Learn a new skill and support a good bill–it’ll just take a few minutes
The Washington State Legislature is in session and actively considering bills in committees. Committee approval is a necessary step toward bringing a bill to the floor and voting on it.
Did you know that you can usefully register your opinion of a bill—or submit written testimony—or sign up to testify remotely or in person? Like all things governmental it is a little confusing at first, but once learned it’s easy—and it gives you a voice.
Here’s a case in point by way of illustration. HB 2079 – 2023-24 is this year’s numbering for a Washington House bill that a friend of mine, Bob West, has been promoting for years. It is up for committee consideration in the House tomorrow, so the time is ripe to weigh in. The bill concerns the safety of those, like sports referees, helping out in elementary and secondary schools. It would broaden those who are protected against threats of violence or actual violence and increase the penalties. Mr. West’s advocacy for this bill stems from an incident he details in his story pasted below. Read through Bob’s post and then continue below to follow the steps you can use to support a bill that is up for consideration like this one.
Bob’s Story
My name is Bob West. I was the wrestling referee that was headbutted by a wrestler and knocked unconscious, back in 1996, in Colville, WA. Since that time I have been an advocate at a local and national level in promoting sportsmanship issues and helping get legislation passed that makes those that assault sports officials accountable. I have been to Olympia over the years and have been unsuccessful so far, but have gotten a resolution passed out of the house. I am asking to take a few minutes and click on the link above, register, and please sign up “pro” for this bill. It is imperative that we get as many as possible to show the Safety and Justice Committee that this is a problem, that assaults continue to increase, and that we are losing sports officials to call our games.
I maintain a webpage at www.ur-safe.org (Umpires and Referees Stopping Assaults For Ever) and have authored a book called (Rage on the Field, the Decline of Sportsmanship in Sports Today) www.rageonthefield.com. This link shows the vicious assault I incurred, along with ending my officiating career, and 4 neck surgeries later.
For additional information you can contact your state legislator or reach me at:
Your help is greatly appreciated along with testifying, written testimony, or voting “pro” in support of.
Thank you so much for your immediate attention to this.
Here’s how to register what you think
Click HB 2079 – 2023-24 for an overview. Click Original Bill under “Documents” on that page to see the three page text of the bill. On that same HB 2079 – 2023-24 webpage there a link near the top that looks like this:
Clicking that link will take you to a page “House Committee Sign In” with the Committee, Meeting Date, and the Bill you wish to comment on already selected. You then click how you wish to express yourself from the short list in the next section.
If you’re not prepared to submit a written comment or to sign up to testify (in person or electronically) you can still register your “Pro” or “Con” view of the legislation for the record by simply clicking “I would like my position noted for the legislative record” and filling in your information on the page that appears. I understand that the numbers of people who take the time to weigh in with a simple “Pro” or “Con” really do get considered and can make a difference to whether or not a bill moves forward.
HB 2079 – 2023-24 has bipartisan sponsors. It’s a good bill, but, like so much we wish the legislature would take up, it competes for attention with many bills—and the way the help it move forward is to support it. So if you agree with what Bob’s bill proposes take a few minutes to register your opinion. This is how representative democracy works.
One More Thing—A Ranked Choice Voting Bill
Now reinforce what you just learned by going through the same exercise with HB 2250 – 2023-24, a bill to be heard THIS AFTERNOON in Committee. HB 2250 further opens the door to adopting ranked choice voting by ensuring the Washington Administrative Code provides clear and consistent standards for implementing ranked-choice voting in Washington and streamlines the process for doing so. If you would like more information, here is a link.
If HB 2250 – 2023-24 makes sense to you they way it does to me, click and follow the same process as I outlined above for Bob’s bill to register “Pro” for this one.
Civic engagement!
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
P.S. I’ve been told that the method I outlined above for citizens to comment on legislation this conveniently is quite new. At least parts of it have been available only as a result of Covid—one of very few good things that Covid brought any of us. Either way, having this ability to comment without the considerable investment of time, energy, and expense necessary to travel to Olympia to testify is a considerable boon for those of us relatively isolated on the eastern side of the state. Let’s use it!
Spokane County Commissioner Al French and the public good
There is trouble brewing on Spokane’s West Plains, and the most powerful, embedded, and connected politician in Spokane County, County Commissioner Al French, along with the Spokane International Airport’s CEO, Larry Krauter, really want the trouble just to go away. The excellent article by long-time investigative reporter Tim Connor reveals how Commissioner French quietly stifled efforts to have the county assist in gathering data on the possible contamination of the West Plains well water. It is one thing for a powerful elected official to personally question if a contamination threat to the health and well-being of some of his constituents is overblown, but it is quite another to unilaterally use one’s political power to block acceptance of a $450,000 grant to do the testing necessary to quantify the problem. Apparently, Mr. French is convinced his understanding of the risks of chemical contamination of the West Plains is superior to that of the scientific community. (Note the parallels to fervent Republican denials of the mechanism and importance of global heating.)
The Background
If you’ve been around as long as I have you’ll remember the slogan “Better Living Through Chemistry.” Those words frequently uttered on radio and TV were part of an ad campaign of the DuPont Corporation from 1935 to 1982. At the time new chemicals with trade names like Teflon and Freon were marvels of modern science. Barely a passing thought was spent on their possible effects on human health and the environment.
If it were not for observant, questioning lay people, physicians, epidemiologists, environmental scientists, and plaintiffs’ attorneys, the long term effects of these chemicals would still be unknown—and, since ignorance is bliss, the corporations that manufacture and market these chemical products to the public would be blithely delivering profits at the public’s expense. The combination of internal corporate evaluations and passive surveillance by government agencies like the EPA are inadequate to the task of deciding what is safe and what is not.
“Forever Chemicals” = all of the “PFAS(s)”
The naming of organic chemicals is mind-numbing, which is why the name “forever chemicals” was first applied to “PFAS” chemicals in an op ed in the Washington Post in 2018 (that is an excellent explanatory article that is worth reading if you’re not blocked by a paywall.) PFAS stands for “Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances”, a class which includes what are now more than ten thousand chemicals that go by a number of abbreviations you might see in print, like PFOS and PFOA (two of the PFAS chemicals that are major constituents of firefighting foams that have been used both at Fairchild and Spokane International). They are all dubbed “forever chemicals” because, once synthesized, they resist breakdown in nature (and in our bodies) for millennia on account of the tremendous stability of carbon-fluorine chemical bonds.
PFAS did not exist in nature before they were first chemically synthesized in the 1930s. As a class of chemicals PFAS possess properties that made them extremely useful in applications like non-stick cook pans (Teflon), fire-fighting foams (like those used in quantity for decades at Fairchild—and—it turns out—Spokane International Airport), waterproof clothing, and stain-resistant fabrics. PFAS have been produced and used in quantity from the 1940s and 1950s onward. There are now thousands of members of the PFAS family of chemicals. Now, if one checks, after eighty years of industrial production and use, PFAS can be found at some concentration nearly everywhere on the globe—and in nearly every living being.
Although DuPont was aware as early as the 1970s that its workers exposed to PFAS had elevated serum blood levels of PFAS chemicals, PFAS were thought to be inert. Consequently, elevated serum levels were deemed by DuPont to be of little concern. It took cows dying miserably, a distressed West Virginia cattle farmer, and an extremely diligent and dedicated plaintiff’s attorney, Rob Bilott, to finally get DuPont’s attention—and to launch a class-action-funded scientific investigation that finally laid out the health risks of PFAS in the early 2000s. If you have the time, the NYTimes Feature article “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare” is a lengthy, but absolutely fascinating story. (The story focuses on PFOS contamination, one specific PFAS forever chemical that is among the West Plains well-contaminants.)
West Plains Water
Over a couple of decades we’ve all read articles on the possible dangers of “forever chemicals” building up in the environment—with consequences like endocrine dysfunction and increased frequency of certain cancers, pregnancy complications, sterility, and birth defects. Such concerns might have seemed far away, the stuff of national reporting with little or nothing in the way local relevance. Then in 2017 there appeared a number of local articles about “PFAS” and “PFOS” chemicals from firefighting foams used for decades at Fairchild Air Force Base that were found in high concentrations as contaminants to the municipal well water of the City of Airway Heights.
There were immediate local consequences. The detection of municipal well contamination with PFAS led Airway Heights to seek water for its citizens from the City of Spokane. The City of Spokane taps into well water drawnfrom a different resource, the Spokane Valley–Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer(SVRP Aquifer). Here’s a map of that large and important aquifer:
The water in the SVRP Aquifer generally (and slowly) flows westward underground along with the Spokane River. Notice that the X in the southwest corner of the map, the spot marking Spokane International Airport on the West Plains, does not lie over, nor is its source of water drawn from, the porous, sand and gravel-filled Spokane Valley—Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer. When the wells supplying Airway Heights turned up with PFAS contamination the City of Airway Heights was able to draw its water from this larger, uncontaminated SVRP Aquifer via pipes connected to the seven municipal wells of the City of Spokane. (Note, as an aside, that if you live on Spokane’s South Hill or Five Mile Prairie you are also dependent on pipes that draw water from these municipal wells drilled into the SVRP Aquifer.)
Think of the SVRP Aquifer as a large, irregular bathtub filled with a thick layer of porous sand and gravel. That material was deposited by glaciers that finally melted back northward around ten thousand years ago. In contrast, the porous, water-permeable “paleochannels” that exist on the West Plains are lined with the impermeable black rocks (basalt) of the same type as you see in a number of places sticking up along I-90. These paleochannels run generally downhill on the West Plains in a northeasterly direction toward Deep Creek and the Spokane River. The black rock you see is basalt that solidified from several lava flows that rolled in from somewhere in eastern Oregon roughly twenty millions of years ago (the early Miocene Epoch). In the periods between these lava flows erosion carved other earlier paleochannels out of earlier layers of basalt. In some cases these earlier channels were partly filled in with porous sediment before another flow covered the landscape. (This is the same sort of geology that also underlies Spokane’s South Hill.) Imagine the result of this process: pockets of porous materials that can hold water (basically the definition of an aquifer) separated by layers of relatively impermeable (but often cracked and fissured) basalt.
Now imagine seeing all that in cross-section with thousands of well-holes drilled into it to various depths and you have some idea of the complexity of West Plains water supplies by comparison the large and relatively uniform Spokane Valley—Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer. The take away from all this, going back to the original story, is that underground water on the West Plains exists in a complex system that flows slowly northeastward in several of paleochannels that were long ago carved in the basalt.
Below is a map of the West Plains roughly showing the paleochannels and the locations of Fairchild Air Force Base and Spokane International Airport. Take note of the light green area signifying the “Fairchild Test Zone” (west of Hayford Rd) and of the location of Spokane International Airport and its upstream (or “up-channel”) relationship to the “Airport Paleochannel.” Finally, note the dark green “Pritchard Ecology Study Area,” the proposed well water data gathering area that would have been studied under the $450,000 grant. That is the grant that Commissioner French and CEO Krauter quietly blocked in 2020.
It’s a little hard to see, but there are three areas on this map that are served by municipal water: Medical Lake (with its own wells and water system), Airway Heights (now connected to the City of Spokane municipal water system as a result of PFAS contamination from Fairchild firefighting foams) and the area surrounding Spokane International Airport (which, being technically a part of the City of Spokane, also on gets its water from the Spokane municipal system). Importantly, all those little red dots you see on the map are private wells still individually drawing water from the complex of aquifers on the West Plains. The private wells within the light green “Fairchild Test Zone” fall under the water testing regimen supported by the federal government through Fairchild Air Force Base. All those red dots in the dark green area are wells that either haven’t been tested for PFAS or were tested at private expense. A large number of those wells are at risk of PFAS contamination not so much from Fairchild but rather from PFAS use at Spokane International Airport (SIA).
Although SIA doesn’t get its water from West Plains wells, but rather from the SVRP Aquifer, in June 2017 four existing monitoring wells on SIA property (drilled earlier for a different purpose) were tested for PFAS. Three of the four wells revealed PFAS at “higher than the established screening levels”. All three wells showing PFAS contamination were at the northeast end of the airport property consistent with the generally northeasterly flow toward the Airport Paleochannel. Even with all the publicity around the Airway Heights contamination in 2017, SIA officials did not disclosure their findings. Were they just hoping the problem would go away and no one notice, that Fairchild would end up with all the blame?
The trouble is that some of the well owners “down-paleochannel” from SIA (and not in the Fairchild Test Zone) were concerned enough about the adjacent Fairchild-related well contamination to have their well water tested at personal expense. They found high levels of PFAS especially of the types of PFAS used in the firefighting foams. Hydrogeologist Chad Pritchard went to work to secure a grant of $450,000 offered by the Washington State Department of Ecology to test wells in the “Pritchard Ecology Study Area”. In February 2020:
The last box to check was a routine briefing for the county commissioners prior to their expected vote to approve the grant application. What Lindsay [the Environmental Services Manager for Spokane County’s water resources department] didn’t expect is the phone call he says he received from commissioner Al French the day before the commissioners’ meeting.
Lindsay says French called to tell him the item had been removed from the agenda. When I asked Lindsay if French had given a reason for pulling the item he said he had; that French was “concerned about the timing and the potential effect on the airport.”
It helps to understand that there are powerful monetary interests here. SIA encompasses an area of 10 square miles with major opportunities for industrial development as well as airport expansion. SIA CEO Larry Krauter and Commissioner French (a developer as well as a County Commissioner) have been working for years to grow Spokane’s business community on the West Plains. Proven PFAS contamination coming from SIA might interfere with property values and development.
Not only has SIA failed to disclosure it 2017 testing for PFAS and worked with Commissioner French to stall Pritchard’s efforts to gather more well data, but CEO Krauter has been quietly lobbying and filing legal arguments seeking to block efforts by the State of Washington to regulate PFAS. (See Erin Sellers’ excellent and exhaustive article “Airport CEO: Lawmakers should ‘wait and see’ before banning toxic PFAS” on RANGEmedia.co.
Commissioner French’s and CEO Krauter’s efforts to slow walk even the gathering of data on PFAS contamination of West Plains wells is a shameful breach of public trust. That they work instead to hide data and discredit the importance of the contamination is intolerable arrogance. It is, in Mr. French’s case at least, another example of Republican denial of science, akin to global heating denial in a misguided effort that they imagine serve the purposes of business development.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
P.S. During the mid-twentieth century asbestos was still used in fireproofing and insulation; mercury was something kids played with when a mercury thermometer was broken; and DDT was fogged from trucks in cities to kill mosquitos. Persistence in the environment and long term health effects of all these materials were little considered by the general public until the publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” in 1962. Looking back, we tend toward the rosy idea that once “Silent Spring” was published everyone got right on board, but, in fact, there was considerable pushback, argument, and instilled doubt. (See the “Silent Spring” wikipedia article.) I conclude that my (and maybe your) understanding of historical events and how attitudes are changed is a gross simplification of the controversies that actually occurred. There will never be one hundred percent agreement about anything—and, as a corollary—changing attitudes in the general population is a complex and long term project. The founders and funders of libertarian think tanks like the Washington Policy Center understood this and acted on it long ago.
P.P.S. In case you cannot tell from all I’ve written here, I find local geology and hydrogeology fascinating. If you really want to dive in headfirst here is a link to an well-illustrated readable document (on a computer screen zooming in and out) that fills in a whole lot of detail:
Yesterday, January 18, The Inlander published Nate Sanford’s article “More than 200 Spokane churches were asked to open their doors to homeless people during dangerously cold weather — four agreed” Please click on that title and read it. It’s a great introduction to a new local effort grounded in the experience of Julie Garcia of Jewels Helping Hands. The four churches that agreed to do so carefully opened their doors to the unsheltered during the recent cold snap under agreements with and oversight by staffers of Jewels Helping Hands, a number of volunteers, and some help from the neighbors. With twenty beds in each church, eighty beds in total, the effort clearly does not solve the problem of unsheltered homelessness in severe weather, but it helps—and, perhaps more importantly, as an example of something that worked well, the number of participating churches could expand.
Of 227 local churches contacted:
…almost every church said they were interested in supporting the effort. But many expressed concern about potential liability, damage to their buildings and other things that could go wrong.
The biggest hurdle, Edmondson says, was fear.
Perhaps the current successful trial run of four churches and eighty beds will allay some of the fear Edmondson identifies and free up some other churches to come on board. This cooperation of the current four is an example of the kind of Christian spirit I was brought up to believe in. It focuses on caring for one’s fellow humans, the teachings of Jesus as expressed in the canonical Gospels, rather than dwelling on preparing oneself for the End Times based in the imagery of the Book of Revelation—as so many modern mega-churches seem to do. One hopes that such Christ-based cooperation of these original four churches will spread by example.
I’ve met and talked with, and count as friends. the majority of the people quoted in Nate Sanford’s article. Among those who have volunteered to take a short shift (with a Jewels staffer) at one of the church warming centers, all describe it as a very positive experience. Here’s a link to a five minute videodescribing the experience and how to sign up or help out in other ways.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
P.S. Sadly, there certainly are pastors and churches in the wider Spokane community that seem unlikely to come on board. See “Can Brian Noble Hear Himself?”.
Over our recent days of sub-zero temperatures I heard rumors (at this time unconfirmed) that two members of the homeless community in Spokane died of exposure. That is two too many, but it might have been a lot worse. Keeping people from dying of exposure a low bar for a country as well off as the United States, but it’s where we’re at. Many living on the streets in Spokane found shelter thanks to the efforts and leadership of many people of goodwill who stepped up to donate or as volunteers to help those left abandoned by society and circumstance. The City of Spokane under the leadership of newly installed Mayor Lisa Brown facilitated the reopening of the Cannon Street Shelter under management by Compassionate Addiction Treatment, expanded the short-term capacity of the TRAC Shelter, and provided material help and cooperation whenever and wherever it could—in spite of being in office only two weeks. And:
“In addition to responding to this emergency, we are taking notes about the inadequacies that we want to reform,” Brown said to City Council members and assembled city officials Monday [January 8th].
Thanks to those words and efforts I feel a lot better about the moral conscience of my city than I did under then Mayor Woodward’s: “I think we need to get to the point where we’re working to make homelessness less comfortable….”
Hope House Women’s Shelter, Family Promise Open Doors, and other organizations stepped up their surge capacity.
In an ongoing effort Julie Garcia and her staff of Jewels Helping Hands provided triage, oversight, and hands-on efforts in cooperation with four small local churches to provide shelter and warmth for twenty people each. Thanks to outreach from JHH staff and volunteers, neighbors at each of the four churches assembled a “meal train” to provide supper to those sheltered. (More about the details of this JHH/”Love Spokane”/Spokane Homeless Coalition/Spokane Low Income Housing Coalition initiative in a later post.)
Now as snow falls and temperatures moderate we still have the issue we started out with: there are a growing number of our citizens who are homeless, either sheltered or unsheltered. Part of the years-long multi-faceted effort to stem the tide of those rendered homeless is the Annual Spokane Homeless Connect to be held this year on Thursday, January 25th, a week from tomorrow, from 10AM to 3PM at the Spokane Convention and Expo Center at 220 West Spokane Falls Boulevard downtown. It is fascinating to attend and even more satisfying, educational, and eye-opening to volunteer—and volunteers are still needed. Please read the news release republished below, check out the link SpokaneConnect.org/and sign up to volunteer. You won’t regret it.
Keep to the high ground, Jerry
The 12th Annual Spokane Homeless Connect is scheduled for Thursday, January 25th, 2024, from 10AM to 3PM at the Spokane Convention & Expo Center, 220 West Spokane Falls Boulevard in downtown Spokane. The annual Spokane Homeless Connect, which will enter its 12th year this January, is the largest and longest-running homeless services event in Spokane. The annual event is designed to offer as many different services as possible under one roof. How does a community event of this magnitude operate? On Volunteer Power!
“We’ll need over 100 volunteers at this year’s Connect,” said David Stone, the Homeless Connect’s Volunteer Coordinator. “Each year’s Connect runs smoothly because of community volunteers who show up and put in time serving and assisting our guests. It’s mainly light work answering questions, giving directions, and helping guests find what they need. We love it when church groups or community service groups sign their people up and get involved.”
What Volunteers Have To Say . . .
· “Before volunteering for this event, I had no idea how many agencies there were assisting this population. It was great to see so much help available.”
· “As a volunteer escort, I assisted guests in finding the resources they wanted in the vast convention center. All of the guests were so appreciative and grateful for all of the services they were able to access.”
· “This was such a great event to be a part of! It made me proud of my city that there were so many generous people helping. And gave me some confidence that we can address the issue of homelessness.”
Anyone wanting to volunteer can sign up online through our website, SpokaneConnect.org/
Volunteers At The Core
According to Kari Stevens, Chair of the Connect Planning Committee, volunteers form the core of the Spokane Homeless Connect. For the past 12 years, the Connect has been organized and operated by a Planning Committee made up of volunteers who meet months in advance to plan each year’s event. Each committee member donates their time and expertise to make each year’s event a success. This equates to thousands of volunteer hours and is an amazing reflection of our community’s desire to address critical issues like homelessness.
“Community engagement is the obvious answer to how we effectively address homelessness in Spokane,” said Stevens. “Every year, volunteers from local homeless service providers team up with government agencies, faith communities, non-profits, grassroots service groups, local businesses, and private individuals to provide as many services as possible in one place and on one day,” said Stevens. “The goal is to remove barriers and create change for people experiencing or at risk of homelessness. It really is a beautiful sight, and it brings our community together so we can improve the quality of life for everyone.”
Immunization against tired, self-serving economic framing
We are taught to think of economic cause and effect as if it were understood almost as clearly as trajectory of an artillery round. For example, how many times—and in how many forms—have we been told to consider a proposed increase in the legal minimum wage (either state or federal) as a “job killer”? Every Republican in the U.S. Congress, and especially our current U.S. Representative from eastern Washington, Cathy McMorris Rodgers, jumps to seemingly plausible stories of how the poor or untrained young people just entering the work force will be disadvantaged by a rise in the legal minimum wage. Inevitably, McMorris Rodgers will trot out her youthful summer work experience toiling at her parents’ produce stand—as if her parents were legally bound to pay her minimum wage. The stated economic mechanism of “job killing” is always that employers, seeing their profits squeezed by increasing labor costs, will either hire fewer workers, automate the work with machines (cutting out low-skill workers), or be forced out of business.
Sadly, I heard this argument against the minimum wage from the mouths of business people and (mostly Republican) politicians so many times that, without thinking about it, the image of a disadvantaged youth priced out of the job market was always the first image that popped into my head when I heard the words “minimum wage”.
This “job killer” formulation is a sincere article of faith with people like McMorris Rodgers. The trouble is, as Nick Hanauer et al puts it, “Corporate Bullsh*t”. This “job killer” formulation long precedes McMorris Rodgers. It has been regularly trotted out since the minimum wage was first conceived in the 1930s—all on the basis of a made-up thought experiment and zero actual evidence. Simply by endless repetition many who ought to have questioned the concept, like myself, passively came to accept it.
Let’s twist the economic crystal ball a quarter turn for a moment. What if the legal minimum wage were raised to, say, $15/hr? Minimum wage workers would have enough money (“disposable income”) to occasionally spend some of it on a restaurant meal, or concert, or winter tires, or a better apartment, or…or. That extra spending, i.e. increased demand, would stimulate businesses to expand their operations and hire more workers, right? It turns out that actual data suggests that an increase in the minimum wage does NOT kill jobs, e.g. “High New Jersey Minimum Wage Doesn’t Seem to Deter Fast Food Hiring, Study Finds” from 1993 in the NYTimes. Sadly, the money behind the media affords studies like this minimal oxygen—and the brain worm of “job killer”, endlessly repeated, remains embedded in the public consciousness.
It turns out that many economic articles of faith put forth as if they were statements of fact are actually nothing but self-serving, empirically dubious, vaguely plausible conjectures that turn out, when subjected to empirical evaluation, to be false.
Nick Hanauer, Joan Walsh, and Donald Cohen have painstakingly assembled quotations illustrating the long history of this self-serving rhetoric in their new book “Corporate Bullsh*t” (avail by order at Auntie’s in “1-5 days” OR at Amazon). The text and the notes offer the modern, empirically based counter arguments.
Below is the table of contents.
You will never hear one of these bogus economic arguments the same way again. For example. I recently attended a Spokane County Commissioner meeting at which Commissioner Al French interjected a notation that he was against state building code regulations to limit new natural gas infrastructure because it “would make housing more expensive and ‘hurt the poor’”. This dubious assertion comes under “Oh, those unintended consequences” (p. 108), a subsection of Chapter 5, “You’ll Only Make it Worse”. Whether Mr. French truly believes his assertion or not is only known to him. The point for me was that I was immunized against blithely accepting this dubious, simplistic formulation that he projected from the dais as if it were plain fact.
I recommend you buy or borrow “Corporate Bullsh*t”. It’s readable, ironically funny, well illustrated, and enlightening—and you’ll never hear politicians making tired points about economics the same way again.
A copy of The Epoch Times, December 20-26, 2023, U.S. Edition, appeared on nearly every driveway Spokane last month (at least on the South Hill where I walk). A partial wrap-around page of the main section advertised that the entertainment spectacular, Shen Yun, would be on stage at the First Interstate Center for Arts in downtown Spokane. Shen Yun will perform Saturday and Sunday March 9 and 10, each day at 2PM. Tickets range from $80 to $150, depending on the seating.
You can watch the 30 second Trailer here on YouTube, where you will see some impressive gymnastic dance clips and a short notice that the show encompasses “5,000 years of history. Inspired by The Divine”, the latter illustrated by horses with wings flying at you out of the screen.
You are invited to think of Shen Yun as an introduction to traditional Chinese culture, a stage show that must have paid The Epoch Times for the advertising. In reality, Shen Yun, with its eight companies comprised of nearly 500 individuals, is an outreach effort of the Falun Gong (aka Falun Dafa). The Falun Gong is a Chinese “new religious movement” with End Times overtones headquartered in their 427 acre Dragon Springs compound in the town of Deerpark, New York, about 70 miles northwest of New York City. The Falun Gong was founded in the early 1990s by Li Hongzhi in northeastern China. Li Hongzhi took up permanent legal residence in the U.S. in 1998, shortly before the Chinese government declared the Falun Gong movement a doomsday cult and suppressed the movement in China.
Former practitioners of Falun Gong told NBC News that believers think the world is headed toward a judgment day, where those labeled “communists” will be sent to a kind of hell, and those sympathetic to the spiritual community will be spared. Trump is viewed as a key ally in the anti-communist fight, former Epoch Times employees said.
The Falun Gong possesses religious roots in Taoism and Buddhism, meditation and gentle movement (think simplified qigong), all leavened with Li Hongzhi’s particular views:
It [the Chinese crackdown on the Falun Gong] has also invited scrutiny of the spiritual leader’s more unconventional ideas. Among them, Li has railed against what he called the wickedness of homosexuality, feminism and popular music while holding that he is a god-like figure who can levitate and walk through walls.
Li has also taught that sickness is a symptom of evil that can only be truly cured with meditation and devotion, and that aliens from undiscovered dimensions have invaded the minds and bodies of humans, bringing corruption and inventions such as computers and airplanes.
You would be forgiven if, having found The Epoch Times last month in your driveway, you tossed it into your recycling bin, but it might have been worth a look. A two page spread in the main section is titled “Trump’s Legal Challenges Explained.” The paragraph under the title establishes the tenor of the article with the notation that most of the lawsuits stem “from his efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 election”—as if these were simple, benign “challenges”. For anyone who has followed the six legal cases against Trump, this article fairly drips pro-Trump bias, presenting defense arguments with a tone of fact and the indictments as overreach. Reading the article, though, goes a long way to explaining the attitudes of people who believe The Epoch Times is demonstrating “Truth and Tradition” as claimed under its masthead. (Even Fox finally gave up “Fair and Balanced”—but not The Epoch Times.)
The Epoch Times has all the trappings of a conventional mainstream news source, including testimonials like this one:
“Very informative, well balanced and trustworthy. My eyes have been opened to many things I wasn’t even aware of and my suspicions were confirmed on other things that mainstream media was choosing to misrepresent.”
– DAVID OLSON
It would be unwise to dismiss The Epoch Times and Shen Yun as trivial or irrelevant. Its multimedia reach is broad with tendrils piercing even ‘lil ole Spokane. Almost three years ago a dear, elderly, former neighbor of mine declared to me her delight in her $16.90 monthly subscription to the Epoch Times. She went on to say she was recommending it to all her friends and relatives. One of the things she said she’d learned from it was that “Biden is ruining the country!”
Bidenomics v. Reaganomics–a Paradigm Shift in the making
You’ve heard it endlessly from U.S. Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-CD5-eastern Washington): the formula for economic growth is 1) cut taxes (especially for corporations and the already wealthy) and 2) reduce regulation. According to her (and most other Republicans in the last forty years) this will “unleash the power of the free market”. The underlying theory is this: if you provide businessmen with more capital, they will use that money to produce more goods and services. Then, by the magic of supply and demand, prices will fall due to the greater supply—and the economy will rev up. Providing corporations and the wealthy with more money while reducing regulation was consistently marketed to the average voter as “reducing yourtax burden” and increasing your “freedom”. (Remember McMorris Rodger’s endless parroting about “money in your pocket” as she promoted the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017”?)
The modern version of this top down formulation of how the economy best works gained ascendance with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Technically (and confusingly) Reagan’s economic formulation is a mix of “neoliberal” economic policies that harken back to the unfettered free market capitalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (the “Gilded Age” and the “Roaring Twenties”). Thanks to Paul Harvey, this Reagan’s neoliberal formulation was dubbed “Reaganomics”. According to Wikipedia, “These policies are characterized as supply-side economics, trickle-down economics, or “voodoo economics” by opponents, while Reagan and his advocates preferred to call it free-market economics.” (None of this is new. Older versions of top-down economics were labelled “horse and sparrow economics” by detractors, alluding to the working class feeding off the oats that passed through the horse fed by the plutocrats, the horse and buggy version of “trickle-down”.) Note that the Clinton administration with its banking deregulation at least partly bought into neoliberal economic orthodoxy.
Forty years of neoliberal supply side economics has resulted in pronounced wealth inequality, hollowing out of the middle class (defined as doing better than living paycheck to paycheck), decreased class mobility, and increasing homelessness. All of that produces a sense that the system is rigged, a sense that fuels the rise of an autocrat like Trump (“I alone can fix it.”) or, better, catalyzes a shift in economic paradigm.
We are at a turning point
You’ve all heard President Biden declare that his administration will build the economy “from the bottom up and the middle out”. The term Middle-out Economics comes by Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer in their book Gardens of Democracy published in 2011. Middle-out Economics is meant to contrast to the Top-Down paradigm that has dominated Republican (and some Democratic) administrations for the last forty years. It is the economic model that underlies every bit of parroted rhetoric about deregulation and cutting taxes that comes from the mouths of people like Rep. McMorris Rodgers. Middle-out Economics, in contrast to Top-Down would once again empower the middle class as the primary driver of the American economy. It is time to change the narrative—a paradigm shift.
Simplistically put, when people possess economic clout beyond the necessities of food and shelter, they use it to pursue (“demand”) goods and services. Business responds to the opportunity to make money by satisfying the demand. In contrast, when corporations and the wealthy have more money they tend to invest in stock buy-backs and stocks that ultimately contribute to the widening wealth gap.
Any society that allows itself to become radically unequal eventually collapses into an uprising or a police state—or both.
Join venture capitalist Nick Hanauer and some of the world’s leading economic and political thinkers in an exploration of who gets what and why. Turns out, everything you learned about economics is wrong. And if we don’t do something about rising inequality, the pitchforks are coming.
President Biden’s “growing the economy from the bottom up and the middle out” is a big deal. The Reaganomic, neoliberal polices that are articles of faith with Republicans like McMorris Rodgers have had a forty year test run. They’ve run their course. The financial deregulation piece of Reaganomics brought us the Dot-com bubble and the Great Recession of 2008 as money at the top sought mechanisms of expansion. The Biden administration’s policies, dubbed “Bidenomics”, include a return to public infrastructure investment, a strengthening of union bargaining, advocacy for a rise in the minimum wage, encouragement of industry on our own soil, efforts to rein in monopolistic tendencies, and support for the IRS to collect taxes due. Early successes include job growth, curbing of inflation, and avoidance of a predicted recession.
This year we choose between “bottom-up and middle out” or a return to “top-down” served up with a dose of oligarchic authoritarianism. Choose wisely.
