Op Ed:
Will Oregon Re-Join
Twenty-First Century
OR Continue In Reverse?

Legislature Cult-Conflict Continuance Threatens Realistic Progress

Oregon State Motto: "She flies with her own wings" Photo: EPA

(SALEM) - Both so-called political parties still active in Oregon promised their constituent remnants --and all other Oregonians-- that this would be the session at which cult-driven political confrontation would assuredly be abandoned.

Presumably what would --and surely should!-- follow then is the kind of cooperative consideration for realistic needs, and the truly consummate hard work of providing sufficient rational and reasonable resources to return this State to the Twenty-First Century.

“At the half” of this continuing game, most pundits will agree as they survey symptoms and signs of some progress but must also manage deft explanation for several striking failures, the score remains very close to 0 vs. 0 --with “both sides losing”!!

Most striking lack of reversing long-going “reversal” is noted in nearly every level of education from preschool through graduate-level, with painful progress partially produced for those middle sections.

But higher education and community college-level remain-drained and deeply-damaged, despite the desperate need for building strong working cadres of competently-prepared people for new 21st Century demanding necessities, completely, across all business/corporate needs.

“We were surprised to see how low community colleges, higher education, and Head Start were in the co-chairs’ budget,” House Majority Leader Dave Hunt commented, surely recognizing “the fat middle” vs “starving beginning-learners and top-grads both.”

That peculiar game-skirmish reported recently --with Rainy Day dollar-bag replacing the game-ball-- indicates all too clearly why-and-how the confrontation concept still sets “the rules”; which is why, most Oregonians continue to believe, return of credibility to the Legislature is still “a sometime thing” -- not yet clearly achieved.

We MUST ask, too: “Where’s that ‘promised-rapidly’ re-make for Oregon’s state Ethics Commission, after recent remarkable demonstration of special need?”

“On the way” is a poor answer for this session: Those new rules should be nailed down and detail-printed for every working participant -- if not perhaps framed on every desk, or even tattooed where they will do the most good; with “painful consequences” for trust-destroying behaviors even further multiplied than that current factor of five-X: Civil penalty of $1,000 has become $5,000.

Why NOT $10,000? That will guarantee intense interest in keeping it clean, honest, and fully on-the-record!

What’s more damaging to democratically-required demand for trust in governance than the relationship of representative to citizen, explicit in the choice-by-vote foundation?

It takes two to make a deal, and lavish purveyors of plush campaign contributions should suffer similar -- if not much more drastic!-- consequences when trust is bartered, bought or otherwise delivered, even via delayed receipt well concealed and unreported.

No matter how you “read the times” today, nor where you stand politically --or anti-politically, as now so many truly do-- the essence of real life resounds for every Oregonian --even if some in this current Legislature refuse to hear, or see -- OR learn.

What some there seem to overlook, ignore or simply deny is the widespread understandings now common “among the common people”, in the relatively harder and threatening surround of:

-Off-shoring jobs, by the millions nationally and the hurtful thousands right here in Oregon;

-Globalization forcing drastic, rapid change in “free trade”; and of prolonged national damage due to failed once-conservative, now simply radical “royalism”-policies, denuding the nation of “the best and brightest” in a frustratingly wasteful war;

-While watering the wilds of the world with the hard-accumulated economic treasures better committed to our own caring needs and achievements right at home.

The brute truth of observable fact demands rapid remedial action across the board on major matters right here in Oregon --if the State is to continue its once-heralded progress and its role as onetime national pioneer on particularly-pertinent issues-now, such as basic conservation via the remade “bottle bill”, a pioneer in earlier times.

Among major matters yet to be managed and made-over are the most essential items on the overwhelming agenda accumulated during those decades of desperate damage to both Oregon state programs and Legislative credibilities, including:

+ Corporate tax reform and remediation, perhaps the absolutely most-essential action-demanded in this session -- and also the most equitable source for solid and sensible funding-needed, so recognized even by business groups.

Recent testimony based on extensive research and authoritative professional analysis clearly concludes that:

1. Corporate tax revenues have been steadily declining as a share of the state economy.
2. Corporate profits are up substantially.
3. Oregon business taxes as a share of the economy are half their 1980 levels.
4. Corporations aggressively pursue abusive tax shelters.
5. Nike and others saw a huge tax break from the shift to “single sales” tax-formulation.
6. The “kicker” has been more valuable to corporations than to personal-income/payers.
7. he “kicker” refunds reward out-of-state corporations much more than it does Oregonians.
8. More than two/thirds of corporations pay the Depression-set “$10 minimum income tax”.
9. Most Oregon corporations pay less state income tax than a family of four living at the poverty level.
10. Corporate executives got huge pay-raises, while Oregon got $10.
11. ADJUSTED for inflation, 1929 minimum tax of $25 would be THREE HUNDRED dollars; 1932 minimum of $10 would be One Hundred Thirty-Five dollars.

+ Healthcare strengthening/remediation in true Oregon- leadership pattern and program, with strong in-state and nation support for rapid, radical action --where Oregon can, again, lead the nation with pioneers such as Gov. Kitzhaber and others involved. It is clearly fiscally irresponsible to neglect rational and reasonable remedial and preventive-actions/now, in face of desperately-summiting healthcare costs across the board. + Road and community safety and security restored via realistic support for Oregon State Trooper additions and logistics. (Most Oregonians could NOT care less how this is accomplished, but most agree that it must be done rapidly and well, to levels equal or beyond any former force.)

But “this game is far from over...”, most canny observers will agree on examination. There is yet time for this Legislature to prove to all of us once again that: “She Flies With Her Own Wings!” …and that this bountiful and beauteous State can be returned to what we once were -- and can be again.

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Editor’s Note: Background on issues come from statements in The AMERICAN PROSPECT April ‘O7:

1. “Why Liberalism Works”; Dr. Paul Starr, Princeton University.
2. “”Why Economists Can’t See the Economy”; Barry C. Lynn, New America Foundation.