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Peace after the IAM vote: Back to the bargaining table

originally published in The Herald

The takeaway from the International Association of Machinists’ tsunami rejection of the pistol-to-your-head Boeing contract: Working people don’t want to get buffaloed, especially by elites.

The contract was textbook divide and conquer. Create an incentive package that segments union membership. A $10,000 bonus draws younger workers disinclined to stew about retirement. Ready-to-retire employees benefit now, however mindful of a raw deal for newer machinists. Solidarity, though, animates a union. An unintended consequence of finger wagging is shove-it unanimity.

As The Herald Editorial Board wrote on Sunday, “To ensure 777X production in Washington, Machinists have been pressured to take one for the team, ratifying a contract freighted with concessions. Trouble is, the Machinists are the team.”
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November 15, 2013 phjackson Leave a response , , , ,

Eroding faith in politics: The government shutdown

originally published in The Herald

The madness of a government shutdown has a corrosive effect, not only on markets and morale, but also on young people who otherwise would gravitate to public life. That’s the intangible fallout, the post-traumatic slow burn. Paralysis in D.C. discourages the best and motivates the worst.

The blame game? Yes, hidebound Republicans in the U.S. House are responsible (or more specifically, a faction of hidebound Republicans). However, when families are turned away from Mount Rainier National Park today, when civilian military employees learn they won’t get paid, the blame is evenly spread. The impasse becomes a metaphor, the way not to get things done.

The visceral impulse is to throw the bums out, although that opportunity is a full 14 months away (note: officeholders and their families often take offense at the term “bums”). Most lawmakers work extremely hard. The challenge is ideological. Red states get redder, blue states get bluer, and never the polarizers shall meet.

Obamacare, with its overshadowed launch today, is the lightning rod. The law needs tweaking, but de-funding it again and again is theater, not leadership,
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October 1, 2013 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

For a people’s ombudsman: Snohomish County government

originally published in The Herald

A culture of accountability requires ethical leadership and an institutional check of the humans-are-no-angels variety. After his first 100 days in office, Snohomish County Executive John Lovick seems to have the leadership part down. Now comes the institutional check.

When Lovick unveils his county budget at the end of September, it will include $100,000 for a county ombudsman. It’s a promising first step to advance government accountability.

During the Aaron Reardon imbroglio early in 2013, The Herald Editorial Board recommended that Snohomish County disband its toothless ethics commission and establish a county ombudsman to quickly and effectively investigate citizen complaints. The idea has been championed by Deputy County Executive Mark Ericks, a former state legislator and U.S. marshal for Western Washington.
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September 15, 2013 phjackson Leave a response , , , ,

The fierce politics of water: Negotiating landscapes

originally published in The Herald

On Friday, the Washington Board of Natural Resources unanimously voted in favor of one of the largest private land acquisitions in Northwest history.

It’s an agreement that teases out a long narrative on water politics, interest-group horse-trading and the federal government’s role in the 21st century West.

In June, the Legislature approved $99 million from the capital budget to purchase 50,000 acres of the Teanaway River Valley north of Cle Elum. Forterra, a land conservation group, working in concert with the state, negotiated the agreement with the willing seller, American Forest Holdings, LLC.

The Teanaway sale will protect the river valley’s headwaters as well as the Yakima Basin watershed. In public lands parlance, it’s a “working landscape,” with recreational, livestock grazing and partially logged forestland.
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August 4, 2013 phjackson Leave a response , , , ,

A chance for a fresh start: Aaron Reardon’s resignation

originally published in The Herald

Thursday’s resignation of Snohomish County Executive Aaron Reardon was a joyless capsule on tainted leadership. Cathartic it wasn’t, because catharsis requires accountability, authenticity, a willingness to make amends.

A career politician adroit at taking credit for the labor of others, Reardon stood defiant, unwilling to shoulder blame or responsibility –or even feign humility — for a crisis of his own creation.

As the late Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, said to the White House congressional liaison in 1980, “You guys came in like a bunch of jerks, and I see you’re going out the same way.”

At his State of the County address, Reardon announced that he would resign at the end of May because of “false and scurrilous accusations” emanating from “groups that oppose” him. Exceptional investigative reporting by The Herald’s Scott North and Noah Haglund revealed evidence of online harassment and surveillance of Reardon’s political enemies — a list that extends to those who cooperated in the Washington State Patrol’s investigation of Reardon’s use of public money.

What, precisely, is false? Reardon merits an opportunity to defend his character and leadership but, like a third-world autocrat, he prefers to isolate, refusing to answer questions. It’s an evocative silence.
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February 22, 2013 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

The selling of The Herald: A new challenge

originally published in The Herald

Over the past decade, disruption in media has become the norm. Curmudgeons are hauled to seminars to learn about online gadgetry. The mantra rings like a line from “The Graduate:” I want to say just one word to you. Just one word. Digital.

Herald scribes, as they always have, show up every day, try to find out what’s going on and then spread the word. Whatever the medium, whether print, mobile or brain implant, people hunger for substance and quality. Ownership is something that happens on a higher floor.

For more than a century, The Herald has provided in-depth reporting and community coverage. The first draft of regional and state history is written by Herald veterans such as Sharon Salyer, Julie Muhlstein, Scott North, Eric Stevick and Bill Sheets. Institutional memory and judgment can’t be replaced.
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February 7, 2013 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

For gun-injury research: Gun violence in America, Part 4

originally published in The Herald

Historian Richard Hofstadter called it the paranoid style in American politics. The NRA’s bloviating Wayne LaPierre is Exhibit One, an angry mind hankering to enshrine George Orwell’s “1984” catchphrase, that ignorance is strength.

The child massacre in Newtown cast into relief LaPierre and the NRA’s decades-long campaign to supplant health research on firearms and violence. Research and facts a hazard? In the paranoid war on firearms data and public health, the paranoid are winning.

Dr. Fred Rivara of the UW’s Department of Pediatrics and Seattle Children’s Hospital experienced the NRA’s data stiffling first-hand. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, Rivara and his colleague, the Rand Corporation’s Dr. Arthur Kellermann, conducted firearm-injury research. The hammer fell in 1996, when an NRA-obsequious Congress whacked $2.6 million from the Centers for Disease Control. As Rivera and Kellermann note in an online essay for the Journal of the American Medical Association, $2.6 million just happened to be the amount dedicated to firearm-injury research. They quote the Appropriation language which underlines the point. “None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.” The inference is that empirical, control-tested data might demonstrate a relationship between gun control and a public good (say, fewer murdered children.) What if the opposite is true, and the NRA’s prescription of armed guards at schools has merit? As the National Academy of Sciences reported in 2004, there is inadequate data to determine what’s effective. Doctors and social scientists need to analyze inputs, but the NRA and its minions in Congress — and even the Washington Legislature — will have none of it.

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December 28, 2012 phjackson Leave a response , , , ,

Political power’s limits: The coal train reaction

originally published in The Herald

Truth and conventional wisdom don’t always align. In the debate over coal trains, two narratives merit a closer review. One involves the nature and limits of political power. The other centers on the inviolable railroads that built the American West.

Proponents of the Gateway Pacific Terminal at Cherry Point have been vastly outnumbered at the scoping hearings on the proposal’s environmental impacts. Nevertheless, a mass of coal skeptics, minus local, environmental data, won’t derail an export facility. The mission of the scoping process is not to jawbone the wisdom of exporting American-subsidized coal to China and its contribution to climate change, nor is it a cumulative, comprehensive economic analysis to determine the net fallout to the Northwest.
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December 27, 2012 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

The time for real decisions: Gun violence in America, Part 3

originally published in The Herald

An Everett-born Jesuit priest, the Rev. Patrick J. Conroy, sits in the nation’s capital, forbidden to buttonhole politicians. A different kind of crucible, a Political Science major, an aspiring politico and Snohomish High grad, squelched.

As chaplain of the U.S. House of Representatives, Conroy offers spiritual ballast, not policy guidance. Last Wednesday, on the heels of the child massacre in Newtown, Conroy crossed the numinous with hard sense. “As we continue to recover from such a great tragedy, endow the Members of this House and all our governmental leaders with the wisdom to respond with whatever policies and laws might be needed to ensure greater peace and security in our land,” Conroy prayed.

Those policies and laws to ensure greater peace are nearly as absent as the wisdom to curtail gun violence. Even facts are elusive. After heavy lobbying by the National Rifle Association, Congress de-funded research by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) concerning guns and public health. The NRA’s Wayne LaPierre said in 1995, “The problem that I see with what the CDC is doing is that they are not doing medicine, they’re doing politics.” On Friday, the same LaPierre promoted a police-state approach to Newtown, with NRA-trained guards stationed at every school in the country. Enough. The NRA’s mission is to sustain the NRA, not the public interest.
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December 23, 2012 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

Advancing mental health: Gun violence in America, Part 2

originally published in The Herald

Gun violence generates a latticework of fix-something brainstorms, from arming teachers to repealing the Second Amendment. Arguments, both ad hominem and rational, cross-hatch the public square, but unite on mental health.

Here, consensus runneth over: Mental-health services must be enhanced, with an emphasis on intervention and access to care.

As an action-forcing horror, the Newtown shooting teased up a stereotype, of those living with mental illness gravitating to violence. In fact, the mentally ill are much more likely to cause harm to themselves than to others. Violence manifests when severely ill patients go untreated. While disease stigmas fester, they aren’t changeless. Cancer was stigmatized. So was AIDS. Education is the antidote, setting mental health on par with the broader spectrum of community health needs. (Parity means just that.)
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December 21, 2012 phjackson Leave a response , , ,