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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (June 16, 2017)
Page 4A OPINION East Oregonian Friday, June 16, 2017 OTHER VIEWS 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 Tip of the hat; kick in the pants A tip of the hat to Thursday’s ballgame. And no, not the Mariners getting beat again. We’re talking about the baseball game in Washington, D.C., between Democrats and Republicans — some of the same Republicans who were shot at on Wednesday as they practiced on an Arlington, Virginia, field. The Congressional Baseball Game raised money for a children’s charity, but it also helped promote bipartisanship and fair competition and playing under well-defined rules — ethics that have been missing recently in our political system. In the face of violence and extremism and anarchy, it’s nice to have baseball and sportsmanship to help calm nerves and point us down the path to move forward. The United States is in a dangerous place with an divisive, unpopular president at the helm. But there is only way to create systemic, sustainable change in a political system. It’s not by violence, it’s by voting. A tip of the hat to the repair project on the Interstate 82 bridge across the Columbia River at Umatilla. Anyone who has ventured across the bridge knows the work is long overdue. Not only is it about the roughest patch of highway you’ll find anywhere, seeing chunks of the bridge missing underneath your tires is especially unnerving. The bridge is even on the Washington Department of Transportation’s “structurally deficient” list. That doesn’t mean it’s likely to collapse anytime soon, but its condition has deteriorated enough to make engineers wary. So for the next year we’ll endure detours and slowed traffic as we make our way to the Tri-Cities and back, and in return we’ll have a little more peace of mind each time we make the trip. 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 Trying to solve PERS crisis S The Oregonian/OregonLive B 1068, a bill aimed at easing public employers’ crippling pension costs, accomplishes the rare feat of being measly and consequential at the same time. Measly, in that the proposed changes would barely move the needle in addressing the escalating contributions that government agencies and school districts will be making to the underfunded pension system for years to come. But consequential for what the bill reveals: Legislators who have long insisted that there was nothing they could do to legally and meaningfully address Oregon’s mounting pension problem finally appear willing to try. In the abstract, SB 1068 seems a promising way to help the government absorb rising Public Employees Retirement System costs. The bill, sponsored by Sen. President Peter Courtney, D-Salem, and Sen. Mark Hass, D-Beaverton, would require public employees to contribute to their own pensions, just as almost all other public employees across the country do. The idea is for workers — who already contribute 6 percent of their salary to “supplemental” retirement accounts — to divert a portion of that to the main pension fund, which owes $22 billion more in benefits than it has on hand. Those payments would help offset the skyrocketing contributions that public employers are required to make to chip away at the pension funding gap and allow them to reserve more money to provide the schooling, health care and other public services that Oregonians are paying for. Unfortunately, while the concept is good, the details leave much to be desired. The bill, which was written with the guidance of the state’s largest public employees union, seems more like window dressing than serious reform at this point. Among the provisions: Employees would redirect only 1 percent of salary to the pension fund in the first year of contributions, 2 percent the following year and no increases until 2021 at the earliest. Given the mechanisms in the bill designed to limit further increases, it’s unclear if employee contributions would ever rise above 2 percent, much less to the bill’s 4 percent cap, which itself is far below the 6 percent that public employees in other states contribute to their pensions, as The Oregonian/OregonLive’s Ted Sickinger reported. The bill also would not require any higher contributions from current employees at “Tier 1 and Tier 2,” whose retirement benefits are not only richer than newer workers’, but account for more of the unfunded liability. And the proposed contributions wouldn’t even begin until July 1, 2018, which, with the paltry 1 percent rate, would produce only $100 million in savings for the 2017-2019 biennium, with less than $50 million going to the state’s general fund. While those savings projections improve modestly in later years, they’re still woefully inadequate in light of the pension funding tsunami that Oregon is facing. Employer contributions are poised to eat up about $900 million more in the next biennium, increase another $1 billion-plus in the biennium after that and take still more in the two-year- cycle after that. That’s money that would otherwise go to employing teachers, counselors and librarians in schools, providing quality child-welfare services and keeping basic health services for Oregon’s poorest residents. Still, there’s hope. The involvement by both Courtney and the Service Employees International Union Local 503 is a sign that they recognize the need to at least start the discussion, even if SEIU doesn’t support the proposal. But Courtney and other leaders must show that this bill is a first step, not a done deal. That means dialing back on the rhetoric. As Sickinger reported, Courtney declared that he would not move the bill forward without a significant revenue package with corporate tax increases to go with it. The fatal flaw in that ultimatum? Courtney thinks he’s holding a royal flush when all he’s got is a pair of twos. It’s hard to imagine businesses, Republicans and anyone racing to the table for fear of losing a bill that, as it stands, would do next to nothing. Instead, Courtney and other leaders should be looking at how to incorporate some of the extensive and valuable work done this session on two other PERS reform bills, SB 559 and SB 560, sponsored by Sen. Tim Knopp, R-Bend. Those bills look at modestly limiting future pension benefits and redirecting a greater percentage of employee contributions to the pension fund. With only a few weeks left in the session, they should seek to put together a comprehensive slate of reforms that still provide a fair package to employees but helps reroute the devastating course we’re currently on. It’s taken far longer than it should, but elected leaders are recognizing they can no longer claim that there’s nothing that they can do about PERS. Now it’s up to them to show they can deliver something more consequential than simply acknowledging the truth. Oregon is facing a pension funding tsunami. Rhetoric and bullets n 2011, after Rep. Gabby Giffords than the nexus of personal mental of Arizona was gravely injured and defect and easy access to weapons is a six others were killed by a shooter way of dodging, well, the bullet. in Tucson, I was moved to commit an So, here I must take a stand in entire column to condemning the left defense of rhetoric. While rhetoric for linking the shooting so closely to should never promote violence, it political rhetoric. needn’t be timid. Yes, Republican personalities I was impressed by the official and officials in the wake of Barack Charles responses from Washington. Even Obama’s election had spoken openly President Donald Trump’s response Blow about “Second Amendment remedies” was sober and direct, not marred by Comment and being “armed and dangerous” and his typical lack of tact, not like the way “revolution,” but it was not possible to he tried to exploit the Pulse Nightclub connect the dots between that irresponsible talk shooting last year. House Speaker Paul Ryan and the Tucson shooter. delivered a stately speech from the House floor, Now, here I am again, only this time and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi echoed his extending the same sentiments in a noble act of condemnation to the right bipartisanship. for doing the same after At the top, the four people, including responses were pitch House Majority Whip perfect, but the political Steve Scalise, were shot debate isn’t confined to at an Alexandria, Virginia, the top. It trickles down baseball field where into the cesspool of social Republican members of media, which has grown Congress were practicing in exponentially since Giffords advance of a charity game. was shot. At that time, The shooter, identified Facebook had only about a as James T. Hodgkinson, third of its current number appears to have had of users, Twitter had about strong liberal, anti-Trump, a fifth of its current users, anti-Republican views — Instagram was just three among other things, he was a volunteer with months old, and Snapchat didn’t exist. the Bernie Sanders campaign — but at the time On social media, where anonymity provides of this writing, authorities had not announced a cover for vitriol, violent threats are a regular motive for the shooting. feature. The very real possibility that the shooting When Gabby Giffords wrote on Twitter, was politically motivated was clearly on the “My heart is with my former colleagues, their minds of many, including Rep. Rodney Davis, families & staff, and the US Capitol Police R-Ill., who was at the baseball field during – public servants and heroes today and every the shooting: “This could be the first political day,” she was met with a sickening number of rhetorical terrorist attack, and that has to stop.” hateful responses, including one that said, “To Let me be clear: I don’t have a problem bad it was not her.” (Yes, it should have been with viewing these incidents through a political “too,” but grammar isn’t a major concern in a lens. Not to do so is naive and ridiculously statement that grotesque.) self-blinding in a way that avoids reality. It is true that political rhetoric can set a As Katy Waldman wrote for Slate last June: tone that greases the skids for a small number “Things that happen for political reasons, of people who are prone to violence to act on and have political consequences, demand that those impulses. We have just gone through a we scrutinize them through a political lens. political cycle where that was on full display. Crying ‘politicization’ is itself politicization But some rhetoric is necessary and real. I — a way to advance whatever slate of politics believe Donald Trump and the Republican-led favors the status quo. Often people invoke Congress are attempting to do very serious policy goals in order to get things done; what’s harm to the country and its most vulnerable at stake is whether these tragedies should be citizens, and I will never stop saying so in regarded as irreducible lightning strikes or the strongest terms I can summon. For many problems with potential solutions.” people, this isn’t an abstract policy debate What I abhor is ideological exploitation that between partisans. For them, these debates reduces these acts to a political sport and uses — about repealing the Affordable Care Act, them as weapons to silence political opponents for example — are about life and death. But and their “rhetoric,” rather than viewing that has nothing to do with the promotion of them as American tragedies that we can work physical violence; it has everything to do with together to prevent through honest appraisal protecting this country from administrative and and courageous action. Every shooting in this legislative violence. country is a tragedy, and they happen with We have to object stridently to proposals disturbing frequency here. that will hurt people, and not be chilled by As The Washington Post reported, a deranged man with a gun. Violence is Wednesday’s shooting was the 154th mass abhorrent and self-defeating, but vociferous shooting so far this year in America. That’s resistance to national damage has nothing to do 154 mass shootings in just 165 days. Violence, with that violence and must continue unabated. particularly gun violence, is the American fact, You can, as I do, have sympathy for the the American shame. victims of Wednesday’s shooting and condemn This country has a violent culture, is full the shooter, while at the same time raging, of guns, and our federal lawmakers — mostly nonviolently of course, against an agenda that Republicans, it must be said, because there places other Americans in very real danger. isn’t any real equivalency — are loath to even ■ moderately regulate gun access. Charles M. Blow, a New York Times Op-Ed Pretending that America’s gun violence is a columnist, writes about politics, public opinion function of collective political rhetoric rather and social justice. I Political rhetoric can grease the skids for a small number of people who are prone to violence to act on those impulses. YOUR VIEWS Don’t help fund the Rainbow travelers in Eastern Oregon I am not sure it the general community has noticed or not, but there has been a recent influx of, for a lack of better term, “rainbow hippies” passing through our town and indeed all of Eastern Oregon. I write to inform the general public that these hippies are a part of an international group who call themselves the Rainbow Family. Every year there are many Rainbow Family gatherings held in different areas, including an annual international gathering, many regional gatherings throughout the year and the big one: every July there is a national Rainbow Family Gathering. Guess where they picked for 2017? You got it, Oregon. Where specifically I do not know. But if anyone is curious they could follow the caravans of panhandling hippies along with the trail of broken down RVs. What do they do at a Rainbow Gathering? Many things, including praying for world peace on July 4. There is also an atmosphere that comes with the Rainbow Family and their gatherings which is ultimately unsavory as it includes pure hedonism, including illegal drugs, nudity, sex and the promotion of homelessness as a chosen lifestyle. This can be very lucrative to young runaways, although the unfortunate truth is that a transient lifestyle is likely to involve addiction, extreme poverty and violence. There have been incidents of crime, both violent and otherwise, related to the Rainbow Family and their gatherings. I urge the general public to keep this in mind when they see hippies panhandling throughout this month, to keep in mind that they are on their way to a giant party and have chosen to purposely live off the kindness of strangers. Don’t feel too sorry for them, as there are plenty of people living in poverty who are willing to not only work to better their own lives, but also contribute to society through civic engagement, voting, etc. In my opinion there are plenty of more deserving causes to fund before you fund their way to what is often little more than a glorified drug orgy. Carlin Sacco Pendleton
