Page 4A OPINION East Oregonian Thursday, June 8, 2017 Founded October 16, 1875 KATHRYN B. BROWN Publisher DANIEL WATTENBURGER Managing Editor TIM TRAINOR Opinion Page Editor MARISSA WILLIAMS Regional Advertising Director MARCY ROSENBERG Circulation Manager JANNA HEIMGARTNER Business Office Manager MIKE JENSEN Production Manager OUR VIEW BPA a public project that actually works Those of us lucky enough to live It does not require a perpetually- climbing profit margin that would in the Pacific Northwest rely on the Bonneville Power Administration as certainly be part of privatization. As it is, the BPA is a self-sustaining the backbone of our energy system. But like our own spines, we often enterprise that provides a public don’t notice it until something goes good and requires no federal out of whack and the pain throbs appropriation. and we wonder how-oh-how did U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D- Ore.), we ever take such is not a fan of painlessness for dismantling a service BPA is a self- that is working just granted. But the BPA and fine. sustaining “Public power its complex vertebrae enterprise that customers in the of energy production Pacific Northwest and transmission is provides a have paid for the once again under threat. A dollop of public good system and their should not Bengay is needed and requires investment be put up for sale,” after reading a budget he said, before later proposal released no federal summarizing Trump’s last month by the appropriation. entire budget as a Trump administration “cynical assault on that recommends American ideas” and “divestiture of that he’s “putting this budget where Bonneville’s transmission assets,” which would raise $4.9 billion it belongs — in the trash can.” The budget document is a bit for the government over the next of political showmanship from decade, according to a short and incomplete explanation in the our reality TV president: Promise Energy Department’s budget. the world then blame others when Similar privatization ideas for the reality rears its head. And it’s not system were floated in the 1980s and worth getting too worked up about mid 2000s. selling off the BPA for scraps, as In case you need a refresher, the most of Trump’s budget (like most BPA runs each of the dams along presidential budgets) is a pipe dream the Columbia River as well as that will never come to pass. 15,000 miles of transmission lines There are some places that stretch from Washington into privatization is worth exploring California. It runs about 75 percent — air traffic control and Amtrak of the high-voltage power lines in come to mind — but selling off the region, according to reporting by functioning and self-sustaining the Seattle Times. In short: it’s the pieces of public infrastructure is not major player that keeps the lights a wise path. on every day throughout the region, It is, however, worth keeping an keeps our AC kicking every summer, eye on and stretching that spine, and helps make our power bills reminding ourselves that it’s there cheaper than in most of the country. and that it keeps us upright. Trump’s That’s mostly because the BPA targeting of it, at the very least, is a public entity — its shareholders reminds us of something we must are the taxpayers and its customers. protect. 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. OTHER VIEWS Oregon needs way to impeach its head of state The (Bend) Bulletin S ay what you will about Oregon’s last governor, John Kitzhaber, he did one thing right: In the face of a clear loss of support from leaders of his party in 2015, he stepped down. But what if he hadn’t? Oregonians have no option short of recall to rid themselves of a governor who may be crooked or otherwise disgracing his office. Impeachment would give them that option. Yet, thanks to Senate President Peter Courtney, D-Salem, and Senate Majority Leader Ginny Burdick, D-Portland, the power to impeach the governor likely is to remain a tool available to be used everywhere in the United States but Oregon. Both oppose House Joint Resolution 10, which would give voters the option to amend the Oregon Constitution, giving lawmakers the right to impeach not only the governor, but the state treasurer, secretary of state, attorney general and labor commissioner. We’ll agree with Burdick and Courtney on one thing. Oregon is a recall state, and that tool could have been used to force the governor out. But recall efforts have their problems: An elected official, other than a member of the state Legislature, is safe from recall for the first six months he or she is in office, no matter what they have done. Kitzhaber took office Jan. 12, and a recall effort could not have gotten underway until mid-July. Only then could recall supporters have begun circulating petitions to gather the signatures needed to force a recall election. They’d have about 90 days to gather signatures, and elections officials would have about 10 days to verify the signatures. Then, if the governor had refused to resign, a vote to remove him from office would be held within 35 days, and, had the governor lost, he would have another 30 days to leave office. The process could have taken nearly a year. That leaves Oregon essentially leaderless for far too long. An impeachment likely would avoid the delays built into the recall system. Burdick and Courtney each can kill HJR 10 by doing nothing. That’s unfortunate. Impeachment is better than the prospect of a stubborn but badly flawed governor holing up in Mahonia Hall for months as a recall effort plays out. 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 211 S.E. Byers Ave. Pendleton, OR 97801 or email editor@eastoregonian.com. OTHER VIEWS Trump lies. China thrives. O ne of the many dangers posed to Shanghai every day, typically with to our society by having a 16 cars able to carry nearly 1,300 president who’s a serial liar — people. … We glide past endless and who doesn’t behave like an adult, brand-new factories and immaculate let alone a president — is that we more apartment buildings in practically easily ignore him even if he happens to every city along the way, with many say something true. more still under construction. As you Yes, some things are true even suspect, I have been sympathetic to if Donald Trump believes them. I Thomas many of Trump’s trade and industrial explored one of them in China last Friedman policy ideas. But if anything, Trump week — Trump’s charge that China is may be too late.” Comment playing unfair on trade. Ouch. My visit to Beijing left me with The core problem, U.S. and two very strong responses. The first is that we European business leaders based in China underestimate China — and attribute all of its explained, is that when the U.S. allowed surge in growth to unfair trade practices — at China to join the World Trade Organization our peril. The country has been in 2001 and gain much fast and smart at adopting new less restricted access to our technologies, particularly the markets, we gave China the mobile internet. For instance, right to keep protecting parts China has moved so fast into of its market — because it was a cashless society, where a “developing economy.” The everyone pays for everything assumption was that as China with a mobile phone, that reformed and become more Chinese newspapers report of our equal, its trade barriers beggars in major cities have and government aid to Chinese started to place a printout of companies would melt away. a QR code in their begging bowls so any They did not. China grew in strength, passer-by can scan it and use mobile payment became America’s equal in many fields and apps like Alibaba’s Alipay or Tencent’s continued to protect its own companies from WeChat Wallet to contribute to the beggar’s foreign competition, either by limiting access mobile payment account. or demanding that foreign companies take on Chinese men and women friends tell me a Chinese partner and transfer their intellectual they don’t carry purses or wallets anymore, property to China as the price of access, or by only a mobile phone, which they use for funneling Chinese firms low-interest loans to everything — including for buying vegetables grow and buy foreign competitors. from street vendors. Once those companies got big enough, “America has been dreaming of becoming they were unleashed on the world. China a cashless society,” Ya-Qin Zhang, president plans to use this strategy to implement its of Baidu, China’s main search engine, new plan — “Made in China 2025” — to remarked to me, “but China is already there.” make itself the world leader in electric It has “leapfrogged the rest of world” and is vehicles, new materials, artificial intelligence, now going mobile-first in everything. semiconductors, bio-pharmacy, 5G mobile Wang Xing, the founder of Meituan. communications and other industries. com — a Chinese mobile website that is a The latest annual survey of the American combination of Fandango, Yelp, OpenTable, Chamber of Commerce in China, released in Grubhub, TripAdvisor, Booking.com and January, found that 81 percent of its members Angie’s List — told me that he has around felt “less welcome” in China than in the past 300,000 people on electric bicycles who and had little confidence any longer that deliver takeout food and groceries to 10 China would carry through on promises to million Chinese mobile internet users daily. open its markets. APCO Worldwide’s James “We are the largest food delivery company in McGregor, one of the keenest observers of the world,” said Xing. China trade, recently noted that China tells the And in an age when raw data from the world that its policy is “reform and opening,” internet of people and the internet of things but on the ground its policy “more resembles is the new oil, the fact that China has 700 reform and closing.” million people doing so many transactions Today, Alibaba can set up its own cloud daily on the mobile internet means it’s piling server in America, but Amazon or Microsoft up massive amounts of information that can can’t do the same in China. China just agreed be harvested to identify trends and spur new to allow U.S. credit card giants, like Visa and artificial intelligence applications. MasterCard, access to its huge market — Moreover, while Trump is pulling out something it was required to do under WTO of the Paris climate deal, China is steadily rules but just dragged its feet on for years — pulling out of coal. Xin Guo, CEO of Career but now domestic Chinese financial services International, told me two of his hottest job companies, like UnionPay, so dominate the openings in China are in “software and new Chinese market that U.S. companies will be energy” — everyone is looking for engineers left to fight over the scraps. The world leader for electric cars, solar and wind. Walter Fang, in industrial robots, the German company a top executive at iSoftStone, which helps Kuka Robotics, was just bought by the design China’s smart, sustainable cities, told Chinese company Midea; Beijing would never me that “just two weeks ago I brought in about allow the U.S. to buy one of China’s industrial a dozen green energy startup companies from gems like that. Massachusetts” to show them opportunities in This is not fair. China needs to know that China. some people who disagree with everything And yet, as smart as China has been in else Trump stands for — and who value a adopting new technologies, Trump’s broad strong U.S.-China relationship — might just complaint that China is not playing fair on support Trump’s idea for a border-adjustment trade and has grown in some areas at the tax on imports to level the playing field. expense of U.S. and European workers has Because our economic relationship with China merit and needs to be addressed — now. is out of whack — and not just because China Before going to Beijing I emailed the smartest makes great products, but because we do, too, person I know inside China on trade (who will and it’s high time they are all allowed through have to go nameless) and asked if Trump had China’s front door. a point. ■ He answered: “Your note has arrived as I Thomas Friedman, a New York Times slide across the Chinese countryside at 300 columnist, was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes kilometers per hour from Beijing to Shanghai. for international reporting in Beirut and Israel There are nearly 60 trains going from Beijing and one for commentary. This is not fair. China needs to know that. YOUR VIEWS Dear world: We’re sorry for our dope of a president To the people of the world, I know this may not mean much to you and you may never get a chance to hear it, but please know that on behalf of the people of the United States of America, let me offer my deepest and sincerest apologies for all the madness coming from my nation at this time. As you know, due to an archaic and dysfunctional aberration of our political election system, the current occupier of the White House was granted leadership of the U.S. despite losing the popular will of the majority of U.S. citizens (and with likely assistance from Vladimir Putin). All of which is to say, his insanity, bombast, uber- narcissism and general lack of good manners, tact, diplomacy and adult maturity are holding all of us in the world hostage at the moment. So please do not think the vast majority of U.S. citizens are for the rapacious destruction of the global environment or the build-up of yet more nuclear weapons or the elimination of social services for the poor. Please do not believe that we are by nature xenophobic or misogynistic or bullies; we are taught to be that way by many of our elected officials, especially by the current resident of the White House. Please give us a chance and join us in holding our collective breath for the next four years or less until we can get this madness past us. Thanks for your global patience and grace as we go through our quadrennial paroxysm. Matt Henry Pendleton