Mountain Views News          Saturday, September 5, 2015

17

OPINION

Mountain Views-News Saturday, September 5, 2015 


DICK Polman 

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OBAMA HATERS’ HEADS 

DETONATE OVER ‘DENALIGATE’

What could be more 
entertaining, on a hot 
summer day, than 
revisiting the American 
idiocracy, which is 
obsessed at the moment 
with the president’s 
renaming of a mountain?

I don’t know where this episode ranks on the 
list of scandals - maybe somewhere between 
“terrorist fist bump” and the tan suit - but 
nevertheless it’s clear that, after all this time, 
Obama-haters still have enough teeth to chew 
a carpet. Which is what’s been happening 
ever since Obama’s announcement that 
Mount McKinley in Alaska shall henceforth 
be known by its traditional name, Denali.

Alaska Natives have called the mountain 
Denali since their arrival in the region several 
thousand years ago - in the local Athabaskan 
language, Denali means “the great one” - and 
nothing changed until a white prospector 
showed up in 1896 and decided on his 
own to re-christen it in honor of William 
McKinley, an Ohio governor who had just 
won the Republican presidential nomination. 
McKinley had never visited the region, but 
Congress didn’t care and approved the name 
change in 1917.

Problem was, Alaskans didn’t like it. In 1975, 
the state defied the federal decree and officially 
reinstated the name Denali - solely for its own 
use. Since then, Alaska’s representatives in 
Washington have tried to remove “McKinley” 
from the federal register of place names. But 
those moves have been repeatedly nixed by 
McKinley’s latter-day protectors, the Ohio 
Republicans.

Enter Obama, who said in a statement 
announcing the name chance, “Denali is a site 
of significant cultural importance to many 
Alaska Natives. The name ‘Denali’ has been 
used for many years and is widely used across 
the state today.”

Cue the ritual outrage.

Right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro on 
Twitter: “Perhaps we should just be grateful 
Obama didn’t decide to rename Mt. McKinley 
Mt. Trayvon.”

Headline on the right-wing Gateway Pundit 
blog: “Obama Renames Mt. McKinley 
(Named After Some White Guy) to Denali.” 
A Gateway Pundit fan on Twitter: “Obama 
observes Islam practice of eliminating 
Western names.”

The right-wing blog Hot Air: “Obama 
apparently wanted a cheap win....It’s a curious 
political choice to pander to Alaskans....It’s 
an arbitrary and capricious use of executive 
power in pursuit of a petty end.”

But Ohio’s Republicans are truly leading the 
league in head detonations. Congressman Bob 
Gibbs says Obama’s decision is a “political 
stunt” and “constitutional overreach.” 
Senator Rob Portman says Obama’s decision 
“is yet another example of the president going 
around Congress.” Gov. John Kasich, the 
presidential candidate, tweets: “POTUS again 
oversteps his bounds.”

The ironies in this faux-flap scream for 
attention.

Don’t Republicans pride themselves on being 
the party of state’s rights and local control? 
For generations, Alaskans had insisted that 
the mountain be formally known again by 
a name that was indigenously Alaskan - 
only to be thwarted by Republicans back 
in Washington. Then here comes Obama, 
standing up for state’s rights and local 
control....and he gets hammered by the haters 
for kingly overreach.

The thing is, Alaska’s Republicans wanted 
to reinstate Denali. They know it means 
“the great one,” and they were fine with that 
native honorific. In the aftermath of Obama’s 
announcement, Senator Dan Sullivan said: 
“For decades, Alaskans and members of our 
congressional delegation have been fighting 
for Denali to be recognized by the federal 
government by its true name. I’m gratified 
that the president respected this.” His GOP 
colleague, Lisa Murkowski, added: “I’d like 
to thank the president for working with us to 
achieve this significant change.”

With nearly 17 months still left on Obama’s 
clock, the haters will move on and find 
something else to seethe about. Maybe Obama 
will salute with a coffee cup or something. 
Maybe he’ll go skeet-shooting or something.

And by the way, we can all take comfort in 
knowing that if Donald Trump wins the 
White House, he’d keep the name Denali. 
Once he hears its English translation, he’ll 
just assume it refers to him.

Dick Polman is the national political 
columnist at NewsWorks/WHYY in 
Philadelphia (newsworks.org/polman) and 
a “Writer in Residence” at the University of 
Philadelphia. Email him at dickpolman7@
gmail.com.


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LEFT TURN/RIGHT TURN 

HOWARD Hays As I See It

MICHAEL Reagan Making Sense


“What does labor want? We 
want more schoolhouses 
and less jails; more books 
and less arsenals; more 
learning and less vice; 
more leisure and less 
greed; more justice and less 
revenge; in fact, more of the 
opportunities to cultivate 
our better natures.”

- Samuel Gompers, 1915

I’ve used this opening quote 
before, but it’s especially apropos for Labor Day.

I’ve written before of the holiday’s roots with 
the late-nineteenth century workers in George 
Pullman’s railroad car company. They lived in 
a company town outside Chicago where, along 
with their wages and hours, their rents and prices 
paid at stores were also controlled by Pullman. I 
wrote how he refused to meet with them when, 
during the Panic of 1893, their wages sank while 
those rents and prices remained high, and they 
couldn’t cut it even working mandatory 12-hour 
days.

 There was the ensuing strike, backed by 
railroad workers throughout the country 
refusing to handle trains pulling Pullman cars. 
And, there was Pullman’s counter-strategy of 
hooking his cars up to trains carrying the U.S. 
Mail, making any interference with them a 
federal issue.

 There were the 13 strikers killed and 57 
wounded as President Grover Cleveland 
dispatched U.S. Army troops to protect those 
trains. And, there was the move by Cleveland six 
days after the strike ended, maybe in atonement 
for the victims and maybe in recognition of the 
growing labor movement, to declare that the 
annual observance of the Central Labor Union 
of New York (our first major integrated union) 
would henceforth be a national holiday known 
as “Labor Day”.

 I’ve written of recollections growing up in the 
1950s and 60s, when by junior high we’d learned 
about Samuel Gompers and the formation of 
the AFL-CIO, and by high school about John 
L. Lewis and the United Mine Workers, Harry 
Bridges and the San Francisco dockworkers and 
the 1937 Flint, Michigan autoworkers strike.

 This was when, whether or not local papers 
had a “Business Section”, they’d have one on 
“Labor News”. It was when a fifth of our nation’s 
workforce was unionized, when Dads of the kids 
I hung with likely got an education through the 
GI Bill and, whether blue-collar factory worker 
or white-collar engineer, worked under a union 
contract providing a middle-class income 
allowing them to buy a home, take families on 
vacation a couple weeks a year, send kids to 
college and earn a pension ensuring a secure, 
comfortable retirement.

 This was when our nation’s economy, based on 
a strong middle-class, was the envy of the world.

Since then, our nation’s wealth has increased 
along with the productivity of its workforce. But 
the problem, explained by Sen. Bernie Sanders 
(I-VT) on PBS’ “Charlie Rose Show”, is that “In 
the last 30 years there has been a massive -- we’re 
talking about many trillions of dollars being 
redistributed from the middle class to the top 
one-tenth of 1 percent.”

 A report last week from the Economic Policy 
Institute shows how, for decades after WWII, 
the increase in productivity (economic output 
per average work hour) was closely tracked by 
an increase in wages. This changed in 1973, 
when productivity continued to rise while wages 
stagnated. 

 The divergence really took off after 2000. Since 
then through 2014, while worker productivity 
rose by 21.6%, inflation-adjusted wages 
increased by 1.8%. Only 8% of the wealth created 
by increased worker productivity was returned 
to the workers responsible for it.

 According to the report, most of the remainder 
went in two directions. One was in making the 
rich richer. In 2014, while most Americans saw a 
3.3% increase in incomes, for the wealthiest 1% 
it was a 10.8% boost. Nearly 60% of all income 
gains since 2009 have gone just to that top 1%. 
From WWII through the 1970s, the top 10% 
took in a third of our nation’s income; now it’s 
half – topping what it was just before the Crash 
of 1929.

 The other direction is towards corporate profit. 
The Roosevelt Institute reports that between 
2003 and 2012, 91% of S&P 500 earnings went not 
for re-investing in companies and workforces, 
but on dividends and stock buybacks. The fewer 
shares there are in circulation, the higher the 
value of those held by remaining shareholders. 
The buybacks don’t help workers, but they’re 
huge for top execs whose pay is increasingly 
tied to stock value, rather than on company 
performance.

 Through the 1960s and 70s, 40-cents of every 
dollar earned or borrowed was put back into the 
company and its workers. Since the 1980s, it’s 
been more like 10-cents. As the Roosevelt paper 
notes, “Whereas firms once borrowed to invest 
and improve their long-term performance, they 
now borrow to enrich their investors in the 
short-run.”

 To Lawrence Mishel, an author of the 
EPI report, this is all the result of deliberate 
government “policy decisions made on behalf of 
those with the most income, wealth, and power 
that suppressed wage growth”. Clearly, “those 
with the most income, wealth, and power” 
are determined to maintain their monopoly 
of influence, which is why there’s been such a 
concerted effort over past decades to bust the 
unions; to deny workers a collective voice not 
only with their employers, but with those in 
government making those policy decisions.

 In addition to enjoying the three-day 
weekend, we might also remember those 
Pullman workers and tens of thousands that 
followed who were gassed, clubbed, shot and 
denied their livelihoods struggling to protect 
workers’ right to that collective voice; so that 
one day we all might be in a better position to 
simply enjoy those “opportunities to cultivate 
our better natures”.

 

 Happy Labor Day


SCHOOL DAYS, 
SCHOOL DAYS

When I first read that the San Francisco 
Board of Education voted unanimously 
to give 107 students high school diplomas, 
even though the students has not met the 
requirements for graduation, I naturally 
assumed it was a case of educrats bending 
the rules to boost graduation statistics.

 But when I looked at the situation more closely, the board’s action 
was fair and made sense.

 The San Francisco board’s vote was a response to the high–handed 
decision from the California Department of Education that suddenly 
canceled the required high school exit exam. Those 107 students 
from San Francisco International High arrived at the testing center 
only to find there was no test and no way to get their diploma, since 
state law requires passing the test before a diploma is issued.

 High school students can try to pass the test beginning as early as 
their sophomore year and continue to attempt to pass for the rest of 
their high school career. The fact the vast majority of students taking 
the test fail it is a damning commentary of the state of education 
here.

 KQED reports, “According to state data, last summer 4,847 math 
tests were given with 1,286 (26.5 percent) students passing and 5,826 
English Language Arts tests were given with 1,248 (21.4 percent) 
students passing.”

 That’s a quality control standard so bad it makes Chinese sheet 
rock manufacturers look like the picture of high standards.

 Since students obviously can’t pass the test, California educrats 
are presented with two choices: Improve education so students are 
learning and not simply warming a chair, or change the test. 
Naturally California decided to change the test, and I don’t think 
the goal is to make it harder.

 State bureaucrats decided to cancel “because the exam does not 
reflect the new state academic standards.”

 Then, after ruining thousand’s of seniors attempt to graduate, 
the department went to the legislature to ask them to retroactively 
remove the testing requirement for three years so the monkeys at the 
state department of education can type up a new test.

 In other words, in typical bureaucracy fashion, out–of–touch 
educrats happily put the cart before the horse and were shocked the 
ride was so dangerous.

 No one bothered to think that suddenly changing the rules of the 
game in the 4th quarter might be controversial for the players.

 When informed about the problem with students planning to go 
to college state Deputy Superintendent Keric Ashley breezily told 
the San Francisco Chronicle, “Our hope is that the few students 
who find themselves in this situation will only have to defer their 
dreams of attending the college of their choice for one semester. In 
the meantime, there are other options available to these students, 
including our California Community Colleges. I received excellent 
preparation at my local community college before attending 
university.”

 Which is the way elite bureaucrats dismiss the concerns of the little 
people whose lives they’ve disrupted.

 So for at least once the San Francisco board has done the right 
thing. Congratulations. Try to make it a habit.

 Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political 
consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. 
Martin’s Press). He is the founder of the email service reagan.com 
and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites 
atwww.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments 
to Reagan@caglecartoons.com. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

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