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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 18, 2015)
Page 4A OPINION East Oregonian Tuesday, August 18, 2015 Founded October 16, 1875 KATHRYN B. BROWN Publisher JENNINE PERKINSON Advertising Director DANIEL WATTENBURGER Managing Editor TIM TRAINOR Opinion Page Editor OUR VIEW Mega¿res are a warning we must heed It comes as no surprise that August is bringing with it some of the largest wild¿res this state has seen in recent history. Even before the season began, those who study, maintain and protect our forests warned it was going to be a hot one. And yet here we are, scrambling to save homes, animals, even human lives as the tinderbox burns. Because no matter how prepared you are on paper, once the ¿re is sparked in the woods the best you can do is limit the damage and try to direct its path of destruction. “Mega¿res” ² destroying 100,000 or more acres, like the Cornett/Windy Ridge ¿re south of Baker City ² are becoming almost common. And ¿res currently burning in Eastern Oregon have destroyed about 200,000 acres already. In an Aug. 9 story, National Geographic makes numerous thought-provoking points about this problem that is exploding in our backyard: • “These infernos, once rare, are growing to sizes that U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell describes as ‘unimaginable’ two decades ago. Five alone have consumed more than ¿ve million acres in central Alaska since June. Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado also experienced their worst wild¿res in the past seven years.” • “The main driver is climate change. Rising temperatures exacerbate drought, spread beetle infestations and melt the snowpack earlier. Early snowmelt alone has lengthened the ¿re season by 70 days since 1970. ‘These stresses are going to become more widespread,’ says Craig Allen, a U.S. Geological Service forest ecologist in Los Alamos, New Mexico. ‘The drought itself is part of the natural variability here. What’s different is it’s a hotter drought than anything in the Northern Hemisphere in the last thousand years.’” • “Today, wild¿res, on average, burn twice as much land every year now as they did 40 years ago.” • “58 million acres of national forests are at risk for severe ¿re, but there is only enough funding to clean up 11.3 million acres.” The end result of these colossal blazes is landscapes permanently transformed in terms of both plants and animals. They burn so hot and are so extensive that formerly “native” species no longer ¿nd themselves at home. One scientist quoted in the story said that if he wants to continue specializing in the same type of forest, he should plan to move a couple hundred miles north. What does all this mean? This very dry summer, at least, the answer is that we should be talking about it and more actively including wild¿re planning in a wide variety of civic discussions. The debate on climate change cannot be agree to disagree, but instead planning to deal with our changing environment. If national forests are poorly maintained in terms of mitigating ¿re risk, might it be safe to surmise that state forests are even less so? Does the fact that Paci¿c County’s forestland in Washington is predominantly owned by large corporations ensure less build-up of Àammable debris on the forest Àoor? This year’s mega¿res are a strong whiff of things to come as we in the Paci¿c Northwest learn to cope with warmer temperatures without reliable snowpacks to see us through the summer. Intelligent, appropriately funded counter-measures can help make the difference. Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the East Oregonian editorial board of Publisher Kathryn Brown, Managing Editor Daniel Wattenburger, and Opinion Page Editor Tim Trainor. Other columns, letters and cartoons on this page express the opinions of the authors and not necessarily that of the East Oregonian. YOUR VIEWS Money for street repair can be found elsewhere The Pendleton City Council is caught between a rock and a hard place. If they raise taxes and fees there is a great chance they will kill growth in Pendleton. Growth solves many problems. If they don’t raise taxes and fees they need to cut low priority budget items which they failed to do this year. High priority items in the budget are ¿re, police and streets. What can be cut? Parks and Recreation takes $2.1 million of general fund resources. If you are a homeowner and need money for major repairs, recreation and vacations are the logical things to cut. A cut of 25 percent of this fund would put us more in line with cities our size. Next, the chamber of commerce receives a large amount of money from city taxes. I think the chamber should be ¿nanced by its membership. We also fund statues and art from the motel room tax. This money would be better spent on street repair so tourists can safely drive to the motel. So what does this mean for street repair? More than $700,000 per year. This would give us a total of at least $3 million per year for streets. Vote no on the 5-cent gas tax, it only makes Arrowhead rich and Pendleton poor. The $5 water user fee for street repair has a lot of problems, one of which is that a lot of residents, young and old, walk to and from the grocery store. They do not have a car or do not drive. They would still be charged the fee. Let’s use the money we have instead of raising Pendleton’s cost of living higher than it already is. We need to be competitive to attract jobs and industry. Rex J. Morehouse Pendleton Walmart the new giant on the block “Welcome to your friendly Walmart,” the greeter says as you pass through the entry doors. Started in 1962, Walmart now is the largest company in the world, overtaking Exxon/Mobil. 260 million customers, about 11,400 retail stores in 27 countries, and over 2 million employed worldwide. In ¿scal year 2012 Walmart had $444 billion in sales, which is $20 billion more than Austria’s GDP. If Walmart were a country it would be the 26th largest economy in the world. In 2010, CEO Michael Duke made $35 million, which means he makes more in one hour than a full-time employee makes in an entire year. Now the bad news: 1.) Walmart has moved their purchasing headquarters to China. Up until 2006 they bragged often about being very patriotic and selling American goods. 2.) Walmart means welfare to many of their employees. Over half of their full-time employees make less than $25,000 per year resulting in many of these people signing up for welfare and food stamps. That way the U.S. taxpayer picks up the million dollar cost in public assistance while Walmart receives over a billion in tax breaks. 3.) In the midst of an obesity epidemic in the U.S., Walmart makes a big contribution and is said to be responsible for 10.5 percent of the rise in obesity since the late 1980s. Over 60 percent of American adults and about one third of our children and teens are now obese or overweight. Unfortunately, “cheap” often also means processed foods with a lot of salt, sugar and not much food value. 4.) The proliferation of Walmart Superstore openings are said the kill 3 local jobs for every two they create. They are labeled an “economic death star” by small retailers who struggle or are forced out of business trying to compete with Walmart. Walmart reduces retail employment by 2.7 percent in every county they enter, according to the Journal of Urban Economics. After a Walmart store was built in Chicago in September 2006, 82 of 306 small businesses in the surrounding neighborhood had gone out of business by March of 2008. To be fair, after a great deal of ridicule, protests by employees, and a number of lawsuits, Walmart has recently agreed to raise wages for about 100,000 employees in the U.S. David Burns Pendleton OTHER VIEWS Republicans against retirement S omething strange is happening Still, nobody should be surprised in the Republican primary at the spectacle of politicians ² something strange, that is, enthusiastically endorsing destructive besides the Trump phenomenon. policies. What’s puzzling about the For some reason, just about all the renewed Republican assault on Social leading candidates other than The Security is that it looks like bad politics Donald have taken a deeply unpopular as well as bad policy. Americans love position, a known political loser, on a Social Security, so why aren’t the major domestic policy issue. And it’s candidates at least pretending to share Paul interesting to ask why. Krugman that sentiment? The issue in question is the future The answer, I’d suggest, is that it’s Comment of Social Security, which turned 80 last all about the big money. week. The retirement program is, of Wealthy individuals have long course, both extremely popular and a long-term played a disproportionate role in politics, target of conservatives, who want to kill it but we’ve never seen anything like what’s precisely because its popularity helps legitimize happening now: domination of campaign government action in general. As the right-wing ¿nance, especially on the Republican side, by activist Stephen Moore (now chief economist a tiny group of immensely wealthy donors. of the Heritage Indeed, more than half Foundation) once the funds raised by declared, Social Security Republican candidates is “the soft underbelly of through June came from the welfare state”; “jab just 130 families. your spear through that” And while most and you can undermine Americans love Social the whole thing. Security, the wealthy But that was a don’t. Two years ago a decade ago, during pioneering study of the former President George policy preferences of W. Bush’s attempt to the very wealthy found privatize the program ² many contrasts with the and what Bush learned views of the general was that the underbelly public; as you might wasn’t that soft after expect, the rich are all. Despite the political politically different from momentum coming from the GOP’s victory in you and me. But nowhere are they as different the 2004 election, despite support from much of as they are on the matter of Social Security. By the media establishment, the assault on Social a very wide margin, ordinary Americans want Security quickly crashed and burned. Voters, it to see Social Security expanded. But by an even turns out, like Social Security as it is, and don’t wider margin, Americans in the top 1 percent want to see it cut. And guess whose preferences want it cut. are prevailing among Republican candidates. It’s remarkable, then, that most of the You often see political analyses pointing Republicans who would be president seem to out, rightly, that voting in actual primaries is be lining up for another round of punishment. preceded by an “invisible primary” in which In particular, they’ve been declaring that the candidates compete for the support of crucial retirement age ² which has already been elites. But who are these elites? In the past, pushed up from 65 to 66, and is scheduled to it might have been members of the political rise to 67 ² should go up even further. establishment and other opinion leaders. But Thus, Jeb Bush says that the retirement age what the new attack on Social Security tells should be pushed back to “68 or 70.” Scott us is that the rules have changed. Nowadays, Walker has echoed that position. Marco Rubio at least on the Republican side, the invisible wants both to raise the retirement age and to primary has been reduced to a stark competition cut bene¿ts for higher-income seniors. Rand Paul wants to raise the retirement age to 70 and for the affections and, of course, the money of a few dozen plutocrats. means-test bene¿ts. Ted Cruz wants to revive What this means, in turn, is that the eventual the Bush privatization plan. Republican nominee ² assuming that it’s For the record, these proposals would be not Trump ² will be committed not just to really bad public policy ² a harsh blow to Americans in the bottom half of the income a renewed attack on Social Security but to distribution, who depend on Social Security, a broader plutocratic agenda. Whatever the often have jobs that involve manual labor, rhetoric, the GOP is on track to nominate and have not, in fact, seen a big rise in life someone who has won over the big money by expectancy. Meanwhile, the decline of private promising government by the 1 percent, for the pensions has left working Americans more 1 percent. reliant on Social Security than ever. Ŷ And no, Social Security does not face a Paul Krugman joined The New York Times ¿nancial crisis; its long-term funding shortfall in 1999 as a columnist on the Op-Ed Page could easily be closed with modest increases in and continues as professor of Economics and revenue. International Affairs at Princeton University. Ordinary Americans want to see Social Security expanded ... Americans in the top 1 percent want to see it cut. And guess whose preferences are prevailing among Republican candidates. LETTERS POLICY The East Oregonian welcomes original letters of 400 words or less on public issues and public policies for publication in the newspaper and on our website. The newspaper reserves the right to withhold letters that address concerns about individual services and products or letters that infringe on the rights of private citizens. Submitted letters must be signed by the author and include the city of residence and a daytime phone number. The phone number will not be published. Unsigned letters will not be published. Send letters to Managing Editor Daniel Wattenburger, 211 S.E. Byers Ave. Pendleton, OR 97801 or email editor@eastoregonian.com.
