A4 SUNDAY, JUNE 4, 2017
OPINION
THE NEWS-ITEM, SHAMOKIN, PA
C ommentary
Efforts to address addiction must continue
There is little agreement in Washington, D.C., these days, but lawmakers continue to come together on one very important topic: opioid abuse. As announced Friday by U.S. Rep. Lou Barletta (R-11), local communities and health care providers can begin applying for grants to help prevent opioid overdose deaths and provide treatment for opioid addiction. The grants were recently authorized by the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act (CARA), which was passed last year with bipartisan support. Some $70 million in funding is available through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) for grants for medication-assisted treatment and prescription drugs opioid addiction; to train and provide resources for first responders and members of other key community sectors on carrying and administering an FDA-approved product for emergency treatment of known or suspected opioid overdose; and for improving access to overdose treatment. Barletta helped to negotiate CARA as a member of the joint House and Senate conference committee tasked with drafting comprehensive legislation addressing the opioid epidemic. He knows that, while there are those opposed to spending taxpayer money on battling drug addiction, the epidemic can’t be ignored as a problem for which the addict alone is responsible. State government here in Pennsylvania has also been aggressive in trying to address the issue, and at the Northumberland County level, curriculum has been introduced to help battle the problem in schools. While all this takes place in the halls of government, people continue to overdose and die from heroin and opioids. There is a sense of urgency, as addiction impacts all walks of life and continues to have an impact in areas we may not realize — from Children and Youth Services to the Area Agency on Aging, which is coping with issues such as grandchildren stealing meds from their grandparents. Meanwhile, the users don’t trust anyone — including those who could help them — and the cycle continues. But we can’t be deterred by the challenge or misguided by the thought that addicts have to fix their own problem. We would all do well to remember this short phrase offered at a meeting this past week of Northumberland County’s opioid addiction coalition, which is forming out of the larger Project Bald Eagle: Opioid addiction is “a disease, not a disgrace.”
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Overreaction to accord pullout BY RAMESH PONNURU BLOOMBERG
Reactions to President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris accord on climate change are — forgive me — overheated. The ACLU is calling it an “assault on communities of color,” for some reason, and environmental activist Tom Steyer says it’s a “traitorous act of war against the American people.” For his part, Trump says that staying in the agreement would have assured us a future of “lost jobs, lower wages, shuttered factories and vastly diminished economic production.” Yet Trump and his critics alike know that very little in the accord is binding on the parties to it. As a result, withdrawing from it can’t have major consequences by itself. Listen carefully to the agreement’s supporters, and their real argument becomes clear: For them, staying in it increases the likelihood that the world’s governments will take future steps to avert what they believe will
be a climate catastrophe. The best argument for leaving, meanwhile, is that these steps would be costly overreactions to that threat — and reducing such conPONNURU sequences is a good thing. The risk that climate change will have catastrophic effects justifies investing to predict, mitigate and adapt to those effects. It doesn’t justify restrictions on the use of energy. The argument that leaving the Paris agreement will jeopardize America’s global leadership also seems overblown. The decision dismays many people around the world, to be sure, just as other American decisions have dismayed many of the same people over the years. We are told that other governments will no longer trust America to keep its commitments. But it would not be a bad thing for other countries to learn that a president’s say-so can’t always bind future
presidents. It’s a mistake, too, to see Trump’s decision as a turn toward isolationism. It’s true that the step cheers those in his coalition who want the U.S. to weaken its alliances and enact tariffs. But it also has the support of conservatives and Republicans who oppose those policies. That breadth of support helps explain why Trump made this move while so far refraining from tearing up NAFTA and the like. Trump has even talked, albeit very vaguely and implausibly, about renegotiating the Paris agreement. It would be better to take a different path altogether. But we are free to go in any number of directions, since we are essentially in the same place we were when we were in the agreement. (Ponnuru is a Bloomberg View columnist. He is a senior editor of National Review and the author of “The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life.”)
$20 billion for Trump crony BY ROBERT P. BOMBOY
gaged American homes, On last week’s billion-dolto fighting lar overseas junket, Presiworker dent Trump squeezed out a efforts for really rotten political plum decent livelifor one of his cronies. hoods. During the president’s Its move to BOMBOY visit in-country, his longbuy up some time crony Stephen of our cities’ and states’ Schwarzman picked up a most important infrastruc$20 billion check from Sau- ture assets (highways, tundi Arabia to take control of nels and bridges) at the our tunnels, bridges, highexpense of our communiways and drinking-water ties is no surprise. resources. Schwarzman, When our infrastructure chief executive of a multiis bought up this way, cities billion-dollar Wall Street and states lose out on the tiger called the Blackstone income that would tradiGroup, also has Trump’s tionally go toward funding ear as chairman of his Stra- public services, like low-integic and Policy Forum, come housing and educawhere Big Business gets to tion. Instead, taxpayers are put in its two cents — and a forced to subsidize billionlot more. aires and corporations who Schwarzman is a backare raking in the dough. door neighbor of Trump’s Traditionally, cities and Mar-a-Lago plantation in states have built highways, sunny Florida, and the two tunnels, and bridges by sellhave been doing more there ing municipal bonds and than kicking the golf ball using earnings from the around on Trump’s weekbonds for public projects. ends away from the White Sales of these municipal House. bonds amount to more than Blackstone has a long his- $3.7 trillion. tory of taking advantage of This Blackstone deal working families — from could suck up those earnprofiting off the 2008 U.S. ings and hit taxpayers with housing crash that reposhigh tolls and user fees. sessed nine million mort-
“Why would we take some of the resources we have, hand them away to Wall Street, and give them control over the assets to do with as they want for 20, or 30, or 40 or 50 years?” asks Donald Cohen of the anti-privatization group In the Public Interest. It’s a good question. The states and cities whose infrastructure will be involved in Saudi-Blackstone deals will need to look carefully for any loopholes. In Virginia, a project to expand the Hampton Roads car and truck tunnel is costing more than expected because of a no-competition clause negotiated by a Swedish construction company and an Australian financier. If toll revenues are lower than contracted, the state might be required to make up the difference over the 58-year life of the contract. In 2012, Bayonne, New Jersey, cut one of these deals with a private investment company to manage Bayonne’s water system. Bayonne got immediate money to update its water system, but bills to water customers went up 28 per-
cent so the investment company could make its profit. The bottom line is that Saudi Arabia’s $20 billion check will get funneled through an arm-in-arm Trump adviser in a grab for state and local infrastructure, with the expectation of billions of dollars in profits off the roads, bridges, and transit systems we have to use every day. I read a lot of history, and deals like this — which are a foretaste of how President Trump wants to manage his trillion-dollar American infrastructure program — remind me of the Teapot Dome Scandal, almost a century ago, when private companies had the squeeze, the influence, to use public assets at bargain-basement prices. Until Watergate came along, Teapot Dome — which had nothing to do with a teapot — was the greatest and most sensational scandal in the history of American politics. Robert Bomboy is an alumnus of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, an author, teacher and former Ford Foundation Fellow at the University of Chicago and in Washington, D.C.)
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Kulpmont Councilman Goretski, it’s time to resign your position To the editor: Councilman Nick Goretski last attended a public meeting Sept. 27. From June 2016 through the end of May there have been a total of 17 meetings, and Mr. Goretski has missed 13. Mr. Goretski’s percentage attendance record during that period is 24 percent, failing to show up for 76
percent of the meetings. During Mr. Goretski’s time on council he has been chairperson of the ordinance and code committees, perhaps the two most important committees. There is no evidence of any work done on either committee. Simply showing up is a very import-
ant part of any job. No need to get into a long discussion about representation on council. The attendance facts speak for themselves. Mr. Goretski — time to resign. Walt Lutz Kulpmont Councilman