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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (Nov. 7, 2018)
Page 4A East Oregonian Wednesday, November 7, 2018 CHRISTOPHER RUSH Publisher KATHRYN B. BROWN Owner DANIEL WATTENBURGER Managing Editor WYATT HAUPT JR. News Editor Founded October 16, 1875 OUR VIEW Don’t be fooled by scammers T ype fonts at newspapers come in all sorts of sizes, but in the old hot metal days the largest used to be a giant 72 point. We can’t spare that space on election day, so readers will have to pretend the next sentences appear in giant letters. We’ll put it in bold, at least. If it looks too good to be true, it is not true. If an online contact warns you are in danger, but can pay to avoid the problem, it is not true. Beware. It sounds like simple advice, but even after law enforcement agencies and media have sounded the alarm, people are still falling for scams. Please don’t. We take no pleasure in writing news stories from local police logs about our neighbors who have been duped out of money they can ill afford to lose. As technology takes a central part of our daily lives, more and more criminal charlatans are finding creative ways to bilk people of their savings. The Umatilla County Sheriff’s Office and the Hermiston, Pendleton and various other police departments have all reported scams. We fear their repeated warnings still fall on some deaf ears. Hundreds of thousands of dollars lost, sometimes in small chunks and sometimes in enormous ones. Scammers will claim to be local law enforcement with a warrant for a person’s arrest, then an offer to accept money to avoid it happening. Scammers will claim to be grandchildren, asking for bail money from an international jail. Scammers will claim to be prospective employers eager to send a large signing bonus, then ask for a portion of it back. Scammers will pose as authority and familial figures of all kinds to build trust. They’re all scams, however plausible they sound. The mere mention of the Internal Revenue Service causes otherwise rational people to be duped by scammers. The federal agency in charge of collecting your taxes doesn’t initiate contact via social media or email. Its real agents don’t ask for payments to anyone other than the United States Treasury. Its website at irs.gov has a detailed page describing scams and how to avoid them. It makes for chilling reading. Some tips to recognize and defeat fraud: • Government agencies typically already know your basic personal information; • Agencies are unlikely to call to announce a coming arrest and never seek money through prepaid debit cards like Green Dot; • If you haven’t participated in a contest, you probably don’t win Dreamstime/Tribune News Service Gift cards are almost as good as cash for scammers. Anyone who demands pay- ment by gift card is always a scammer, according to the Federal Trade Commission. anything — and you certainly don’t want to pay a fee (or “taxes”) to receive it. Frankly, it’s best to avoid sending money over the internet or phone when possible, unless you are sure you are dealing with a bona fide vendor. Phone and email scammers often access personal information through social media accounts to seem credible during conversations. They are skilled at building long-term rapport with potential targets. This often happens through online dating sites, where the scammers work patiently to create a plausible “relationship” with their targets, then ask for money to bail them out of a fictional predicament. Your social media accounts are ripe for sharing information that scammers and identity thieves can use. Those online posts where friends ask you to share the name of your first pet or where you met your spouse may appear harmless fun. But those are the same questions financial institutions ask you when they set up security questions to access your online accounts. Would you post these private secrets on the bathroom wall at a truck stop along Interstate 84? Sharing those details on Facebook is the online equivalent. The most sickening aspect is that elderly people — who grew up in a more trusting age — are so vulnerable to scams. Many don’t have the same familiarity with technology as younger people whose entire lives have been lived in the personal computer or smartphone age. These days, a scam caller can be anywhere in the world, because software exists to indicate that the number they are calling from is in your area code. Because of embarrassment, victims can be shy about reporting they’ve been scammed. Don’t. If you suspect you are being scammed, call your local law enforcement agency with your suspicions before handing over any money. YOUR VIEWS OTHER VIEWS City budget, sustainability or the same old thing Iran & Saudi Arabia, Thelma & Louise As Bob Dylan once said, “The times they are a-changin’.” Our Pendleton mayor and city councilors have concluded that the budget road city hall has taken us down has led us to more potholes, leaky roofs, rotten plumbing, and myriad other infrastructure problems. A lot of thought and discussion is going on toward implementation of a sustainable budget, a road map to rebuild our crumbling city. In the past, a common practice for funding new programs has been dependent on grants with routine maintenance provided by volunteers. This must be addressed. With no long-range plan in place for future maintenance once those grants expire and volunteer burnout, funding inevitably falls on the general fund. Deferring maintenance on city infrastructure while simultaneously funding new projects became the preferred solution simply because it was the easy way out. The replacement of the Eighth Street Bridge is just one example. Not only did this project require the city to assume ownership of several miles of substandard county roads, and city hall not complying with proper procedures for the disposition of historic property, ODOT was forced to delay the project. This resulted in cost increases, and added to our backlog of street repairs. It’s time to cancel the relocation portion of this project and use those funds to offset the cost overruns. Such a gesture makes perfect sense and would show the public the mayor and city council are serious about getting the budget under control. The city streets are the main issue. Public works continues a pattern of paying consultants to tell us that our streets are crumbling. This, and continued use of $190,000 in gas tax revenue to pay electric bills, wastes already scare funds that should be buying asphalt. One look at the condition of our streets and you can see how well that’s worked out. Their remedy? Classify the streets as a utility, tack another fee on our utility bill, and get more revenue to feed their insatiable appetite without any spending cuts. Oregon law bars the city council from dictating a budget, they can only advise. Unless the council can convince the city manager they are serious, it looks like all that talk about a sustainable budget is just talk. Only time will tell. Rick Rohde Pendleton Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the East Oregonian editorial board. Other columns, letters and cartoons on this page express the opinions of the authors and not necessarily that of the East Oregonian. W ith each passing day, rebels and helped that regime U.S. policy toward Iran ethnically cleanse Sunnis from and Saudi Arabia more key districts in Syria. Iran and its closely resembles the 1991 film mercenaries also winked at Syria’s classic “Thelma & Louise.” genocidal use of poison gas and For those too young to barrel bombs, which contributed remember, the movie starred Susan mightily to the death toll from the Sarandon and Geena Davis, two Syrian civil war of some 500,000 Thomas people, with 11 million people gal pals, whose fishing trip turns Friedman displaced. dark after Sarandon’s character Comment shoots a would-be rapist, triggering Iran’s imperial overstretch was one of the all-time great movie halted only by the Israeli air force lines: “You shoot off a guy’s head with dealing a heavy blow to Iranian units in his pants down, believe me, Texas ain’t Syria when Iran sent missiles there to the place you want to get caught.” This attack Israel. eventually prompts the women to escape Then came President Donald Trump. the police by dramatically driving their He tore up the Iran deal, reimposed 1966 Thunderbird off a cliff into the Grand sanctions on Tehran and vowed to advance Canyon to their deaths. U.S. interests in the region by selling $110 What’s this have to do with Iran, Saudi billion in arms to Saudi Arabia and betting Arabia and the U.S.? Well, if you look on the young Crown Prince Mohammed back at U.S. Mideast policy over the last bin Salman, MBS, who had removed the decade, what do you see? You see the religious police from the streets in Saudi Obama team looking at Iran and Saudi Arabia — a big deal — granted women Arabia and saying: The Saudis are drifting the right to drive and brought cinema and will never deliver on Arab-Israel peace and Western-style concerts to the desert or real reform at home, so let’s bet on Iran kingdom, all while snuffing out any — let’s bet that the best way to tilt the dissent. region onto a better path is by promoting Barack Obama’s bet on Iran made denuclearization and reform in Iran, which sense, but it required the U.S. and its allies is a real civilization, with empowered to also restrain Iran’s malign regional women and a pro-Western middle class. influences from the outside. Trump’s bet So, the Obama team forged the on MBS also made sense — we had a Iran nuclear deal, which curbed Iran’s huge interest in his curbing the export of development of nuclear weapons for at puritanical Saudi Salafist Islam, extreme least 15 years, in return for a lifting of versions of which inspired the hijackers of U.S. sanctions — and with the hoped- 9/11, the Taliban and ISIS. for byproduct of opening Iran up to the But to get the best and cushion the world, thereby strengthening moderates worst of the impulsive MBS, the U.S. there against the hard-line Revolutionary needed to restrain him from the inside. We Guards. needed a strong U.S. ambassador or special And how did that work out? envoy in Riyadh — or a president — to Iran denuclearized, but the draw red lines for MBS. Trump did none Revolutionary Guards used the release of of that, leaving MBS’ maintenance largely pressure and fresh cash and investments to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. from the West to further project their power And so, like the Iranians, MBS used into the Sunni Arab world, consolidating his carte blanche from America to the grip of Iran’s proxies over four Arab project power and stretch far beyond capitals: Baghdad, Damascus, Sanaa and his capabilities: intervening in Yemen, Beirut. blockading Qatar, abducting the prime Worse, Iran and its Lebanese Shiite minister of Lebanon, cracking down on mercenary army, Hezbollah, joined with women driving activists and permitting, Syria’s pro-Shiite regime in suppressing if not ordering, his team to kill any chance of power-sharing with Syrian moderate Saudi democracy advocate Jamal Khashoggi. Do you see a pattern here? In both cases the U.S. hoped that limited bets on Iran and Saudi Arabia moderating their most toxic behaviors might lead to better outcomes in the region, and for U.S. interests. Instead, both countries used the additional maneuvering room and resources that we gave them to drive right over the cliff. To put it cinematically, Iran and Saudi Arabia did the full Thelma & Louise. But, this being the Middle East, they did it in separate cars. For instance, MBS abducted the prime minister of Lebanon, Saad Hariri. But Iran’s Hezbollah murdered the former prime minister of Lebanon, Saad’s father, Rafik Hariri, to make sure he did not return to power. Meanwhile, Denmark just accused Iran of sending intelligence agents to assassinate an Iranian Arab opposition leader living in exile in Denmark, and France just expelled an Iranian diplomat after a failed plot to carry out a bomb attack at the Paris rally of an Iranian opposition group. I note this simply to point out that this whole region is in the grip of an incredibly self-destructive cycle of tribal, political and sectarian madness — Persians versus Arabs, Shiites versus Sunnis, Egyptian government versus democracy activists, Saudis versus Qataris, Alawites versus Sunnis, Islamists versus Christians, Israelis versus Palestinians, Yemeni Houthis versus Yemeni Sunnis, Turks versus Kurds and Libyan tribes versus Libyan tribes. So much hate, in so many directions. An American president’s job is to understand that all the key players out there have multiple agendas. Some agendas align with our interests — did we forget that Iran helped us defeat the Taliban after 9/11? — but many conflict with them. We need to extract the best we can from them, curb and offset their worst impulses — and get off oil as fast as we can to reduce our exposure to this madness. ■ Thomas L. Friedman became the New York Times’ foreign affairs columnist in 1995 and has been awarded three Pulitzer prizes. 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. 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.
