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