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Posts published in July 2021

Amtrak, maybe

July 23, 2021

stapiluslogo1

Could Amtrak return to southern Idaho?

It would be great to see, so many years after the service was cut off in 1997. For the moment, the odds still look less than even. But they’re better than remote.

No one, even the advocates, should overstate what it would mean. It would not fundamentally change the region or, likely, affect the transportation of vast numbers of people.

I remember using the Pioneer line in the 70s and 80s, when I worked out of Boise and Pocatello and on a few occasions needed an easy way to get to central Portland. It was useful transportation, and the feel of it was traditional - this is travel by rail, with a pedigree - and easy.

The service was daily, but it was limited. As I recall, I’d get on the train in Pocatello somewhere around midnight and arrive in Boise somewhat past dawn. Headed the other way, I’d board well before midnight in Boise and debark in Pocatello around four in the morning. In both cases I was in walking distance to downtown (at Pocatello, within downtown). The hours were not ideal, but they were functional. They didn’t interrupt a day’s activities, and they allowed for some sleep on the way. But that was the only scheduled run each day.

Stops were limited, too. There was a station at Shoshone, but by the time I was using the train, it wasn’t a very busy location, even when it wasn’t the middle of the night. Nor did the train stop in many other places.

Heading west, toward Portland, there was more daylight and stops were a little more regular. And at Portland, you could connect with the north-south west coast Amtrak route (which is still very much in operation and has even expanded its activities in recent years).

The trains were reasonably busy and drew passengers, but I don’t recall them as packed. From a pure spreadsheet standpoint, the trains probably serviced a none-too-massive number of people.

You could point out that some other forms of transport have gotten better over the years. Idaho highways are a grade up since the eighties, and there are more air flights available. (Bus service, though, isn’t as extensive.)

Still. Trains provide a special kind of link from place to place. In some ways southern Idaho is cut off from much of the rest of the country. (There still is one passenger rail Amtrak stop in Idaho, a very basic one, in Sandpoint.)

I know people who do all their long-distance travel by rail - they have a string of reasons why - and places without rail service just don’t get their attention.

So could southern Idaho Amtrak - presumably from Utah to Pocatello west through Boise to Oregon - actually happen, or is it a pipe dream?

It doesn’t seem to be a part of current plans for Amtrak expansion (which is on the boards for, as one example, the line along the Pacific coast).

But it does have serious advocates.

Senator Mike Crapo and in Oregon Senator Ron Wyden long have favored return of the line, and they’re now in key positions to press for making it happen, as the top leaders of the Senate Finance Committee. (It doesn’t set the budgets but has a key influence on the purse strings.) Obviously, some sympathy from Amtrak Joe Biden in the White House would be highly helpful too. Federal funding could be coming along at the right time.

And locally, a number of activists have been pressing for train restoration. All of the members of the Boise City Council have worked together on a resolution asking for the train back. The train depot near downtown has been maintained (by the city) ever since train service stopped, and easily could be put back to use.

It’s not time yet to head down to the station and wait for the train. But there’s at least some chance the wait may not be forever.

Old men and fire

July 22, 2021

schmidt

Back in the antediluvian days, I was a government GS-4, Forest Service fire fighter. I did four summers on a Category One, interregional crew. Folks love the term “Hots Shots”, but the jumpers just called us ground pounders. They figured they were much cooler than us, parachutes and all. Maybe they were.

“Interregional” means we got sent off our home forest to “project fires”. When a fire gets to a certain size, it becomes a “project fire” then the local forest didn’t have to pay the costs, it came out of a national budget. Our home forest only had to pay our wages if we weren’t on a fire. Can you see a budgetary problem here? We talked about the wisdom or folly of policies like these as we chopped and dug.

Have you ever noticed that any news story about wildland fires uses the term “bone weary” when they describe the crews? We always joked about that term as we napped on the airport runway waiting for the DC3. Like any big government deal, there were lots of inefficiencies. And we could see them close up. We all knew when there was waste happening, but most of us knew we couldn’t manage it much better if we were in charge. That didn’t stop our grousing.

It sure was a privilege to see some of the most beautiful country in the West and get paid to do it. Yeah, and some of it turned black, or white or grey, instead of that beautiful green we think of when we say “forest”.

To be honest, project fires needed weather to put them out. Hand crews cannot do much when the forest is dry, the humidity is down and there’s any wind. Except, that is, do your best to not get hurt.

But it was dirty, hot, sometimes cold (woke up under 6” of snow on my first project fire in Wyoming), filthy, exhausting, grimy, work. I really remember the dirt. And I remember the people on the crew. I’m not joking about having forest management policy discussions. It was a great group. I’m still friends with some.

I will admit I had no lofty goals about saving the forest. I needed the money for college. But that first year I stayed late because California burns in September and California was where the money was. Often the 20-man crew would lose guys in August as they went off to college. My first year we were based in McCall, so if we got a call, we could fill out our crew with any jumpers who wanted the work. We took five with us to California. We had seen a lot of fire that summer, mainly in Idaho. We’d run a few times and been burned over on the Middle Fork. So, when the fire came up the California chapparal canyon, we felt OK hunkering in the middle of a three Cat blade wide fire break. We could see it would go up one side first, then the other. We didn’t pop our fire shelters. But the jumpers did.

Staying late I was able to save enough money to pay for college, felt secure enough financially to marry the woman I loved, and started building a career, a life, a family. In that sense, firefighting was very good to me, even though it was dirty. And I never got hurt.

Our family grew to have four daughters. I guess I told too many firefighting stories because three of the four ended up working on fire crews. But they, and I moved on from that dirty work. It’s good when you’re young. Dirt washes.

So, the smoke in the air these days doesn’t bother me so much. I know some firefighters are out there making time and three quarters. I do hope they stay safe.

Social (dis)Graces

July 21, 2021

meador

I made someone cry once, when she read my comments in a news forum. She was a person of some note and influence and her tears were not those of compassion or sorrow — she was outraged. I am told she took my remarks to the forum’s publisher, demanding they be removed, all the while shaking and crying tears of anger. Of course, I heard all this third-hand so I have no way of knowing whether it’s true. All I know for certain is my remarks caused a certain amount of offense among those who read them.

The news story was a simple one, describing a new business coming to one of the outlying small towns scattered throughout the Yamhill Valley. Several local residents were bothered the new business might erect a cheap back-lit sign — in not-very-polite terms, I remarked that a shabby little town like the one in the story had greater sartorial concerns than one more tacky plastic back-lit sign. In my defense, as McMinnville has become known as a wine destination, the surrounding communities have jumped aboard the tourism bandwagon, some with greater success than others. The offended woman interpreted my blunt comment as classist, a sweeping insult to people of little means. While my remarks were not intended kindly, they were also not intended as classist.

At the time, I thought her outrage was quite humorous.

I do not find it funny now.

What changed? Well, we all did, most of us anyway. As social media grew in use and influence, we were fairly quick to spot the hazards inherent to posting anonymously. It was easy to see that we and others could and would vent freely when protected by the shield of online facelessness. The venom came quick and it came in unbelievable measure as the public felt the exhilarating freedom of dropping all constraints of decorum when there was no threat anyone would find out what assholes we really were.

Oops. Did I just say assholes? Sorry. I went through dozens of words to fill that spot and there was really only one that fit. I apologize if you find it offensive. I know it’s tacky at best, but so were we when no one knew who we were. Anonymity gave us license to say whatever we wanted to whoever we wanted whenever we wanted with no consequences or accountability — well, with no consequences to us, anyway.

So the responsible among us tried to tone down our anonymous commentary or even stick with posting only under our real identities. Problem solved, right?

Not so much.

What happened next was far more insidious. When COVID hit and everyone was forced to stay at home for unprecedented lengths of time, our dependence on social media grew. Coupled with one of the most politically divisive periods in our history, people just decided being polite wasn’t worth the effort. So no one felt like being nice but at least those of us who had already made a conscious decision to eschew the protection of online anonymity believed we held the high ground — we posted under our real identities so nothing we said could really be all that bad, right?

What was missing was subtle but enormously important.

We’ve become dependent on social media — we’ve become familiar with it entangled in the events of our lives and we’ve become comfortable with it. What’s lost is the nuance of a tilted eyebrow, the barest smirk, a wink, a nod or any of a thousand tiny signals we use to convey the emotion behind the words we speak.

Online, I find myself scolding people who maybe didn’t mean their remarks as I interpreted them. Likewise, I am regularly chastised by people who read negative emotion into a comment I intended neutrally. Or I reread comments I made hours or days earlier, startled to see that they sounded harsher than I intended. Or any of ten thousand combinations of the ways we assign emotion to dispassionate text when we haunt our favorite news and politics pages on the internet.

That’s the problem: text, itself, is totally dispassionate. We can feel any emotion to any degree when we pen an online remark but these words we type are, themselves, unfeeling. Thus, those who read our comments — even if we took great pains to make them reflect our feelings — will assign their own emotions to what we wrote, based on their own perspectives. And vice-versa. I can encounter an innocuous remark about a subject dear to me and I may read all sorts of emotions into those words, feelings the remark’s author never intended to represent. And many of us tend to default to the worst possible interpretation when we do this. Even if we don’t become the full-on a-holes we were with anonymity, we certainly become mini-a-holes, knowing the worst backlash we’re likely to face is a flurry of hateful responses in the thread. No real world consequences. Most of these little snark-a-thons in which we engage online we would never allow to escalate in real life, with a real person in a real place like a coffee joint or a shop.

Most of us would be mortified if we behaved in person like we do online.

Lest anyone think I am lecturing, let me state unequivocally that I am guilty of all of these bad practices. In fact, I examined my own social media use to form the outline of this essay. I am as guilty as anyone.

So what’s the solution? How do we go about implementing the small-but-hugely-important constraints we use when we have a conversation with a real human, face-to-face?

I dislike the virtue-signaling redolence of vowing to ditch social media entirely. For one thing, it’s impractical: so much of our lives are tied up in the events and discourse present in social media. For another thing, few people can make such a commitment and stick with it. Further, swearing off social media entirely throws out its good connective aspects along with the bad. But using social media mindfully — meaning consciously monitoring our use of social media, being careful to balance digital relationships with actual human contact — is another thing entirely. With a little practiced discipline, we should be able to calm the instinctive negative reactions we have to things we read online, making our default interpretations neutral instead of worst-case. If we approach social media with our eyes open and our minds aware, we can begin to fix this monster we’ve created — a monster bent on turning us, ourselves, into mini-monsters who accept menace and suspicion as completely normal.

Where I once saw humor in creating outrage, I am now embarrassed by my own related actions and reactions.

Writing political commentary, I am well aware I will regularly offend people — it’s an unavoidable occurrence when anyone takes a public stance on any controversial issue. But offending people with reasonable dialogue is a different creature than penning intentionally rude remarks that serve little purpose beyond insult. I probably won’t be able to help myself once in a while but I’ve already sharply constrained the way I react to comments with which I disagree or even to the rude words of people doing their level best to offend.

I’ll never be perfect but I’ll tell you one thing: I no longer worry I’ll regret my remarks later. It’s a surprisingly refreshing feeling.

Health and death

July 21, 2021

maloy

Talking with Idaho Congressman Russ Fulcher about his recent cancer diagnosis a couple of weeks ago hit home with me. In many ways, being lucky is better than being good.

The congressman’s cancer was discovered in conjunction with a routine physical examination. Fulcher, who normally is a ball of energy, just happened to mention to his doctor that he was not feeling at his normal high-octane level.

The revelation probably saved his life. His doctor ordered some tests and renal cancer was discovered. Fulcher says it’s all treatable and everything will be fine.

I was in a similar situation almost 17 years ago, although my circumstance was related to my heart (and diabetes), opposed to cancer. During a routine checkup, I told my doctor that I was experiencing shortness of breath during my regular workouts on my exercise bike – nothing big, just something that I have noticed over time. My doctor referred me to a cardiologist, and a few days later, I was getting five-way heart bypass surgery.

Looking back, I came close to not telling my doctor anything – a decision that would have put me in a graveyard 16 years ago. Look at me now. I just turned 71 years old and typically walk four or five miles a day, play golf during the spring and summer and bowl during the cold months. As a bonus, I’m still writing my regular political columns, which is my twisted way of “having fun.”

So I have no doubt that Russ – who compared to me is a young whipper snapper at 59 – is going to be fine. I’d say chances are strong that he will be serving in Congress for at least some time after I hang up my keyboard.

But he’s the first to say that he won’t be the same Russ Fulcher that we’ve always known – or the same guy he knows. His goals include being a better legislator, a better person and one who has more compassion toward people dealing with cancer. A few of his perspectives will change, no doubt.

Diabetes certainly has changed my outlook. Over the years, I have spoken to various groups to promote awareness of this “silent killer” and have participated in events in Washington, sponsored by the American Diabetes Association. A couple of weeks ago, as an early birthday present, I was named to the board of directors for Diabetes Alliance of Idaho, which is focused on diabetes education and prevention.

So, what does this have to do with politics? Everything.

Finding a cure for diabetes depends on continued congressional funding for the Centers for Disease Control and National Institutes of Health. Politics comes to the forefront during discussions over the cost of insulin, or the listing of calorie counts on menu items.

With COVID-19, diabetes has been pushed to the background some, but it remains as a major health crisis both nationally and in Idaho – with an estimated 132,000 having diabetes and more than 100,000 with this ticking time bomb called pre-diabetes.

We’ll see in time where Fulcher’s passion takes him, but he’s a pretty decent guy to begin with. He’s not one of these members of Congress who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth – coming from a rich family and turning his privileged fortunes into a lofty political career. Russ grew up on a dairy farm and spent his life, in and out of politics, working his tail off. He’s an easy guy to chat with and relate to – even for those who might not agree with him down the line politically. Stay tuned to an “improved” version.

What he should realize is that a cancer diagnosis is not a death sentence – it’s just something he has to deal with for a while. I’ve had my share of complications and challenges with diabetes over the last 20-plus years, but it has not been a death sentence.

I couldn’t imagine having a better life. I may be into the fourth quarter, but there’s still a good amount of time left on the clock.

Chuck Malloy is a long-time Idaho journalist and columnist. He may be reached at ctmalloy@outlook.com

Remembering Jimmy

July 20, 2021

rainey

Bottom line: Our unvaccinated neighbor(s) poses a threat to our lives for which, if the threat were him firing a gun, he’d be arrested. For being unvaccinated, he’s free to go.

I’ve heard every damned excuse for avoiding the COVID needle and they’re all non-starters - with the only possible exception being someone who, medically, cannot be exposed to the vaccine. Other than that, they’re all pure B.S..

In the very early 1960's, Dr. Jonas Salk announced a reliable, and thoroughly tested vaccine for polio. I had a friend in second grade - Jimmy Shoemaker - who contracted the disease and was quickly placed in an “iron lung” 150 miles away. Though I didn’t know it in 1943, he’d spend the rest of his life in that damned machine and die at the age of 31.

With that image in mind, when the Salk vaccine was initially available, I made sure our three kids were immediately in line for a little sip from a Dixie cup. Us, too. Tasteless. Almost to the point of being disappointing. I’d expected some medical after-taste as is almost always the case in oral medical treatments.

But, thinking of Jimmy in that damned steel machine, and knowing the effectiveness of the Salk vaccine, there was no decision to make. Go get it. All five of us.

Now, jump ahead 60 years. It’s likely impossible to come up with a source for the politicization of what should have been purely a medical issue. But, early on, that’s exactly what happened with COVID-19. The anti-vaxxers and the loud voices of Trumpers set the tone and here we are. Another needless national division.

COVID is on the rise in all 50 states. People are being hospitalized. People are dying. Needlessly! This should NOT be happening. But, it is. The unvaccinated are walking among us and some could be carriers of COVID. And, I’d bet some of those walkers who’ve made that detestable decision, are also not mask wearers.

So, the rest of us - we who’ve chosen the safer route of vaccination and masks - are ready targets for the COVID many of them are carrying. Though vaccinated, we can be reinfected. The vaccine in our bodies is only about 70-percent effective. We are vulnerable.

With the possible exception of those with well-proven medical problems with vaccines, there’s no excuse fo anti-vaxxers. With COVID or anything else. Full stop.

We’re a nation of laws, though some recent court decisions seemingly challenge that long-standing fact. When facing an international pandemic - COVID or the Black plague or any other terrible, life-threatening disease - we, as citizens, deserve and expect such treatments, as are recognized and effective, to be accessed by all. If not willingly, then I believe, mandated.

My unvaccinated neighbor should not be entitled to be a medical threat to me, my family or the neighborhood. His likelihood of being a carrier - or being infected - pose such a threat to all with whom he comes in contact. As previously stated, what if he carried a loaded rifle and pointed it at all the people who cross his path? Wouldn’t he be considered “armed and dangerous” and, therefore, a threat to the community?

And the politicalization. Overlay a map of the most severe states affected by this deadly disease on one showing states Trump won in 2016 and last year. The red ones. There’s a lot of similarity. Especially Texas, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee and - well - you get the idea.

There was a time - long, long ago - in an America now seemingly far, far away - when you lost the argument or the ball game, you stopped arguing and the minority went along with the majority.

No more. Now, we have those who won’t move. Who won’t stop arguing. Who loudly go their own way. As we’ve seen repeatedly, sometimes carrying a weapon. Or a disease.

Even something as simple as being a responsible citizen - not to mention being a responsible parent - when getting a three-second shot to do your part in stopping the spread of a pandemic, brings angry resistance. That’s wrong. That’s the point, when you put all you come into contact with in life-threatening danger; when you become irresponsible. That’s not right!

We’re a nation of freedoms. We’re a nation of choices. But, when you chose to be a danger - and possibly a disease carrier or a killer - to all around you, well, that’s wrong. Just wrong.

There oughta be a law.

Playing pandemic politics presents perverse predicament

July 19, 2021

jones

For the last year or so, Idaho’s Governor wannabes and their legislative supporters have engaged in pandemic politicking to win over voters. They have railed against scientifically proven preventive measures such as social distancing and mask wearing. Those measures, particularly the consistent use of masks in public, could have prevented the great majority of coronavirus infections and deaths in Idaho and across the country, benefitting people of every political persuasion.

The Ammon Bundys and Janice McGeachins of Idaho have portrayed mask wearing as a personal freedom issue, rather than the love-thy-neighbor protective measure that it really is. Consequently, needless divisiveness ripped through our good State, pitting families, friends and neighbors against one another to no good end.

With the advent of several effective vaccines that have brought serious infections under control, the politics of the pandemic have taken a perverse turn. Our science-denying politicians, egged on by the Idaho freedom Foundation and Fox News talking heads, have taken to badmouthing efforts to vaccinate the public to save lives. The irony of this ill-advised strategy is that the people most likely to suffer are their own supporters.

Since the first of the year, the vaccines approved for usage have dramatically reduced Covid-19 infections and deaths in the U.S. As vaccinations have increased, the death rate has plummeted.The people now at greatest risk are those who are not fully vaccinated.

Dr. Anthony Fauci says that 99.2% of Covid-19 deaths in June were suffered by unvaccinated Americans. The Director of Idaho’s Department of Health and Welfare, David Jeppesen, reported a similar death rate in Idaho. He recently said that 98.8% of the 443 Idahoans who died of Covid-19 from January 1 through July 3 were unvaccinated.These figures show the effectiveness of the vaccines and the dangers posed to those who refuse their protection. Practically every Covid-19 death is preventable.

There is a political divide between the parties on this critical public health issue. Recent polling disclosed that about 38% of Republicans said they would “definitely” not get shots, while less than 5% of Democrats would refuse. The disparity shows up in every published vaccination map. The historic blue states have much higher vaccination rates than the historic red states. The southern states generally have the lowest vaccination rates in the country. Idaho’s rate of fully vaccinated stands at 44.6%, well below the national average of 55.9%.

When an Idahoan dies of Covid-19, there is less than a 2% chance that the person has been vaccinated. The same holds true across the country. There is also a substantial likelihood that the person is a Republican, since the vaccination rate among Democrats is substantially greater. Unvaccinated Republicans are a prime target for the virus.

When Ammon Bundy discourages vaccinations, like when he attended the burning of a giant syringe in April, he puts Republicans most at risk. When Janice McGeachin and the Idaho Freedom Foundation rail against improving Idaho’s vaccination rate, they primarily jeopardize the health of their own followers.

Fox News talking heads, like Tucker Carlson, may well consign some of their conservative listeners to Covid deaths by scaring them out of getting vaccinated. It is a perverse irony that those who purport to love their followers are the ones who jeopardize the health of those followers with false and misleading contentions about the safety and efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines and the substantial protection afforded by vaccination.

Political disease

July 18, 2021

schmidt

I have wondered why it took so long for Idaho health care employers to require their workers to be immunized against Covid 19. Maybe they were anticipating the political reaction. Three large employers did just that this last week, and of course, they got the predictable reaction: umbrage, outrage, bluster and brouhaha.

When I got matched as a resident to work in Spokane hospitals, back when dinosaurs still roamed the Northwest, my first week of orientation included a bunch of blood tests, skin tests, and shots. They wanted to know if I had HIV, or tuberculosis. They checked that I was immune to Hepatitis A & B, measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox.

Every different employer I have had over these long years has had similar requirements, now Hepatitis C is added to the list.

Hepatitis B and C and HIV are transmitted through body fluids, not aerosol. But the ER and the OR and labor and delivery have sharp things and lots of blood. The risk of me getting the disease from others was real, and so was the patients’ risk if I happened to be a carrier. So, such a mandate by these employers made common sense. I’ll admit to feeling some initial hesitation, kind of like I feel every year when I have to renew my medical license. But it’s about making tradeoffs in this crowded world, and some pondering and reflection eased my hesitancy.

But Covid is now a political disease, not an infectious virus. Where you stand on the political spectrum, what news you listen to, what flag you fly from your Trump pole will lend more influence than half a million or more excess deaths.
Here’s how many died in 2019 from some of those other diseases we have screened health care workers for since dinosaur days:

Viral Hepatitis: 4,285
HIV:15,815 (total deaths from all causes in HIV infected people, most not directly from HIV)
Tuberculosis: 542
Measles: 0

Half a million Covid deaths seems like a big deal when stacked up to this list.
There is no doubt there is immunization hesitancy out there. I work in a clinic that offered free shots to all employees and about a quarter are still un-immunized. Masks are required, and if you don’t want to wear one you can look for work elsewhere.

I had to put on a fluorescent vest and a plastic hardhat just to tour a lumbermill in Laclede. They also had me sign a waiver their lawyers had written up. I’m still a free man.

And that’s an employer’s choice in Idaho and in most states. Some workplaces have mandatory drug testing. Does that infringe on “freedoms”?

So, when Janice McGeachin, my Lieutenant Governor calls this “medical tyranny”, I have to laugh. You know, and I know exactly what she’s doing. But I’m old and can’t hear dog whistles anymore. But I can see when they are being blown.
If her posturing and misguided pose appeals to you, then I can predict what flag you fly. I’m sorry, but I wish there was a flag for the “Common Sense Militia”.

We’d meet every week and have coffee. We’d laugh at each other’s mistakes and tell stories about ourselves and our silly neighbors. Somebody might bring up politics, but that would get boring real fast. We’d probably talk amongst ourselves about whether we had gotten “the shots” or were taking ivermectin.

Some guys might even wear a side arm, but long guns in a coffee shop aren’t common sense. They belong out in the pickup.

I hope this virus hasn’t robbed us of our common sense. With all the problems we have, we sure need it.

Dawn of an orderly era

July 18, 2021

hartgen

We’ve seen short water times before in Idaho, but this year’s extended drought has put into sharp relief the decades-long Idaho water adjudication process playing out in the Bellevue Triangle just South of Ketchum/Sun Valley/Hailey/Bellevue.

Mostly, it’s been an orderly and legally-reliant curtailment, driven by clear prior court rulings and sound legislation which has established Idaho’s water law over more than 30 years.

It wasn’t always that way. It was Mark Twain who reportedly once said whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting. Even if he didn’t say it, the phrase has the ring of truth when it comes to Idaho water disputes. In the early days, water was thought to be abundant enough for every use. But groundwater pumping beginning in the 1960s quickly showed a declining Snake River Plain Aquifer. That led to various water “calls” by senior users.

It took a couple of decades for this to play out, through the Swan Falls Agreement, (1984) clarifying legislation and a series of court rulings establishing the “First in Tine, First in Right” principle of prioritization firmly in Idaho water law.

There were many participants who worked out the details on water prioritization, but one important step was the creation of a Snake River Basin Adjudication court within the Idaho judiciary. The court’s role was to review and establish, claim by claim, the priority rights of senior and junior water users. By 2014, it was estimated that nearly 40,000 claims had been heard, as well as some 36 Idaho Supreme Court rulings. (Jones, A Little Dam Problem, 2016).

Which brings us to the Bellevue water case. Shrinking aquifer resources led the Department of Water Resources to issue a curtailment order in early July for the Bellevue Triangle area, affirming prioritization of downstream senior users over junior groundwater pumping. There was no fight over this; the process went smoothly forward without undue dispute. No court battles.

The order was lifted a week later following negotiations between user groups led by the DWR and the office of Gov. Brad Little, as well as Speaker of the House Scott Bedke (TN, 7/9) who has been a leader in state water negotiations for years.

That’s called cooperative leadership but without it, not much can be accomplished, as we witness daily in Washington, D.C. On the court side, adjudication judges have applied the evolving law fairly and evenly for more than 30 years, beginning with Dan Hurlbutt and continuing with Roger Burdick, Barry Wood, John Melanson and Eric Wildman, the current water adjudication judge. Interested parties weighed in, included Clear Springs Foods, the Surface Water Coalition and canal companies up and down Idaho’s irrigate farmlands.
It was all these parties, working together, which led to today’s water resolution framework. When disputes arose, the parties looked for solutions, unlike the my-way-or-the-highway vindictiveness of far rightists and other narrowly-focused interests.

“This settlement is an important first step and sets the stage for a long-term solution in the Wood River area.” Little said of the agreement. “I appreciate the efforts by the surface and ground water users to come to a resolution that protects senior water rights while allowing some groundwater pumpers the ability to provide valuable crops,” he said. “I would also like to thank Idaho Department of Water Resources Director Gary Spackman and his team for their expertise and genuine desire to reach a meaningful resolution. This kind of coming together to face our challenges head on – especially during an extreme drought year – is what Idahoans do.” (IdahoPress, 7/9).

That led to a solution this year to provide water for some 140 Triangle growers covering about 23,000 acres. That’s a tiny percent of Idaho’s 3.3 million acres of irrigated farmland, but the fact that it was accomplished without rancor or delay speaks well of what we can do in the state when there’s common sense and the willingness to find solutions rather than to obstruct.

Again, it was Bedke whose leadership and solutions-oriented focus led the parties to agreement. (Statesman, 7/10) After two decades in the Legislature, ten years of which he’s been Speaker, Bedke is running for Lieutenant Governor, where his expertise and even temperament will be an enormous asset.

"We live in the arid West,” Bedke said, “and we're fast-growing, and these will always be problems. And so these agreements, these solutions that last way into the future, will continue to serve us." (IdahoPress, 7/9). Amen to that.

Stephen Hartgen, Twin Falls, is a retired five-term Republican member of the Idaho House of Representatives, where he served as chairman of the Commerce & Human Resources Committee.  Previously, he was editor and publisher of The Times-News (1982-2005). He can be reached at Stephen_Hartgen@hotmail.com

The rich are different

July 17, 2021

johnson

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his 1926 short story “The Rich Boy.”

Let us count the ways.

British billionaire Richard Branson flew in his own space plane recently to the “invisible boundary between the planet’s atmosphere and outer space” where the space tourist spent a few moments “basking in the sensation of weightlessness.”

The flight was hyped to the hilt, as only cable television can do, and while the stunt was celebrated as a space travel break through with hints of science it was really about money and the strange American obsession with too much of it. Branson’s trip, journalist Marina Koren wrote, “brings us closer to an era in which rich thrill seekers with bucket lists, not government-backed astronauts, make up the largest group of people who’ve been to space.”

If you want to ride with Sir Richard plan on winning the lottery. A ticket on Virgin Galactic will set you back a quarter of a million dollars. No word on the quality of the in-flight snacks.

Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, is next into near space in his own craft. A joy ride with the Amazon emperor is reported to cost even more than a near space hop with Branson.

Meanwhile, “summer camp for billionaires,” the annual Allen and Co. shindig in Sun Valley, Idaho, recently attracted a guest list with an estimated net worth of a trillion dollars. This is the place where big media and tech mergers are hatched and where guys like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates fly in on the dozens of corporate jets that make the little airport in nearby Hailey look like a used plane lot for Falcon 50’s. One of those nine passenger wonders will, by the way, set you back $15 million.

You can contemplate the excess of this billionaire carbon footprint while pondering why the Pacific Northwest climate is producing record heat and some of the earliest, most catastrophic fires on record. There are no coincidences.

The Allen event, as Hamilton Nolan wrote in The Guardian, “is the wondrous model of American capitalism in action – a tiny handful of wealthy people eat cake, and an entire nation gathers downstream, hoping to snatch up a few falling crumbs.”

A bit harsh, perhaps. Yet, it is also true that while a lot of us are happy to just be doing reasonably well after 18 months of a pandemic, the Sun Valley crowd never missed a beat even as many, many Americans took a beating. According to one analysis, the world’s 2,365 billionaires saw their net worth increased by 54% during the first twelve months of the pandemic.

The rich are different. Very different. Among other things, and unlike most of the rest of us, they don’t pay taxes. The income tax structure, written by politicians beholding to people with great fortunes and who also aspire to have their own great fortunes, rig the system to benefit the wealthiest people in our society.

Since there are no coincidences, the timing of the recent Biden Administration executive order – all executive orders these days are “sweeping” – aimed at enhancing business competition and giving consumers more say was issued while America’s billionaires huddled in Idaho’s Wood River Valley.

Historian Nelson Lichtenstein said Biden’s executive action “returns the United States to the great antimonopoly tradition that has animated social and economic reform almost since the nation’s founding. This tradition worries less about technocratic questions such as whether concentrations of corporate power will lead to lower consumer prices and more about broader social and political concerns about the destructive effects that big business can have on our nation.”

It’s about time. Here is one issue the right and the left should be able to unite around: bigness is very often bad for little people.

It’s mostly been forgotten in the sweep of the last hundred years of history, but American politicians from both parties once opposed monopoly, concentrated economic and political power and the accumulation of vast wealth. In 1927, legislatures in Maryland, Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania passed laws taxing chain stores.

The theory behind the tax was simple. Local, independently owned retail establishments were good. They were connected to their communities. They created value for their owners, employees and customers. The money stayed close to where it was generated. You wonder what those politicians would have thought of Bezos’s creation.

Politicians like Congressman Wright Patman of Texas once tried to break up big banking concentrations. Congress passed landmark legislation in 1935 tearing down the corrupt holding company structure of the always monopolistic electric utility industry. Great wealth – the Mellons, the Rockefellers and such – were taxed, and I mean really taxed.

But the rich are different, after all. The five biggest U.S. banks now control nearly half of the industry’s total assets. Warren Buffett’s holding company has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the destruction during the second Bush Administration of the last remaining elements of the utility holding company legislation. Biden’s plan to modestly increase taxes on Americans making more than $400,000 a year has been hooted down amid cries that such audacity will usher in, wait for it, socialism.

Socialism must have thrived during the Eisenhower Administration in the 1950’s since Ike presided over a 90 percent tax rate for the super-rich.

There are many and varied reasons why many younger Americans have trouble paying for college, can’t afford to own a home and struggle to more than barely get by, but the vast concentration of wealth in the hands of a handful of Americans is surely a contributing factor. Even a modest redistribution of the concentrated wealth of the richest Americans could power transformation on climate, infrastructure and education, just for starters.

We live in a new Gilded Age, populated by billionaire space cowboys and the hedge fund super wealthy. Biden has the right idea: save capitalism by insisting on more competition, tax the greatest wealth, create real economic opportunity by making the tax code work for people not named Bezos or Zuckerberg.

As the historian T.J. Stiles said of one of the first great American tycoons, Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad and shipping magnate, amassed economic power in the 19th Century “to rival that of the state.” The state – and the people – pushed back. It’s past time to do it again.

What better metaphor for private wealth rivaling the power of the state than two multi-billionaires launching a vanity project to send themselves into space? If you have that much money, you really are different, and you have too much.

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