Page 4 - Reedley Exponent 1-4-18 E-edition

The Reedley Exponent A4 Thursday, January 4, 2018 Editorial & Opinions
Serving “The World’s Fruit Basket” since 1891
A Mid Valley Publishing Newspaper
Founded March 26, 1891, in a two-story building on the corner of 11th and F streets, by A.S. Jones
Fred Hall — Publisher
In my OPINION
Early January in California often means—as the announcer used to warn us in introducing each episode of the “Twilight Zone” — there’s a signpost up ahead indicating that we have entered the threshold of unintended conse- quences.
Jon Earnest — Editor
Chris Aguirre — Sports Editor Felicia Cousart Matlosz — Panorama Editor Budd Brockett — Editor Emeritus
QUOTE
“I’m not concerned about all hell breaking loose, but that a PART of hell will break loose... it’ll be much harder to detect.”
— George Carlin (1937-2008)
Fred Hall
A case of truth-telling in immigration
In the coming months, we indeed will be
coming face-to-face with many of the vagaries
of poorly researched or miserably written leg-
islation being pronounced upon us by so called
“leaders” of the sixth largest economy in the
world. Why should we be upset because they
stripped a few more of our rights away to make those less driven more comfortable? Why should they be saddled with rational thought when anything goes wrong — they simply turn to the belabored tax- payer for resolution of their problems. More tax money will solve everything, right?
Anyway, one might keep in mind the fact that this group of people which we sent to Sacramento are imbued with the ability to undercut and downsize our economy until it is small enough — even for them to manage! Their limits on the skill set required to absolutely waste seems, however, to have no bounds.
For those of us who make a living in the private sector, it’s ab- solutely imperative that we look at the downside of every decision in the context of its overall impact. We are forced then to do a risk analysis to determine if the potential damaging offset is worth the risk or is at least controllable.
An example would be our legislature caving into the demands of California’s environmental community and requiring that our utility companies use more and more renewable (more expensive) power sources in the cocktail used to generate our electricity. The result has been the most expensive utility rates in the country. Not the kind of statistic that leads to livability or maintaining a competitive edge.
Unintended consequences would be involved in raising the tax on each gallon of gasoline or diesel consumed in the State of California. The intended outcome for that gambit was to provide money for the repairs to our crumbling infrastructure. Problem with that is that we already were paying some of the highest taxes in the country just for that purpose. Bungling and mismanagement meant there was never enough after ancillary projects stole from the road fund. Added to the fuel taxes which were added for “cap and trade” and recently renewed as well, this new fuel tax guarantees everything that moves within California’s borders is going to cost the consumer
more.
Want even more? Small businesses in this state will continue
to disappear under the artificial upward pressures on the minimum wage, which was designed to be an entry level number, not a career! This is a decision far too important than being placed in the hands of folks in Sacramento who have never really run a business or worked for a living in their entire lives.
Making matters worse is that a one-figure-meets-all-needs is the fact that $15 has a whole different meaning when one considers exist- ing in San Francisco compared to the Central Valley.
Last, but not least, we have the city of Coalinga, which recent- ly annexed a state hospital to treat sexual deviants. City fathers in Coalinga thought it would be a great idea because it would enhance their tax base. That seemed like a good idea until Gov. Jerry Brown decided we needed to expand our voter roles by allowing those same “patients” the right to vote.
During a recent vote on a safety initiative the city came face-to- face with unintended consequences. A voting block, formed within the facility, cast 137 votes against the tax increase because it “would have increased the cost of their cheeseburgers and the city had failed to sit down with them and negotiate in good faith.”
Unintended consequences of actions by politicians and the system surround us on a daily basis — one does not need to look very far!
But, as always, that’s only one man’s opinion.
By Andrew Moss
Guest columnist
As we enter a new year, 800,000 Dreamers await news of their fate in this country. Thwarted by a president who soon will terminate the only pro- gram giving them temporary reprieve from harassment or deportation, stood up by a Congress that couldn’t muster the will last year to grant them a path- way to permanent residency, they wait.
But not all are simply standing by. On New Year’s Day I scan the internet, seeking photos and stories of Dream- ers willing to share something of their lives and their contributions to Amer- ica. On a USA Today site, I read about Ellie, whose DACA status enabled her to attend community college full time, earn an associate’s degree, and even- tually become the first person in her family to attend a four-year university. I learn about Julio, for whom DACA meant the opportunity to become a mortgage loan officer and a tax-paying, contributing member of his communi- ty. There is Carla, who started a digital marketing business, and there, too, is Reyna, who founded an organization that advocates for migrant youth.
These are only a few of the ma- ny Dreamers who have not been de- terred from speaking out and sharing their stories. When President Donald Trump announced in September that he would terminate the Obama-era DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) Program by March 2018, many Dreamers began protesting in Washington and other cities for a just resolution of the crisis, seeking to gal- vanize public support. They have per- sisted in telling their truths in an era of official distortions and betrayals.
In her 2008 study of immigration policy, “Illegal, Alien, or Immigrant: The Politics of Immigration Reform,” political scientist Lina Newton showed
how changing images of immigrants colored debates and influenced legis- lation in the 1980s and 1990s. Though many Americans expressed concerns in the 1980s about job security when they discussed immigration, they neverthe- less acknowledged the contributions that immigrants were making to Amer- ican society; 61 percent of Americans surveyed in a 1984 Newsweek/Gallup poll agreed with the assertion that “im- migrants help improve our culture with their different cultures and talents.” In the political climate of the time, Con- gress passed, and President Ronald Reagan signed, the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, opening a pathway on which 2.7 million undocu- mented immigrants would eventually advance to permanent residency.
By contrast, the 1990s, the era of Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America,” saw a shift in congressional debates about both government and immigration. Playing on Americans’ growing economic insecurities, law- makers, particularly Republicans, in- creasingly characterized government as an engine of redistribution that shifted citizens’ tax dollars to the un- deserving, and they lumped into that “undeserving” category both welfare recipients and immigrants. They not only characterized legal and undocu- mented immigrants as freeloaders; they also played up a more ominous image of the “criminal alien” who constituted a threat to law and order. In that era, the most significant piece of immigration-related legislation, the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, not surprisingly introduced stiffer new enforcement measures while of-
fering no new avenues to permanent residency or citizenship.
In the ensuing decades, negative images of immigrants as freeloaders and as threats, played up by politi- cians and nativist think tanks, have continued to crop up in public debates about immigration, whether those de- bates have concerned policies dealing with legal immigration or with the presence of undocumented individu- als in the country. This situation has persisted despite countervailing de- velopments, such as President Barack Obama’s executive order creating DA- CA in 2012 or the publication in 2016 of a National Academy of Sciences re- port affirming immigration’s “overall positive impact on long-run economic growth in the U.S.”
With the candidacy and presiden- cy of Donald Trump, the negative and threatening discourse about immi- grants has been taken to unprecedent- ed levels, spurring an uptick in hate crimes and bias incidents and creat- ing an atmosphere of fear that many public officials have described as cor- rosive to public trust in local law en- forcement. It has been in this fearful atmosphere that many Dreamers have been speaking out and even engaging in civil disobedience, often at great risk to themselves. They know that it is possible for a Dream Act still to be passed in this Congress, and the com- ing weeks will be revelatory about the nation’s capacity to resist falsehood. In the meantime, the Dreamers con- tinue to remind us of the talents and the promise they offer to this nation.
Andrew Moss, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is an emeritus professor at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, where he taught in Nonviolence Studies for 10 years.
Jon Earnest’s column will return next week.
Why the Bundys walk from prosecution
By Harold Pease
Guest columnist
In jury after jury, few of the hundreds engaged in what has been dubbed the Battle of Bunkerville have been prosecuted in a historic confrontation be- tween the federal govern- ment and its citizens over western land. A confronta- tion which, at its peak, had government snipers aimed at the unarmed Bundy fam- ily. Friends of the Bundys, coming from points as far away as New Hampshire and Florida, saw a few of these had their rifles aimed at the government snip- ers. Had the government not backed down it could have resulted in a nasty blood bath with many more throughout the West ready to aid the family.
Three trials were held in 2017: the first in April ended in a mistrial, another in July had mostly acquittals, and a third in November on ring- leaders Cliven Bundy and his two sons, Ammon and Ryan, and a co-defendant Ryan Payne, ending in an- other mistrial. The most recent was complicated by the government’s with- holding 3,000 pages of evi- dence, some showing the involvement of the FBI in the standoff at the ranch and others the disparity be- tween government sources on the threat assessment, one showing the Bundys to be nonviolent.
To further complicate
the issue Ammon and Ryan Bundy had also been acquit- ted of federal conspiracy and weapons charges stem- ming from an armed, 40-day occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon the year before.
Why can’t the govern- ment get prosecutions? Bundy arguments brought focus to three concerns: federal land within a sover- eign state, the Constitution, and what is known as jury nullification.
Juries are made of citi- zens who have to wonder why the federal government owns 87.7 percent of Nevada leaving private ownership of the state at but 12.3 per- cent. The percentage of land owned by government ex- ceeds fifty percent in Alaska (98.5), Idaho (63.8), Oregon (52.6), and Utah (63.6). Ba- sically the federal govern- ment did not give western states all their land when they qualified for statehood. States were so excited to get coveted statehood that they went along with the condi- tions despite the confisca- tion of, for most in the West, at least a third of their land. States want their confiscated land returned, so as to be on equal footing with 19 sister states that actually own their land.
The Revolutionary War doubled the size of the coun- try. The federal govern- ment under the Articles of Confederation, Northwest Ordinance of 1787, was to manage non-state lands un-
til such lands met the quali- fications of statehood there- after to be managed by the new state. This process was retained under the new Con- stitution in Article IV, Sec- tion 3 and was to be modeled throughout the West.
In Article I, Section 8 of the new Constitution, the federal government was permitted to have but 10 square miles for a federal capital. The only other land that they could acquire had to be for military purposes as specified in the common defense clause of the Con- stitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 17 which reads: “and to exercise like Au- thority over all places pur- chased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the same shall be for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock Yards, and other needful Buildings.”
Jury nullification is the long-standing practice of ignoring the instructions of the judge when those instructions appear to be one-sided or to be against common sense, sometimes referred to as “lived expe- rience.” When jurists, on their own, even when ex- cluded from “approved” testimony, come to realize that Nevada only owns 12.3 percent of itself, they real- ize this is neither reason- able nor common sense. Some may have read the Constitution and know of its clarity on land distribu- tion. Some few know that
in the distribution of power between federal and state entities federal judges al- most always advocate the extension of federal pow- er—they are the strongest advocates for it—and thus tend to shape the decision by what they allow the ju- ries to consider.
When Judge Gloria M. Navarro, who presided over the two mistrials, refused to allow issues running up to the standoff, or the con- stitutional arguments — es- pecially defense and free speech issues — to have rel- evance in this case and was so dictatorial with respect to what jurors could use to base their decision, she turned jurists off. Hence, jury nullification. It did not help the federal case when none of the Bundys bran- dished an assault weapon, or themselves appeared threat- ening to federal officials, or had any history of violence.
Both sides had until Dec. 29 to make their cases for or against a new trial. If recon- sideration is favored Judge Navarro has set a new trial date for Feb. 26, 2018. She is advised to let the issue stand as is, lest she risk yet a fourth jury nullification.
Harold Pease is a syn- dicated columnist and an expert on the United States Constitution. He has taught history and political science from this perspective for over 30 years at Taft College in Kern County.
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