Salem Political Snark

Story of Salem firefighter's widow being denied benefits is more nuanced than outrageous

Look, I never pass up an opportunity to become outraged at something officials at the City of Salem have done. That's why I called this blog Salem Political Snark rather than Salem Political Praise.

So when I saw a story on KGW News a few days ago about how the widow of a Salem firefighter, Maurice "Mo" Stadeli, was being denied workers compensation benefits after her husband died of tonsil cancer because the city was asking the state Supreme Court to reverse a Court of Appeals ruling that approved the benefits, my outrage meter was prepared to rise into the Red Hot zone.

Mo Stadeli

Actually there were three stories on KGW, which you can watch or read here, here, and here. 

The last story was about how the Salem City Manager, Keith Stahley, announced at last Monday's City Council meeting that the Supreme Court appeal was being dropped. A Salem Reporter story about this quoted Mayor Chris Hoy as saying:

“I know we struggled with this decision before., and after further information and further reflection, I think we all realized that we made a mistake. And I don’t think it’s a sign of weakness to change your decision or admit a mistake. I think it’s just a sign of people understanding what’s right and what’s not,” he said. “ I’m happy that we are able to move forward and I am very sorry for the harm we’ve caused to Mo’s spouse.”

Well, I agree that it was a mistake, but it wasn't an outrageous mistake as I thought at first. For city officials had good reason to consider that while Stadeli's death was a tragedy, the cause of his tonsil cancer wasn't related to his job as a Salem firefighter for 28 years.

That was the conclusion of an administrative law judge, according to the Salem Reporter. But then the Workers Compensation Board and Court of Appeals ruled against the city.

In December 2019, the city denied the Stadeli family’s claim for worker’s compensation benefits. City attorneys later argued in court filings that it consulted medical experts who determined that a pre-existing medical condition most likely caused his illness. 

An administrative law judge supported that finding in an April 2021 ruling. But the state Workers Compensation Board reversed the decision eight months later, finding that the experts did not rule out firefighting as a cause, according to court documents.

Under state law, cancers of the throat and mouth are presumed to be a work-related illness if contracted by firefighters who have worked more than five years.

...The city in January 2022 sought a review of the decision by the state Court of Appeals. The court ruled on Sept. 13 that the city did not prove Stadeli’s illness was not work-related under state law, court records showed.

You can read the Court of Appeals decision here. It isn't the easiest reading, but my fairly quick perusal turned up some facts that ratcheted down my outrage at city officials.

Stadeli chewed tobacco. He had HPV. Here's an excerpt from the ruling.

We state the facts supported by substantial evidence consistently with the board's order. ORS 656.298(7); ORS 183.482(8)(c). Claimant worked as a firefighter for over 25 years. He also chewed tobacco for “many years.” In 2018, a biopsy of claimant's right tonsil revealed an invasive squamous cell carcinoma that was positive for the human papillomavirus 16 (HPV-16).

All four physician experts who offered evidence in this case agreed that HPV is a cause of tonsillar cancer generally, and all three who evaluated claimant's situation agreed that HPV was a probable cause of claimant's cancer specifically. The three experts on whom the board relied in reaching its decision—Drs. Pierce, Orwoll, and Beer—also agreed that HPV was the most significant probable cause of claimant's cancer.

Those experts were also asked about the probability that either claimant's habit of chewing tobacco or his work as a firefighter were causally connected to his cancer. As to both, no expert was able to cite studies in medical literature supporting a connection between either tobacco or firefighting and tonsillar cancer, but neither were they able to definitively state that either had no connection to claimant's cancer.

My impression of the Court of Appeals ruling not surprisingly fits with how City Manager Stahley described it in the Salem Reporter story. There wasn't conclusive evidence that Stadeli's cancer was caused by his work as a firefighter, but there also wasn't conclusive evidence that it wasn't. 

Stahley became city manager after the city pressed for the Court of Appeals to review the matter and before that court made a decision.

He told Salem Reporter on Monday that the appellate judges who ruled earlier on the matter misinterpreted Oregon’s worker compensation law – requiring medical experts to have an impossible level of certainty about the cause of some diseases.

“If the court of appeals decision stands, the city of Salem and other Oregon employers will pay higher workers compensation insurance premiums and pay more in claims for some illnesses or injuries that are unrelated to working conditions,” he said at the time.

So city officials weren't acting like mean-spirited grinches determined to take away a widow's workers compensation benefits following the death of her firefighter husband. They sought medical advice about whether his cancer was related to his job. 

The general consensus, from what I could tell in the Court of Appeals ruling, was that HPV and chewing tobacco were likely causes of the cancer, with HPV being most important.

However, since mouth and throat cancers are viewed in state law as being occupational hazards for firefighters, the Workers Compensation Board and Court of Appeals determined that the widow was entitled to her husband's workers compensation benefits.

That seems fair. It also seemed reasonable that the City of Salem filed an appeal with the Supreme Court, given the specific facts in Stadeli's case.

Desperately seeking these Salem Weekly issues

Salem Weekly was our city's alternative newspaper from 2004 until 2018. I loved reading it. I also wrote a Strange Up Salem column that appeared in it from May 2013 to May 2015. This was the cover of the issue where my first column ran. The drawing was by the multi-talented Salem Weekly publisher, A.P. Walther.

Though Salem Weekly is no more, it isn't forgotten.

Jim Scheppke, retired librarian for the State of Oregon, is working to have every issue of Salem Weekly bound and preserved professionally. The volumes will be made available to the general public. Mark Wigg and I are helping out with the project.

One of the first tasks is finding Salem Weekly issues that Jim doesn't have yet. Below is the list that we're looking for. If you have any of these issues and are willing to donate it/them to this preservation project, let me know by emailing me: [email protected] 

Helen Caswell, who died recently after a lengthy bout with cancer, was the most prolific writer for Salem Weekly. Without her, Salem Weekly wouldn't have existed for as long as it did. Her illness was a key reason why Salem Weekly stopped publication. Preserving the Salem Weekly issues is a memorial of sorts to Helen, a wonderfully kind and talented person.

Here's the list of missing issues:

Volume 8, Issue 19 (12/2011)

Volume 8, Issue 20 (1/2012)

Volume 10, Issue 8 (7/2013)

Volume 10, Issue 10 (8/2013)

Volume 13, Issues 16, 17, 18 (2017)

Volume 15 Issues 4, 6, 9, 10, 12 (2017)

2018 (No volume/issue numbers in 2018)

April 12 - 25

June 7 - 20

August 2 - 15

School superintendent Andrea Castañeda wows at City Club talk

I've listened to a lot of talented speakers at Salem City Club programs. Fewbhave impressed me as much as Andrea Castañeda, the superintendent of the Salem-Keizer school district who said that she's been on the job for 81 days as of last Friday.

All I can say is, Salem and Keizer are super fortunate to have her heading up the school district. Castañeda came across as deeply caring, highly competent, and most importantly, genuine. That's a quality that can't be faked.

It isn't something that can be taught, or pretended, because it springs from the root of who a person really is. Genuineness is what I remember most about the talk she gave yesterday, though I'll be sharing some of the substance of what Castañeda spoke about.

Sorry for the angle of the photos of her slides. I arrived kind of late and didn't have much of a seating choice. This one shows basic information about the school district. Forty-seven percent of students are Hispanic and 40% are white. Eighty-four percent are economically disadvantaged. 

School staff are 73% white and 21% Hispanic. So it's great that the school district has a Hispanic superintendent. Helps to make up for the overall staff imbalance.

Here's some facts about how large the school district is. Castañeda said there are 1,500 external doors and 400 cameras.


After the facts and figures, this slide was an appealing change of pace. Castañeda said, I recall, that she was the glum looking Western Oregon student second from the left in this photo of the winners in a track race. She thought she'd win the state championship. She didn't.

Castañeda related that someone gave her the contact info for the woman who did win. Her impulse was to call up the woman and tell her, "We'll race again and I'll win." But that didn't happen, though the story would have been even better if it had.

This anecdote led to observations about how she dropped out of college, then went back after working at a porta-potty business for a while. She felt shame at failing, saying we think it's our fault. Failing isn't our fault, but it is still our problem.

I loved Castañeda's optimism about today's youth.

She said, "We teach the generation that will save us." I can only hope, since my Baby Boomer generation isn't doing so great at this. Noting that Americans are pessimistic about the future, she said "If you were around young people, you wouldn't feel that way. They won't do things the way we did. We'll be amazed at things they figure out."

She spoke highly of the district's dual language program, saying "It's good to not know things and have to ask for help," adding that the construction of words is different in Spanish and English, so learning something in both languages leads to greater understanding of the subject.

Regarding safety, Castañeda said the school district has the best safety program she's ever seen. A slide she shared noted: "There are limits to what schools can do related to safety. There are no limits to what schools are expected to do related to safety."

In the question and answer portion of the City Club meeting, someone asked about class sizes. Castañeda said this was a problem, but it isn't as easy to fix as simply adding more teachers, because more classrooms are needed for more teachers, which can mean more schools need to be built.

Regarding the school district budget, she said that next year there will be no less than a $30 million deficit. There are two lapsed contracts. Castañeda said that the district can't afford the salary increases demanded.

Meet the Press shouldn't have interviewed Trump

I'm a big fan of Meet the Press. It's been a Sunday viewing habit of mine for as long as I can remember. I enjoyed Chuck Todd when he was the host. But he's no longer with Meet the Press.

Today was the debut of Todd's replacement, Kristen Welker. The show was devoted to a taped interview Welker did with Donald Trump. A transcript of the interview is here.

The best part of the interview for me was seeing how old Trump looks.

Either his makeup artist has gone on strike, or the pressures of his four indictments is getting to him. Regardless, it's hard for me to see how anyone watching the interview would think that Biden is old and Trump isn't. If anything, Trump looked older than Biden even though he's several years younger.

After that first impression, the interview went downhill. Welker did her best to get Trump to answer her questions and not get away with blatant lies, but her best wasn't nearly good enough.

Trump refused to answer questions. He talked over Welker. He interrupted her when she tried to fact check his lies. Welker served up some softball questions rather than using her interview time to pin Trump down on tough questions.

On the positive side -- and Welker certainly had some good moments -- Welker got Trump to admit that he was the one who made the decision that the 2020 election was rigged, not his attorneys at the time.

His current attorneys defending him in the January 6 and Georgia indictments won't like that he said this, since Trump demolished a potential defense position that his attempts to overthrow the election were based on advice from legal experts that he'd actually beaten Joe Biden.

Overall, though, Trump got away with way too many lies.

Welker would correct some of them after an interview segment was shown. However, inexplicably Welker didn't say that Trump's repeated claim that Democrats want to kill babies after birth, or that this happens, was entirely false. Instead she rather weakly said that late term abortions are rare, constituting just 1% of abortions, if I recall correctly.

NBC News did publish a fact check of Trump's lies and false statements, which, though better than nothing, won't get anywhere near the attention that the interview itself did.

So a valid criticism of Welker and Meet the Press is that while they knew full well that Trump would use the interview to spread his lies that the election was stolen, Joe Biden engaged in illegal behavior, and other falsehoods, they gave Trump a big soapbox anyway, essentially providing him a forum to give a campaign speech.

Here's some quotes from people who are critical of what Meet the Press did.

Corbin Boiles of The Daily Beast:
Journalists and commentators for years have wrestled with the question of how to approach Donald Trump, a former president who is both a prolific liar and facing dozens of criminal charges in federal and state court. In her debut turn as moderator for Meet The Press, Kristen Welker wanted to be the latest to prove to critics that he could be challenged.

But like those who have tried before, her inherent skills as an interviewer were no match for a chaotic interview subject like Trump.

...He repeatedly refused to answer questions—directly telling Welker “I’m not going to tell you” when asked if he watched the chaos on Jan. 6 from a White House dining room—and made multiple ludicrous claims that were left largely unchallenged, or weakly so. (Democrats want to kill babies after birth! Nancy Pelosi was responsible for Jan. 6!)

NBC produced multiple post-interview fact-checks on air and online, including after each interview segment during the broadcast, but that is no replacement for an on-the-spot confrontation. Presenting an evidence-backed fact check to Trump’s face allows an audience to watch him reject truth in real time. That serves a greater purpose than roundups scattered throughout NBC’s online platforms.

Ari Berman of Mother Jones:
On Sunday, Trump gave his first broadcast network interview since leaving office, joining NBC’s Meet the Press from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. It followed a predictable script: Trump says a bunch of outlandish and untrue things, the interviewer (in this case Kristen Welker, making her debut as host) pushes back in a very serious way, and in the meantime Trump’s base only hears the lies, not the fact-checks. We’ve seen this happen over and over. 

“I plan on watching the Meet the Press interview Sunday, but this is not encouraging,” NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen wrote after watching one clip. “He floods the zone. She nods her head. And they make content of it — boring, predictable content — for other NBC shows. Pointless and inane.”

...Meet the Press will likely get a ratings boost today. The network will brag about how responsibly they covered Trump. And the former president, as he so often does, will have the last laugh.

Bill Goodykoontz of the Arizona Republic:
Well, she tried.

That’s about the best you can say for Kristen Welker’s interview with Donald Trump in her first week as the new moderator of NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Despite putting some guardrails in place to protect against Trump’s repeated lies — the interview was pre-taped, without a MAGA-fied audience like the disastrous live CNN town hall in May — it was the same old tired song and dance.

And Welker seemed powerless to do much of anything about it.

If she can’t hold him accountable, who can? This was Trump’s first interview with a broadcast news network since he left office. As his lies have become increasingly bold and unhinged, as his popularity among his base seems to grow, what’s the alternative?

...There is simply too much at stake. As others have pointed out, the upcoming election is not just a Democrats vs. Republicans horse race, though some insist on covering it that way.

You don’t have to be a fan of Biden or of Democratic policies to understand that this is in many ways a referendum on democracy itself, as Trump and his base — which includes legislators, governors and rich donors, among others — work to dismantle it.

It is incumbent upon journalists to make their audiences aware of this, to frame their work in this context, and to remind them of it constantly. (In the full, unedited interview, Welker asked Trump if he believed in democracy. He said he did, but "I don’t consider us to have much of a democracy right now.")

Filling Sunday morning with lies, no matter how much you fact check them, isn’t enough.

Salem city officials playing some games with budget problems

Yeah, I know. The title of this blog post is kind of like a headline saying "Dog seen chasing a squirrel." What's obvious really doesn't need mentioning.

But even though we expect government officials to play games when they're talking about their budget, it still makes sense to point out specific instances of this so we don't become overly accustomed to the game-playing.

Yesterday the Salem Reporter ran a story about ways officials at the City of Salem want to cut the city general fund budget in light of a potential defeat of a controversial employee payroll tax to be levied on everybody who works in the city limits whether or not they live in  Salem.

The tax will be voted on in the November election because a business group gathered many more signatures than were necessary for a referendum petition after the City Council approved the payroll tax in a narrow 5-4 decision without a vote of the people -- even though most citizens who weighed in on this issue said the tax should have such a vote.

City officials have been saying that about half of the $29 million to be raised each year by the payroll tax would go to maintaining existing services and about half would go for new services. However, until now it wasn't clear which existing services those officials would want to cut if the payroll tax fails.

The Salem Reporter story tells us what those services are, based on a staff report to be discussed at next Monday's City Council meeting. 

Salemites may see more trash, slower emergency response times and the closure of the West Salem branch of the public library if voters fail to approve a new tax on wages in November.

That’s according to a new city report released Wednesday outlining proposed budget cuts over the next five years if the tax fails.

The Salem City Council will have a work session on Monday, Sept. 18, to hear the proposal and begin the conversation about changes to the budget.

“Obviously we’re not going to make any changes until November 8, when we know what the results of the election are, but we’re planning for that contingency and looking at what the impacts and ramifications would be to that,” City Manager Keith Stahley said.

That conversation starts Monday, when councilors will view a proposed list of specific cuts compiled through recommendations from city department heads. The proposal lays out cuts each year through 2028 to keep the city budget balanced without any additional revenue.

Keep in mind that city officials are barred from campaigning for the payroll tax, being government employees. So the proposed cuts are a backdoor way to urge citizens to vote for the tax. Note that city department heads came up with the recommended cuts, not a citizen committee.

So it isn't surprising that slashing funds for the West Salem and main libraries, along with homeless shelters, are some of the eye-catching cuts that city officials threaten will be made unless the payroll tax is approved by voters.

Unfortunately, since the Mayor and eight city councilors are unpaid and have no staff of their own, they have to rely on complex staff reports such as the one about the city's budget problems when agenda items are discussed at City Council meetings.

This means that the cuts arrived at by the department heads likely will dominate the discussion next Monday, even though other cuts might well make more sense.

My own view is that since the Police and Fire Departments consume most of the general fund budget, and there's good reason to believe that significant cost savings could be made in these departments, that's where most of the cuts should be made.

I hope that Mayor Hoy and the City Council will address the question of the ending fund balance, which jumped out at me when I perused this figure showing how proposed cuts in the staff report would impact the budget.

OK, the goal is to stay above the fund balance policy throughout the five budget years (bottom line in the figure above). But given the city's budget problems and the projected cuts, it seems that the goal should be to keep the fund balance as close to the goal as possible to minimize those cuts.

Instead, city officials are indicating that the fund balance ranges from $7.6 million over the goal in FY2024 to $1.6 million over the goal in FY2028.

Since the proposed cuts to Salem libraries are about $1.9 million over those five years, reducing the fund balance much closer to the policy would eliminate the need for those cuts except, perhaps, in FY2028. But if this was done, the headline of the Salem Reporter story wouldn't be so dramatic.

Which could explain why it wasn't done.

Biden impeachment inquiry shows how crazy Republicans are

Hmmmm. The Constitution says that a president can be impeached for "high crimes and misdemeanors." So you'd think that if the House of Representatives embarks on such a serious step, there would be evidence of a high crime or misdemeanor. 

But a minor detail like evidence isn't about to stop Biden-hating Republicans from initiating an impeachment inquiry, since they can't say what horrible thing Biden is supposed to have done.

So they're going to act like they're in an existentialist novel where the accused is to be convicted without being told what crime they committed. "Biden must have done something," goes their twisted reasoning,  "so we'll investigate him until he admits to the nothingness that is the human condition -- after all, that nothing is something!"

With Trump's two impeachments, it was easy to capture his wrongdoing in a simple declarative sentence.

Trump used a threat of withholding military aid from Ukraine in an attempt to have Ukraine announce an investigation of Biden's son, Hunter. Trump actively encouraged the insurrection against the United States government on January 6, 2021.

But when you hear House Republicans try to describe why they're embarking on a Biden impeachment inquiry, the gibberish that comes out of their mouths sounds something like: where there's smoke, there's fire.... some people have claimed... influence peddling... bribery... lack of facts points to a coverup.

That last bit of gibberish is my favorite. Some members of the House GOP want us to believe that because no facts have emerged that prove President Biden did something seriously wrong, this shows that a coverup is being engaged in by the Biden administration.

Yeah, right. Just as the lack of evidence that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump shows that the Deep State is so powerful and entrenched, it can make citizens believe the fraudulent election was free and fair.

Speaker McCarthy said just a bit over a week ago that the entire House would vote to approve an impeachment inquiry. So the fact that McCarthy ended up doing this on his own shows that he doesn't even have the support of House Republicans to begin the process of impeaching Biden.

I strongly suspect that this impeachment fiasco is going to help Biden and the Democrats in the 2024 election. Americans can tell the difference between a justified presidential impeachment and a bullshit impeachment. 

Oregon's sole Republican member of Congress from a swing district, Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, is thrilled about the impeachment inquiry. Well, we shall see how thrilled she is when her Democratic opponent reminds voters of this after the inquiry finds no evidence of Biden wrongdoing.

Here's some other posts on X, formerly known as Twitter, regarding the impeachment inquiry.

 

Why did it take so long to charge DEA agent in death of bicyclist?

Yes, as the Salem Reporter and Statesman Journal have reported, it's good news that a Marion County grand jury has indicted the DEA (federal Drug Enforcement Agency) agent who killed a Salem woman after running through a stop sign.

Here's an excerpt from the Salem Reporter story by Ardeshir Tabrizian.

An agent of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has been charged with criminally negligent homicide for his role in a collision in March that killed a Salem cyclist, according to court documents.

A Marion County grand jury on Wednesday indicted Samuel T. Landis, 38, a special agent of the DEA, on a single count. The charge comes over five months after the collision that killed Marganne Allen, a cyclist and state official.

The charge alleges that the DEA agent killed Allen with “criminal negligence,” according to the indictment. Criminally negligent homicide is a class B felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

Marion County District Attorney Paige Clarkson on Wednesday requested that a warrant be issued for the agent’s arrest and that he be held in jail on $20,000 bail. The Marion County Jail’s  roster did not list him as being in custody Wednesday morning.

The Statesman Journal story by Whitney Woodworth says this.

The move comes after months of silence from city and county officials regarding Allen's death.

Salem Police passed the investigation on to Keizer Police, citing a potential conflict of interest. Keizer Police said it referred the investigation to the Marion County District Attorney's Office almost four months ago. Prosecutors repeatedly said the decision on charges was still under review.

What's disturbing is how long it took the authorities to charge Allen. After all, KPTV in Portland has reported that it was known almost immediately that Allen had driven through a stop sign after traveling at a high rate of speed in the residential neighborhood.

(That's a screenshot of the KPTV video. You can view the video on the KPTV web site.)

Here's an excerpt from the KPTV story about the indictment of Allen.

Michael Baird, a retired Oregon state trooper who specialized in accident reconstruction, says he is puzzled why the investigation took so long.

“Marganne’s husband told me the night that Salem police came out and notified him that Marganne had been hit by a car, or ran into a car, and died subsequently at Salem hospital, they told him that they had clear evidence that the driver of the vehicle had run a stop sign,” Baird said. “They told him that right from the get-go, and I thought to myself, ‘Why wasn’t he cited if they had evidence of that?’”

For weeks now, FOX 12 been asking Salem police, Keizer police and the Marion County District Attorney’s Office what has been holding up the case. Only Keizer police gave a real response, and said they turned the initial investigation over to prosecutors first in May, and then did two more follow-up investigations since then.

FOX 12 learned a grand jury was looking into the case starting last week, and on Wednesday, they indicted Landis on criminally negligent homicide charges, a Class B felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

Michael Baird says Marganne Allen’s family has been taking life day by day, and that justice will hopefully give them answers to some of the questions they’ve been asking for months.

It sure sounds like the authorities mentioned in the story were slow-walking an indictment (at best) or trying to find a reason to not charge a fellow law enforcement officer (at worst). Either way, this episode doesn't put our local police and District Attorney in a very good light.

I love the idea of a Whitmer-Warnock Dem presidential ticket

Few Americans are excited about a repeat of Joe Biden versus Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. I'm sure not. 

Sure, as a Democrat I hugely prefer Biden over Trump. I think Biden has done a very good job as president, better than expected, absolutely.

But Biden doesn't excite me. He doesn't even enthuse me. His appeal for me and many others is more that he's a competent decent person who isn't Trump.

That worked to elect Biden in 2020. I'm deeply worried that the same game plan won't work in 2024.

And the stakes are too high to risk Biden going down in flames, giving Trump another four years in office when every indication is that Trump would be much more successful at turning the presidency into his authoritarian throne of power, smashing democracy and the rule of law into smithereens. 

That's why I found an article in The Bulwark so compelling. A.B. Stoddard has a terrific idea in To Beat Trump, Democrats Need a Whitmer-Warnock Ticket. 

As soon as I thought about Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock  being the Democrat president and vice-president candidates respectively, I felt an Obama-era surge of enthusiasm well up within me.

Here's an excerpt from the article.

DEMOCRATS HAVE A DEEPER BENCH than many people appreciate. In particular, there are two leaders from swing states who can provide generational change, a fresh start, and a far more serious threat to Trump than Biden can: Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock.

Whitmer, 52, is one of the most experienced, exciting, and winning Democrats in the country. She is as tough a candidate, and leader, as the Democrats can find, and she was vetted as a potential VP pick in 2020. Warnock, who has won pluralities or majorities in five elections in three years, is the cerebral 54-year-old senior pastor at Martin Luther King Jr.’s church. He grew up in public housing, went through a messy divorce—no longer disqualifying in the age of Trump—has small children, and was the top small donor fundraiser from either party in 2022. The dramatic stakes of his election gave him national name recognition: Less than 10 percent of Warnock’s individual donations came from within his state.

Young. Dynamic. Diverse. Competent and experienced. Broadly appealing. Can mobilize core voters. Would deliver two battleground states. Those are seven big boxes already checked. 

There are other benefits: Such a ticket would take away the core self-justification of the No Labels project, would seriously dent West’s vanity run, and would circumvent the ever-expanding Hunter Biden issue. 

Who lost Russia? New Yorker article says U.S. played a part.

This blog post is a partial apology to a couple of progressive friends of mine here in Salem, Oregon who I've argued with via email about the extent to which Putin was justified in viewing NATO's expansion into the former Soviet bloc countries as a provocation that he used as one of his excuses to invade Ukraine.

I vociferously said that the NATO expansion was none of Russia's business, since NATO is all about defending member countries from attack, with Russia being the prime potential attacker. My friends, though, said in strong words that the United States and our allies engaged in a bait-and-switch with Russia, initially promising that NATO expansion to the east wouldn't happen, then making it happen anyway.

I just came across an article by Keith Gessen in the June 12, 2023 issue of The New Yorker on this subject -- How Russia Went from Ally to Adversary: The Cold War ended. The United States declared victory. Then things took a turn. I'd read the article back in June and saved the issue so I could share some excerpts from it, since it provided perspectives on NATO and Russia that I wasn't aware of before.

Those excerpts are below. The whole article is well worth reading. Gessen explains how several recent books about the fall of the Soviet Union paint a complex picture of how American hubris combined with Russian dysfunction to create the mess that is Russia today. I tried to select excerpts that are comprehensible without the context of the full lengthy article.

In early December of 1989, a few weeks after the Berlin Wall fell, Mikhail Gorbachev attended his first summit with President George H. W. Bush. They met off the coast of Malta, aboard the Soviet cruise ship Maxim Gorky. Gorbachev was very much looking forward to the summit, as he looked forward to all his summits; things at home were spiralling out of control, but his international standing was undimmed. He was in the process of ending the decades-long Cold War that had threatened the world with nuclear holocaust. When he appeared in foreign capitals, crowds went wild.

Bush was less eager. His predecessor, Ronald Reagan, had blown a huge hole in the budget by cutting taxes and increasing defense spending; then he had somewhat rashly decided to go along with Gorbachev’s project to rearrange the world system. Bush’s national-security team, which included the realist defense intellectual Brent Scowcroft, had taken a pause to review the nation’s Soviet policy. The big debate within the U.S. government was whether Gorbachev was in earnest; once it was concluded that he was, the debate was about whether he’d survive.

On the summit’s first day, Gorbachev lamented the sad state of his economy and praised Bush’s restraint and thoughtfulness with regard to the revolutionary events in the Eastern Bloc—he did not, as Bush himself put it, jump “up and down on the Berlin Wall.” Bush responded by praising Gorbachev’s boldness and stressing that he had economic problems of his own. Then Gorbachev unveiled what he considered a great surprise. It was a heartfelt statement about his hope for new relations between the two superpowers. “I want to say to you and the United States that the Soviet Union will under no circumstances start a war,” Gorbachev said. “The Soviet Union is no longer prepared to regard the United States as an adversary.”

As the historian Vladislav Zubok explains in his recent book “Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union” (Yale), “This was a fundamental statement, a foundation for all future negotiations.” But, as two members of Gorbachev’s team who were present for the conversations noted, Bush did not react. Perhaps it was because he was recovering from seasickness. Perhaps it was because he was not one for grand statements and elevated rhetoric. Or perhaps it was because to him, as a practical matter, the declaration of peace and partnership was meaningless. As he put it, a couple of months later, to the German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, “We prevailed and they didn’t.” Gorbachev thought he was discussing the creation of a new world, in which the Soviet Union and the United States worked together, two old foes reconciled. Bush thought he was merely negotiating the terms for the Soviets’ surrender.

...In February, 1990, two months after the summit with Bush on the Maxim Gorky, Gorbachev hosted James Baker, the U.S. Secretary of State, in Moscow. This was one of Gorbachev’s last opportunities to get something from the West before Germany reunified. But, as Mary Elise Sarotte relates in “Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate” (Yale), her recent book on the complex history of NATO expansion, he was not up to the task.

Baker posed to Gorbachev a hypothetical question. “Would you prefer to see a unified Germany outside of NATO, independent and with no U.S. forces,” Baker asked, “or would you prefer a unified Germany to be tied to NATO, with assurances that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its present position?” This last part would launch decades of debate. Did it constitute a promise—later, obviously, broken? Or was it just idle talk?

In the event, Gorbachev answered lamely that of course NATO could not expand. Baker’s offer, if that’s what it was, would not be repeated. In fact, as soon as people in the White House got wind of the conversation, they had a fit. Two weeks later, at Camp David, Bush told Kohl what he thought of Soviet demands around German reunification. “The Soviets are not in a position to dictate Germany’s relationship with NATO,” he said. “To hell with that.”

...In almost every former Communist state, the story of reform played out in the same way: collapse, shock therapy, the emergence of criminal entrepreneurs, violence, widespread social disruption, and then, sometimes, a kind of rebuilding. Many of the countries are now doing comparatively well. Poland has a per-capita G.D.P. approaching Portugal’s; the Czech Republic exports its Škoda sedans all over the world; tiny Estonia is a world leader in e-governance. But the gains were distributed unequally, and serious political damage was done.

In no country did the reforms play out more dramatically, and more consequentially, than in Russia. Boris Yeltsin’s first post-Soviet Cabinet was led by a young radical economist named Yegor Gaidar. In a matter of months, he transformed the enormous Russian economy, liberalizing prices, ending tariffs on foreign goods, and launching a voucher program aimed at distributing the ownership of state enterprises among the citizenry.

The result was the pauperization of much of the population and the privatization of the country’s industrial base by a small group of well-connected men, soon to be known as the oligarchs. When the parliament, still called the Supreme Soviet and structured according to the old Soviet constitution, tried to put a brake on the reforms, Yeltsin ordered it disbanded. When it refused to go, Yeltsin ordered that it be shelled. Many of the features that we associate with Putinism—immense inequality, a lack of legal protections for ordinary citizens, and super-Presidential powers—were put in place in the early nineteen-nineties, in the era of “reform.”

When it came to those reforms, did we give the Russians bad advice, or was it good advice that they implemented badly? And, if it was bad advice, did we dole it out maliciously, to destroy their country, or because we didn’t know what we were doing? Many Russians still believe that Western advice was calculated to harm them, but history points at least partly in the other direction: hollowing out the government, privatizing public services, and letting the free market run rampant were policies that we also implemented in our own country.

...Short argues convincingly that Putin came into the office ready to work with the West. He had a tense first meeting with Bill Clinton (“We’re going to miss ol’ Boris,” Clinton remarked to Strobe Talbott, his Deputy Secretary of State), but then a much warmer summit with George W. Bush in which Bush claimed to look into Putin’s eyes and see his soul. A few months later, Putin was the first world leader to call Bush in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks. He actively supported the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and didn’t complain too much, at first, about NATO expansion: most of the Visegrád states had joined in 1999, under Clinton, and the Baltic states were up next.

But from the high-water mark of 2001 the relationship with Putin continuously declined. The Russian leader did not enjoy the Bush Administration’s “Freedom Agenda,” whether it took the form of the full-scale invasion of Iraq or the much milder cheerleading for the “color revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine. (In this case, the U.S. did, symbolically, jump up and down on the Berlin Wall.) Putin was deeply disappointed by Western criticisms of his continuing war against Chechen separatism. To Putin, it looked like the same war on terror that the West was waging, “gloves off”; to the West, it looked like human-rights violations and war crimes. Having supported the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Putin was furious when the U.S. and the U.K. refused to extradite Chechen leaders.

...By the logic of co-transformation, we urged brutal free-market policies on Eastern Europe, and then imposed them on ourselves. Having participated in the creation of the Russian monster, we are now forced to become monsters to battle it, to manufacture and sell more weapons, to cheer the death of Russian soldiers, to spend more and more on defense, both here and in Europe, and to create the atmosphere and conditions of a second Cold War, because we failed to figure out how to secure the peace after the last one.

The development of Russia in the post-Cold War period was not the result of a Western plot or Western actions. Russian officials chose, within a narrow range of options, how to behave, and they could have chosen differently. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, in February, 2022, was no more inevitable or foreordained than the U.S. invasion of Iraq, in 2003. Still, it’s worth asking what other course we might have followed.

Sarotte, in her book on NATO, argues that a slower pace of expansion might have caused less damage to Russian internal politics; in time, with less pressure from an expanding West, Russia might have come around. Ther suggests that, in place of Western triumphalism and complacency, a more serious reckoning with the revolutionary ideals of 1989—a striving for democracy and freedom of the sort that was utopian even by Western standards—could have led to a different result.

In Zubok’s book on the demise of the Soviet Union, the top American officials—Scowcroft, Baker, and Bush—are depicted as thoughtful and sympathetic but also, in the end, keeping their cards, and their cash, too close to their vests. Everyone in the former Soviet bloc looked to America for guidance and inspiration. Never had the prestige of the United States been higher in that part of the world. We had an astonishing amount of moral capital. What did we do with it?

Ultimately, the West chose the West. We extended our writ where we could, and dug in where we had to. This meant, among other things, keeping the structures we already had in place and expanding them, as opposed to inventing new ones. Back in 1990, three months after the “not one inch” meeting, Gorbachev had waxed lyrical to Baker about a new pan-European security arrangement. The American Secretary of State’s response was polite, but firm: “It is an excellent dream, but only a dream.”

Sleazy behavior by police department after cyclist's death

Keep this excellent investigative journalism in mind next time City officials want you to lavish more money on the Salem Police Department, which will occur in the November election via a proposed payroll tax. 


The Salem Reporter has a great update on the thoroughly sleazy behavior by the department following the death of a cyclist on March 28 at the hands of a federal DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) employee who drove through a stop sign and killed Marganne Allen, who was riding her bicycle on High Street.

After the Salem Reporter obtained cell phone call records, email logs and police mobile computer entries from the police department, journalist Ardeshir Tabrizian wrote New details emerge on how Salem police managed DEA crash information.

It's infuriating to read how the police department closely communicated with the employer of the man who killed Allen after driving recklessly, while keeping Salem citizens in the dark about what happened. Here's some excerpts from the story.

Salem police had more frequent contact than previously known with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration while investigating one of its agents for involvement in a fatal bicycle collision, according to recently released records. 

The contacts suggest the two agencies worked to manage what information was shared with the public beginning within hours of the crash. 

That apparent coordination conflicts with the Salem Police Department’s repeated assertions since the March collision that it couldn’t disclose to outsiders information about the investigation. 

And the records show that Salem’s police chief soon after the fatal crash was discounting that anyone would be charged in the March 28 death of cyclist Marganne Allen. That was before he decided to turn over the case to another agency because of the close professional linkages between his department and the DEA. 

Marion County prosecutors said last week that they still haven’t decided whether to charge the DEA agent in the cyclist’s death.

...The day of the collision, Salem citizens were told by police on social media only that the road was closed due to a “collision with a pedestrian.” The investigation shut down a high-traffic intersection in central Salem just before rush hour. 

But records show that Salem police spokeswoman Angela Hendrick, a civilian employee charged with providing the public information about police matters, was almost immediately on the phone with her DEA counterpart.

Public information officers for the two agencies kept up such contacts over four days while citizens were left in the dark, first about the fatality and then about the federal agent’s role in the collision, according to a Salem Reporter investigation.

The handling raises questions about Salem police coordinating with an outside law enforcement agency to steer the flow of public information that appeared to favor the federal agent – a possible suspect – over the victim.

The full extent and purpose of the contacts between Salem police and the DEA remain unclear because neither agency will explain their actions after the collision.

This is disgusting. It sure seems that the Salem Police Department cared much more about standing shoulder to shoulder with the employer of the federal agent, Samuel Landis, than with providing timely and accurate information about the death of Allen.

The Salem Reporter wasn't looking for information about the investigation into Landis' actions on the day he killed Allen. What they sought, and got, was information about communications between the police department and the DEA following the cyclist's death. 

Yet our supposedly open and transparent police department (according to department leadership) refuses to answer questions from the Salem Reporter about contacts with the DEA.

Emails from City Councilor Vanessa Nordyke showed her concern about the police department's failure to communicate with citizens. 

Councilor Vanessa Nordyke on May 16 told [Police Chief] Womack and City Manager Keith Stahley via email that her constituents were “deeply concerned about this case.” She asked that the chief speak about the Allen matter at the next council meeting and be prepared for questions.

...The chief also informed the city manager that he would be out of the state and unable to attend the May 22 council meeting.

Nordyke again wrote to the city manager after that meeting.

“​​I’m disappointed that no one from the police department presented information on this incident last night, despite the fact that I gave advance notice,” she wrote. “I have been careful to tread lightly to respect those in mourning. But when the community repeatedly asks me about a serious incident like this, they (and Councilors) reasonably expect a response. I highly doubt I’m the only member of Council getting questions about this. I have real concerns about transparency in city government, and the city’s response thus far to this incident only concerns me further.”