My Benton County Neighbors Vote for Trump

Back in November of 2015, when the prospect of a Trump Presidency seemed a nightmare fantasy, I watched video of one of his rallies in which, holding his right hand at an awkward angle, he jerked and gyrated in an hideous mockery of a disabled reporter, Serge Kovaleski. I was disgusted, repulsed; the idea that any decent human being, let alone a candidate for President of the United States of America, would do this was unbelievable. I was frankly incredulous.

Kovaleski, a Pulitzer Prize winner, who has arthrogryposis, had the audacity to contradict Trump’s charge that “thousands and thousands” of people cheered in Jersey City as the Twin Towers collapsed. Like so many of Mr. Trump’s incendiary claims about immigrants and minorities, that claim was unequivocally false.

Over the course of his campaign, Trump demonstrated over and over again that he was untrustworthy and intellectually and temperamentally unfit to hold the highest office in the land. He continues to do that to this day.

So much has already been written about why Donald Trump won the election, from the decline of the Middle Class, to the xenophobia created by Trump and his allies. But what I question, and what distresses me most — besides the prospect of a Trump Presidency— is why almost 60% of my neighbors here in Benton County voted for Trump. As I've written previously, "The Mid-Columbia is of and by the government."

We here in Benton County, like the rest of Eastern Washington, survive and thrive as a result of massive government spending on water projects, the agriculture that's possible as a result, bomb making and the cleaning up of the mess made doing it, and the funding of leading edge science by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). The election of Donald Trump is a repudiation of all that government has done for us -- it is like killing the goose that laid those golden eggs, but in this case, we are the geese.

How to explain it? Surely my neighbors cannot be so ignorant of our government's largess and how we benefit from it. I know for a fact that my friends in agriculture realize the benefits of Eastern Washington's vast network of government-funded dams and waterways. I am less sure that they understand the leading edge climate science performed at PNNL -- republicans seem either immune to, or in stark denial of science in general, and especially climate science.

So I have to ask myself, were we so afraid of “others” that we willingly abandoned our values and entrusted our Nation to such an odious demagogue? If so, shame on us.

Tri-City Herald Editorial Talks About the Changing Climate and Water

Our Voice: Water storage projects still vital for Mid-Columbia

June 27, 2014

New water storage in the Yakima Basin is something Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., has been working on for years. In February, Hastings proposed a portion of the funding Congress approves for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation be set aside to pay for new and expanded capacity for water storage in the Yakima Basin.

This week, a bipartisan vote of the U.S. House Appropriations Committee approved a bill including language that encourages the Bureau of Reclamation to join its funding with the state for projects we can't do on our own. The new bill eventually will go to a full House vote.

This week's step is a small one, but it's an important project for the future of Eastern Washington. And Doc won't be there to carry the banner in the future. Our next representative from the 4th Congressional District must take up the charge. So must our two senators.

This year, we narrowly avoided a water shortage. Thanks to a significant late-season snowfall in the Cascades, we have enough water for all stakeholders to get what they need. But without those big storms, we would be feeling the effects of a drought. We have had, and will continue to have, dry years.

Users with junior water rights come out on the losing end of that proposition every time. But nobody really wins. Water is vital for the Yakima Basin for everything from agriculture to fish.

The Bureau of Reclamation is the arm of federal government charged with overseeing the delivery of water. In some ways, the hands of the bureau are tied by history and legislative red tape. Water needs and methods of storage and delivery continue to evolve, yet the bureau is not free to adopt new strategies at will. Even ideas that seem to be obvious improvements need congressional approval. For example, Hastings also introduced legislation that would allow irrigation districts to voluntarily repay federal obligations early. He added the stipulation that the money would be put into a new account to be used only to build new water storage or to expand existing water storage reservoirs. Currently, to repay money early, a water district must get a bill signed into federal law. Five water districts have done that in the past decade.

We are a mecca for crops and agriculture. Without water storage and reclamation projects, we revert to dusty desert. Our climate is changing, and we can no longer count on winter snowfall to see us through the summer. Water storage is important to us now and will be even more so in the future.
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COMMENT
The Washington Department of Ecology addresses declining water resources due to global warming on its web page, where they point out that, "Warmer temperatures mean more precipitation will fall as rain, not snow, and more snow will melt earlier in the spring. Much of Washington’s water supply is stored in snow pack and glaciers that melt into rivers. As this stored snow recedes to higher elevations, less will be available to feed rivers. Too much water runoff (melted snow) through early spring when it's not needed will not help in summer when it is needed." Establishing additional capacity for water storage is a good idea. However, Hastings, like most of his Republican colleagues isn't addressing the root cause of the problem, i.e., climate change. Many conservatives are joining with Democrats to urge Congress to implement a revenue neutral carbon tax, such as that proposed by the Citizens' Climate Lobby, in order to move our economy away from fossil fuels and reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are contributing to global warming (see Hank Paulson's op-ed in the WSJ, for example). Hastings needs to get on board with that proposal.

Feeding at the Federal Trough -- A Brief History of the Mid-Columbia

The Mid-Columbia’s long history of feeding at the Federal trough seems to have evaporated like slack water from the memory of the many local Tea Party activists who grew “Didier for Senate” signs on their lawns like toadstools.

There seems to be a streak of Libertarianism in Eastern Washington that defies logic. We may be a nation of the people, by the people, and for the people, but the Mid-Columbia is of and by the government.

The Grand Coulee Dam was a depression era, deficit-spending, “stimulus” project orchestrated by Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Bureau of Reclamation; a project that infuriated the Republican Party, who considered it socialistic, impractical, and unaffordable. As a result of the Grand Coulee Dam, Mid-Columbia farmers had the water they so desperately needed to irrigate what one critic of the project had termed a “dead land, bitter with alkali,” and so hell-like that “even snakes and lizards shun it" (A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia, Blaine Harden, 1996)

Grand Coulee Dam is a large hydroelectric dam in Central Washington. It is made of 12 million cubic yards of concrete. It is the third largest hydroelectric dam in the world. It holds 9 million acres of water in the dam reservoir, and provides power to the large part of the Columbia Basin and the Northwest region.

The Columbia River watershed is today a vast network of dams and canals that provide government-subsidized irrigation, electricity, transportation, and flood control. The Columbia and Snake rivers in particular have been “engineered” to support commerce of one form or another. Their contribution to the Mid-Columbia economy is incalculable (to get some idea, check the Washington Department of Ecology's web site). Clint Didier himself acknowledged that, "without water from the Grand Coulee, we would be nothing more than a desert" (Seattle Times, 5/18/2010).*

Canals carry water from the Columbia River to farmers' fields

Here in the Tri-Cities there is another major economic outgrowth of the Grand Coulee Dam and its power generation -- Hanford, a critical part of the Manhattan Project. Hanford was located here in large part because of the “free” electricity available from Grand Coulee’s spinning turbines, and also because of the massive amount of water available in the Columbia; water essential for cooling Hanford’s plutonium plants.

The 560 square mile Hanford Nuclear Reservation on the Columbia River

The workforce created to build, operate, and maintain Hanford made it in 1943, the fourth largest city in the state of Washington. The sprawling complex of Army barracks, trailers, and tents, plagued by dust-laden “termination winds,” ultimately grew into the Tri-Cities.

Considered the most contaminated site in the U.S., Hanford has cost the American taxpayer in excess of 1 billion dollars per year to cleanup.

Another outgrowth of Hanford was the establishment of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), one of ten DOE national laboratories, and the single largest employer in the Tri-Cities. It brings to the community a workforce of unparalleled scientific and technological capability and potential, and has developed some of the most advanced research facilities in the world – facilities that attract scientists from around the world and place the Tri-Cities squarely on the high tech map.

Our community exists in its present state only because of the hundreds of billions of dollars the government has spent on dams, on Hanford, and in support of PNNL.

A recent Tri-City Herald article pointed out that while home sales around the nation declined during this economic downturn, the Tri-Cities registered an increase of 5.5% in the median resale price of homes, together with a 33% increase in home sales, going on to say that we are perhaps the only community in the state to see significant growth, thanks largely to federal stimulus money ($1.3 billion of which went towards Hanford cleanup).

Despite this long history of government largess flowing like the great Columbia itself to Eastern Washington, our Tea Party neighbors seem to have a mixed message for the federal government; keep the money flowing, cut our taxes, and leave us the hell alone.

But some day the flow of government money to Hanford will slow, just as the roar of white water over Kettle Falls did when that great, gray behemoth was set astraddle the canyons of the Grand Coulee. Will we be ready for that, will we be speaking with one voice, or will we still be talking out of both sides of our mouths? Will we build on the capabilities that government money has helped create, or will termination winds blow once again?

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*Of course, the other result of the Grand Coulee Dam, built without fish ladders, was to cutoff salmon runs, deprive the Colville Indians of their land, their means of livelihood, their culture, and their dignity.