Op Ed: Capital Editorials
Can Shape State Policies
Despite Corporate Concern

What is the reponsibility of local media when it comes to telling the truth about educational funding?

The road to college will grow more difficult for students unless Oregonians take control back from right-wing factions that want to choke the tax base

(SALEM) - Skimming other Edit Pages is professional effort here, demanded to determine where others are headed --and why. When any colleague joins us in “raising-the-dust relative to realities” --even while still playing political games protecting “the interests”-- it helps us all.

This week has seen a most peculiar combination of such public-press dance-steps performed right here in the capital. Monday we had fancy free-steps involving a winsome whirl or two.

On Tuesday comes a perfect pirouette playing political catch-up while protecting the homestead. We can hardly wait for Thursday --and then the weekend!

First, Monday’s SJ Lead Edit: "School improvements must start right away" makes strong case for what surely DOES have to happen, and rapidly.

The first-word is nowhere on the foremost change-demanded: Corporate tax payments restored to Oregon’s budget.

Beginning essential return-shift from individual Oregonians back to profit-producing corporations is, inescapably, the single most-demanded campaign issue as Tuesday’s profit-protecting pirouette surely shows, now.

Precise, probing documentation from Oregon Center for Public Policy is seldom seen in the SJ - why NOT? OCPP’s authoritative reporting nails down depths of corporate perversion in Oregon’s tax system over many years.

(Those reports were reviewed, then forwarded to both candidates recently by Salem-News.)

Second Edit: “Legislators kowtow to right by trying to kill estate tax", by accomplished Oregonian Ron Eachus.

Ron’s right on the money, regarding national actions. But we need to apply the same wisdoms and experience --and now intense new and strong demands for change-- right at home.

Corporate corruption via campaign contribution has eaten the bottom right out of everything the Legislature has done, can do, and will ever be ABLE to do -- as TABOR-coverage plainly showed.

Do you remember any SJ-Edit even mentioning the corporate tax reform movement, much less supporting it?? How about campaign-contribution remediation ?

So now’s-the-time for political catch-up cavorting-dances.

Lead Edit (facing page): "School board should preserve honors classes": Comes from anguished parents hurting when Salem-Keizer Schools slash programs for "high-achieving and motivated students." They’re dead-right about change when federal funding is now dying.

They're dead-on re No Child Left Behind, too. This hampering, hurtful federal action was never intended to carry out its catchy title, but to shift the national system into battle mode, manipulating state educational systems for the first time in history.

Oregon’s Commissioner Susan Castillo has led that continuing fight compromising its consequences --never well reported locally.

These parents make points persuasively --part of the pattern involved here --pieces and consequences while avoiding "the heart of the matter":

“WHO is paying WHAT PART of taxes totally-demanded for any movement whatsoever in education and every other part of our state budget?”

Now cometh Tuesday: Full of fancy pirouettes around “the heart of the matter” -- corporate tax reform NOW in Oregon.

But this Edit makes it seem like it’s all simple political-ploys played “tongue-in-cheek” by vote-seeking gamesters; rather than Governor-candidates seeking to reflect democratic representative governance.

Oregonians haven’t lost confidence in our educational system OR its leaders in every school district and classroom. The CHALKBOARD REPORT makes that fundamentally clear; Readers have seen little laid out here in Salem on that issue --until recently, elsewhere than the SJ.

What Oregonians DO deplore is further delay on WHAT we are NOW going to DO, to correct what we already know to be WRONG: That heavy-load and continued cost-burden shift from profitable corporations to other Oregonians suffering economic woes.

More than 85 percent of all Americans are now high-school graduates, recent polls have shown. That surely qualifies those in Oregon to seek equitable rapid change in our educational system at all levels, NOW.

Any possible action must start with solid reforming of the corporate tax-burden level; with every voter -- and every newspaper-- seeking action from a dodging, evading, lackadaisical Legislature under heavy economic extortion from surrounding lobbyists.

Only then will Oregon retain any right to claim it has a future --for “those still coming and growing” and for those moving here with corporate recruitment “for the Oregon lifestyle”.

They are obviously wise enough to check on children’s welfare via schools prior to packing-and-moving!

SO that's the situation on the SJ Edit Page: Partial opinion more palatable than “the real dance” of reality.

We welcome their two-step now, even if delayed, since it must surely presage support for corporate tax reform. (But take due care on any forthcoming “endorsement”!)

Journalism takes life from the First Amendment providing responsibilities, as well as privileges, for our “free press” --when acting for public interests.

“Free”-journalists must uphold those responsibilities to preserve the privileges; and only then seek out paid-advertising making those many privileges --and “the business side”-- possible.

When that role is reversed denigration and damage to democracy inevitably sets in, as the Founders warned us; a trend noted nationally for the past decade, ironically, during an era of eradication for many of our freedoms.

"Profit" becomes a dirty word only when distortion and perversion prevail whether for the press OR the corporation.