its own. Hillary has some real personal ethics issues she needs to confront, but she’s got the chops to be president. What interests me most right now, though, is a different question. It’s not, “Who are they — our politicians?” It’s, “Who are we — the voters?” To be speciic: Are we all just Shi- ites and Sunnis now? More and more of our politics resembles the core sectarian conlict in the Middle East between these two branches of Islam, and that is not good. Because whether you’re talking about Shiites and Sunnis — or Iranians and Saudis, Israelis and Palestinians, Turks and Kurds — a simple binary rule dominates their politics: “I am strong, why should I compromise? I am weak, how can I compromise?” With rare exceptions, the poli- tics of the Middle East is just a see- saw game between those two modes of zero-sum, rule-or-die thinking. Rarely, these days, does either party stop to seek or forge common ground. It’s just: I am strong, so I don’t have to meet you in the middle, or I am weak, so I can’t meet you in the mid- dle. You can see how well it’s worked for them. Stymie Clinton Politico last week reported that while some GOP oficials may vote for Hillary, they are already sketch- ing plans “to stymie a President Hillary Clinton agenda.” Liberals are already warning Clinton not to bring Republi- cans into her Cabinet or explore meet- ing them halfway. Have a nice day. That kind of sectarian/tribal think- ing, reinforced by left-right social media enforcers, gerrymandering and giant campaign funders, gives you the sorry spectacle of House Speaker Paul Ryan saying, without embarrassment, that Trump’s pronouncements are a “textbook” example of racism, but he’s supporting Trump anyway. And it gives you the sorry specta- cle of Clinton surrogates turning them- selves into pretzels to defend her, even though it’s obvious that she embraced a pattern of major donors to the Clin- ton Foundation being given preferen- tial access to her as secretary of state. Shiites stick with Shiites. Sunnis stick with Sunnis. It’s rule or die, baby. Nothing else matters. That is not always true in other walks of life. We just got that lesson at the Olympics. U.S. runner Abbey D’Agostino clipped New Zealand’s Nikki Hamblin from behind in the women’s 5,000-meter qualifying heat, sending both tumbling to the ground well short of the inish. The Associated Press reported: “D’Agostino got up, but Hamblin was just lying there. She appeared to be crying. Instead of running in pursuit of the others, D’Agostino crouched down AP Photo/David J. Phillip New Zealand’s Nikki Hamblin, left, and United States’ Abbey D’Agostino after competing in a women’s 5000-meter heat during the athletics competitions of the 2016 Summer Olympics at the Olympic stadium in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. D’Agostino helped Hamblin up after clipping her in a qualifying heat. and put her hand on the New Zealand- er’s shoulder, then under her arms to help her up, and softly urged her not to quit.” They embraced at the inish. Contrast that with the Egyptian Olympic judoka who, under pres- sure from his society, refused to shake hands with his Israeli opponent. And how’s Egypt doing these days? Drift- ing aimlessly. Yes, I know, politics ain’t bean bag. It’s about winning. But it’s also about winning with a mandate to govern. And right now, everything suggests that the next four years will be just like the last eight: a gridlocked, toxic, Sunni-Shiite, Democrat-Republican civil war, with little search for common ground. That’s how you ruin, not run, a great country. The hows How will we improve Obamacare? How will we invest in infrastructure? How will we re-create the compro- mise on immigration that a few brave Republican and Democratic legislators tried in 2013? How will we get corpo- rate tax reform, a carbon tax and some iscal policy that we so desperately need to propel the economy and con- trol the deicit? There is no doubt that Republi- cans during the Obama presidency pio- neered and perfected this scorched- earth politics and have paid a price for it. They let themselves be led around by a group of no-compromise talk-ra- dio gasbags, think-tank ideologues in the pay of one industry or another, Fox News know-nothings and an alt-right fringe, who, together, so poisoned the GOP garden that an invasive species, Donald Trump, just took it over. That is all the more reason for Clin- ton to reach out, at the right time, and see if any of them have learned their lesson. There is no way she’ll get any- thing big done otherwise. We have to break this fever. It will be a tragedy if center-right Republicans conclude that their only problem is Trump and that, once he’s gone, the GOP will be theirs again. Their party is over. They have to either become conservative Democrats or redeine a responsible center-right GOP — with a different base. But it will be equally sad if Clinton wastes the opportunity of a potentially sub- stantial victory, achieved with some Republican votes, to rebuild the politi- cal center in this country. As Americans, we were once sum- moned by our politics to be partic- ipants in a race to the moon. Lately we’ve been summoned by our politics to be spectators in a race to the bottom. We can do better, and we must.
