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Page 4A OPINION East Oregonian Tuesday, September 26, 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 Protect your credit like your home Data breaches like the one reported by credit-reporting company Equifax are a great calamity of modern life. The ancient Egyptians had swarms of locusts; we have plagues of identity thieves and computer hackers. Nowadays we aren’t totally at the whim of nature or some capricious higher power, but we do have to actively protect our own interests. In the case of Equifax, the breach lasted from mid-May through July. The hackers accessed people’s names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and, in some instances, driver’s license numbers. They also stole credit card numbers for about 209,000 people and dispute documents with personal identifying information for about 182,000 people, according to the Federal Trade Commission. You can visit www.equifaxsecurity2017.com for more information and to perform a basic check on whether your data is known to have been compromised. This was, of course, far from the first time a company or agency has lost control of private confidential information. Yahoo, Target and others have been in the news when electronic burglars have blown holes in Internet security and made off with information that can be used to set up fraudulent credit cards, empty bank accounts, divert tax refunds and commit other forms of theft. It bears remembering that companies on the receiving end of computer hacks are victims themselves, incurring great costs and loss of trust. At the same time, however, these companies bear comparison to a bank that didn’t employ good enough security guards or a strong enough vault for our money. After all the breaches of recent years, it is angering and dispiriting to learn a company set up to make money by policing the credit of individual Americans itself became the instrument that could allow criminals to wreck our credit. Lawsuits will inevitably arrive at a fuller understanding of how this happened and whether it should have been possible to avoid it. In technical legal terms, a major question will be whether companies owe consumers a fiduciary duty to fully safeguard our information. Most of us would argue they do. In the meantime, we clearly must all become more active participants in protecting our own financial interests. Just as every responsible parent cautions young-adult children to guard debit and credit cards as if they were actual cash, we all must treat our credit lines and financial facts in the same way — like cash that can be stolen if we aren’t vigilant. Having credit that some criminal can wreck is a decidedly modern “first-world problem” — in other words, a nuisance we’re highly privileged to possess. Even half a century ago in America, such easy access to credit was unheard of. And in much of the world, it still doesn’t exist. In essence, most of us have a nearly forgotten slush fund of hypothetical money floating around for thieves to grab when we aren’t watching. We each should treat the Equifax incident as a spur to revamp management of our credit assets. The Washington Post offers some concise advice on how to freeze (and unfreeze) your credit in such a way as to keep others from tapping it. Other necessary steps include becoming more knowledgeable about passwords and the security questions financial institutions commonly use to establish people are who they say they are. For example, a genealogy blogger has described how publicly accessible online family trees can provide scammers with many answers to commonly asked security questions, such as your mother’s maiden name. Responding to all this is a hassle, one that most of us assumed we didn’t need to deal with. But we obviously can’t trust private corporations — or possibly even public agencies — to treat our private information as cautiously as they should. Congress and state lawmakers should hold corporate feet to the fire to make rights, responsibilities and penalties completely clear. And each of us must acknowledge and act upon the knowledge that our credit requires careful ongoing management. 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 Respect is a two-way street, even on Pennsylvania Avenue I always adhered to the idea that there is an obligation for the citizens of this country to respect the person in the office of President of the United States, regardless of your view on the politics of the moment or whether you voted for that person or not. The flip side of that belief is the person in the position of President is obligated to respect the citizenry that elected him/ her, and also respect the institutions through which he/she was elected. Now, I feel an overwhelming current of open disrespect emanating from our President directed at any person, any group, or any entity that does not agree with him. That is not how you get work done. The adversarial politics of our leadership through the past decade has been destructive. It is exacerbated by the time wasters of petty name calling and temper tantrum over trivial matters, a habit now embodied routinely by the current President. I believe the Office of the President sets the tone for our nation. If we use trash-talk to insult others; nations, institutions, or individual citizens, we should be prepared to get trash-talk back. When we use that technique to isolate groups of our citizens, we will not only get that back in verbal form, but also in the form of protest. Then we are threatened by upheaval from domestic conflict. I understand media bias, but I also see inconsistent and incorrect messages coming from our White House. Assurance does not come from assertions that are obviously false, even if they are of little consequence, like the number of people attending an assembly. I caution elected officials against becoming The Emperor’s Men admiring the Emperor’s New Clothes. Saying it is true does not make it truth. The greatness of this nation comes through working to find common ground. When we lose that, we lose our unity and become a nation of separatists. The most efficient way to collapse a nation is to: • take away or reduce access to information (discredit the media; release inconsistent or vague information), • isolate and reduce the power structure (malign judiciary; implement nepotism; reduce or ‘confuse’ communication between lawmakers and citizens), • alienate neighbors and partners, • assign negative stereotypes to large segments of the population (support discrimination based on religion, national origin, race, color, or sex), • devalue diverse opinion become ego- and ethno-centric. Lynn Robertson Pendleton OTHER VIEWS Want geniuses? Welcome immigrants M fields. The MacArthur grants aybe “some are rapists,” in cover the humanities, too; the past Donald Trump’s nasty words. decade’s winners include such But many are geniuses. Just celebrated writers as Junot Díaz, ask the MacArthur Foundation, which born in the Dominican Republic; responded to our president’s frequent Edwidge Danticat, born in Haiti; and demonization of immigrants, including that infamous phrase, by doing a little Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of math. “Americanah,” born in Nigeria. Every year since 1981, the José Quiñonez, named a genius Frank foundation has bestowed so-called last year for his pioneering work in Bruni financial services, was born in Mexico, genius grants on more than 20 of the Comment the country vilified in Trump’s country’s most accomplished and “rapists” remark. He told me that he promising scientists, scholars, artists and his siblings immigrated illegally in 1980, and writers. These awards are a huge deal, after their mother died, to live with relatives in trumpeted in the media and worn with pride forevermore. And the winners, typically in the San Jose, California. He was 9. He studied hard and got a master’s degree middle of their careers, get $625,000 each. from Princeton. He said that his four siblings, Of the 965 geniuses (or, more properly, like him, have good jobs, two as high school MacArthur fellows) to date, 209 were born outside the United States, according to Cecilia teachers. Long before Trump’s campaign, he heard and cringed at complaints that Mexican Conrad, who leads the fellowship program. immigrants were criminals, freeloaders. That’s 21.7 percent. The 2010 census “Especially early on, I began to believe: determined that less than 13 percent of the Maybe I was lazy, maybe I was broken?” U.S. population is foreign-born. said Quiñonez, 46, who Conrad wondered now lives in Oakland, whether MacArthur Immigrants or the California. “But there fellows are anomalies. something in our They’re not. She looked children of immigrants was family that helped us back over the past 3 reject that narrative. We ½ decades — which have founded or fought back against that is the life span of the co-founded nearly every narrative. I never allowed fellowships — to see it to seep into my soul.” who’d received other top legendary American It’s possible that the honors given only to U.S. bounty of immigrants citizens and residents. technology company, won MacArthur She found that including Google, Intel, who’ve grants demonstrates immigrants were overrepresented Facebook and Apple. some predisposition among foundation among the winners of executives toward certain the Pulitzer Prize for life stories and a desire to promote people who music, of the National Humanities Medal and have been overlooked and underappreciated. especially of the John Bates Clark Medal, Some critics of the foundation have asserted which recognizes brilliant U.S. economists that. under the age of 40. Thirty-five percent of But it’s worth noting that if the foundation these economists were foreign born, including took into account children of immigrants as people from India, Turkey and Ukraine. well as immigrants themselves, the percentage The far-right paranoiacs and scaremongers who pressured Trump to end DACA (Deferred of its geniuses that reflects the benefits of immigration would be higher than 21.7. It’s Action for Childhood Arrivals) hate to also worth noting that for most of the grant’s acknowledge what we reality-moored types history, foreign-born people constituted less understand: Many of our country’s finest than 10 percent of the U.S. population. minds and brightest ideas are forged when The immigrants who’ve won MacArthur dreamers from elsewhere encounter an unfamiliar place with unimagined possibilities. grants include refugees, and I spoke with one, There’s a creative spark in that convergence. It An-My Lê, 57, who fled Saigon as a teenager at the end of the Vietnam War. She finished has powered American greatness. high school in Sacramento, went to college That’s the moral of the MacArthur at Stanford, got graduate degrees there and at Foundation’s math, which it shared first with Yale, and drew acclaim for photography with The New York Times. That’s also the moral of the Nobel Prizes. According to an analysis late war and military themes. Her work has been exhibited at the country’s most prominent last year by Adil Najam, a Boston University museums. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches professor: “Since its inception in 1901, the at Bard College in upstate New York. Nobel Prizes and the Prize in Economic I asked her what she made of immigrants’ Sciences have been awarded 579 times to prevalence among MacArthur geniuses. “I 911 people and organizations. The U.S. alone think most of us feel very lucky to be here, so has had more than 350 Nobel winners. More we work extremely hard,” she said. “I think than 100 of these have been immigrants and individuals born outside of the United States.” maybe trauma is part of what drives us.” She added that in terms of innovation, “Having If immigrants to the United States were the different perspectives, having the different considered their own country, Najam wrote, life experiences, makes you see things their tally of Nobels would exceed that of differently.” Fresh ideas and great art are often every country but the United States. An article about immigrants in The Atlantic born that way. Conrad, the MacArthur Foundation just a few years ago noted that the four executive, said that in all the debate lately U.S.-based physicists who sounded the 1939 about how many immigrants our country warning about nuclear weapons that led to needs for jobs of varying skill levels, she the Manhattan Project were born outside the hears too little about the ambient impact of United States. The article went on to point out that “immigrants or the children of immigrants immigrants on the United States’ creative climate. “They have certain attributes,” she have founded or co-founded nearly every told me. “They are risk takers.” And their legendary American technology company, thinking and discoveries are nourished by “the including Google, Intel, Facebook, and of course Apple (you knew that Steve Jobs’ father experience of dislocation, of navigating a new culture and a new set of norms,” she said. was named Abdulfattah Jandali, right?).” They come with a sort of hunger and a And Jennifer Hunt, a professor of kind of gaze that don’t subtract from what economics at Rutgers University, has done those of us already here have but, instead, research showing that among graduates of add to it. They give us insights, inventions, U.S. colleges, immigrants are twice as likely art. Embracing their genius is the genius of to receive patents as native-born Americans. America. Her research further suggests that this doesn’t ■ come at the expense of native-born Americans Frank Bruni, an Op-Ed columnist for but in fact stimulates their innovation, too. The New York Times since June 2011, joined “You’re bouncing ideas off each other,” Hunt the newspaper in 1995 and has ranged told me. broadly across its pages. He has been both Her findings speak to the oft-charted a White House correspondent and the chief success of U.S. immigrants in STEM restaurant critic. (science, technology, economics and math) 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.
