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.