Op-Ed: Corporate Remediation Key to ANY Oregon Future

(SALEM) - If ever there was a political-issue certainty, we now face one in Oregon, absolutely and irrevocably.

Simple, solid, stable tax principles must prevail again, restoring balance and equality of treatment for all.

`Compaign contributions" and their shaping impact or threat must be removed from their manipulative impact and in turn placed under precise and permanent control well within overriding public interest.

Already, we have laid out lines-demanded right here on this page in six previous statements, detailing specific consequences arising from this infamous inequality. (All Op Eds are available on request, so will spare you quotes, citations, dollar figures, and large pile of potent other facts documenting an obvious reality.)

No matter what we want to do NOW in this State re education, health care, public safety, transportation facilities, trade resources, university system; and any other state-funded program meant to serve our citizens as they deserve to be served; any and every action starts and ends at precisely the same point:

`How do we pay the piper ?" You know who the piper is -- and who gets to pay him, without fail.

The law of economic gravity works precisely like the one controlling the physical world: If you remove support, either slowly or rapidly, whatever is supported will collapse, either slowly or rapidly.

That the piper must be paid is without question. If you doubt debt-owed to the piper for any of those programs cited -- simply look around you at your friends, neighbors, and other citizens, and seek their fundamental responses to what they now encounter.

Costs are not always accountable only in dollars, although here that total is already fabulous and still growing -- as the parent-school board suit seeking Constitutional obligations in education will surely illuminate in another spectacular light-burst.

That we have failed to find and preserve and strengthen the absolutely demanded substantial resources to carry out that very fundamental governance responsibility is also without question.

Yet that is only the most painful of problems now proving unavoidably demanding of practical solution and permanent fix, finally, before we must face even worse and more costly court-imposed `solution" for it and others, too.

We still allow and continue to maintain --at our very special risk-- one of the most questionable state-level corporate tax systems in this or any Western nation.

WHY this has been allowed to become reality-in-Oregon is immaterial here at the moment --not even controversial, any longer.

But it is politically and potently now becoming highly obvious, a la Mannix debacle when PLEDGE became well-known, blocking any sensible, rational, reasonable, and demanded remediation re taxes-NOW in this state.

Nor is it socially so --controversial, that is. The public record shows denial, degradation and denigration, at many levels, now more than for the past twenty years. It is simply, solely, unavoidably, inevitably, and nearly immeasurably a fact of Oregon life.

You can check for yourselves. Most of you are already doing just that, with results as outlined here.

If YOU have not done so yet, for yourself -- start NOW, -before they come back to the Salem arena".

Since that is truly the reality we face, that is where we must start for anything and everything else we intend to do, for our own generation and for those yet-to-come: Surely the only real future this State of Oregon will ever possess, however briefly as they sweep on and outwards into the world we are making for them.

That is why this Op Ed has a simple question for both of the two political-cult/backed `candidates for Governor", now rearming campaign workers for that final flood of `campaign advertising" --notable to them but more and more nauseous to many frustrated citizens.

Look for straightforward demand for defining statements from these two politicians, with full reports on each response.

It is not only our OWN future hanging on demanded-action, but that of those who follow us; to whom we surely owe an absolute responsibility to `leave things better than when we arrived".