Good Event: Grass roots one-on-one politics.

What "moves the needle" in an election campaign? 

Do meet-and-greet fundraisers? Does knocking on doors? Do TV and social media ads? Do lawn signs? 

You never know, so you try them all.

Denise Krause met and talked with about 55 people Sunday afternoon.

Campaign fundraisers for state and local campaigns have a pattern. The candidate lines up a host and venue. The campaign and host invite people. The event last about two hours, starting with mingling for the first 30 to 40 minutes. The candidate makes the rounds. Then someone, usually the host, goes to the microphone and welcomes people. The host introduces someone well known to the audience who shares positive thoughts about the candidate for a couple of minutes. The candidate speaks and answers questions for about 40 minutes. Then someone other than the candidate makes a wrap-up speech urging people to donate money.

That is pretty much it. 

Sometimes the well-known person speaks briefly after the main-event candidate's speech, instead of before. That is what happened yesterday. A popular former Democratic county commissioner, David Gilmour, M.D., played that role.

On Sunday a guest, David Lane, stood up and shouted out an impromptu appeal to fellow guests to donate more than they had planned.

I did the wrap-up appeal for donations.

My wife later told me I went on too long. I reiterated a point I have made multiple times in this blog. Krause's opponent makes no mention of being a Republican. He presents himself as "working across the aisle" and opposing "rubber stamp" politics. That is smart messaging, but it belies the very partisan behavior of the organization he led, the Medford Chamber of Commerce and its PAC. It also belies the extraordinary amount of partisan Republican money he is receiving, which he is using to buy commercials saying he is neither partisan nor Republican. I watched CNN for 10 minutes this morning while making coffee. Hicks had two 30-second ads during those 10 minutes. 

I made the point that Trump has nationalized state politics. He has attacked Oregon's vote-by-mail system and his Big Beautiful Bill cuts the Affordable Care Act's support for insurance premiums. This is causing a cascade of cancelled insurance, cuts to the Oregon Health Plan, and distress and closure of Oregon's rural hospitals because the care they provide is billed but uncollectable. Republicans could publicly object to this, but don't. That means, even if they pretend otherwise, they are partisan Republicans.

I urged people to donate money, but Krause need not match Hicks' spending. Even casual followers of politics notice all the ads: Wow! The message is independence but the meta-message is a pawn in a party of billionaires. The public's unease with data centers and financial and industrial elites shows the danger in that meta-message. His being a former Chamber of Commerce executive further locks in that association: the candidate of very very big money. My own sense is that this is a structural disadvantage for Hicks, and more money doesn't cure it. Meanwhile, Krause has a structural advantage: a single mother, a long career in health policy, and scrappy survivor of both cancer and an insurance company that tried to deny coverage to her and women like her. 

Some voters will prefer Goliath in any contest. He represents powerful people and some voters trust that. My sense is that more people will prefer David here, especially this year. All David needs is a few stones to make her point, and that is what this fundraiser was about.

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Easy Sunday; Trump: "Cheat like hell."

President Donald Trump: 

     “Please raise your right hand. I pledge, to the greatest president in the history of the United States, that loves us so much he can’t even breathe, that I will go out with my family, my friends, I’ll do it any way, I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m gonna try and cheat like hell like they do."

No matter how low Trump goes, there is always something lower.  

Republican officeholders and candidates are silent. They are establishing new norms of what is acceptable behavior for a Republican. 

i don't welcome a messy 2026 midterm election, but I can see how easy it is to create one. In a state like Oregon, with mail ballots, I expect to see something like this from people inspired by Trump:

Partisans will watch for when ballots are mailed and go to homes that had lawn signs for Democratic candidates. They will follow the mail delivery truck open the target mailbox, and steal the ballot. They will fill it out, voting Republican, and send it in. When the Democrat complains to the county clerk that they didn't get a ballot, the clerk will see they had already submitted a vote, and that the signatures don't match. That ballot won't be counted. The Democrat will be offered a new ballot and get to vote, and that one will count.

If the Democratic vote is counted, what's the point? The chaos and news of election fraud is the point. The county clerk will warn of mailbox ballot thefts, and there will be police investigations. It will make local news. GOP party officials can blame Democrats, and call it a false flag operation. The big takeaway for the public would be that elections are insecure and there is massive fraud. The real winner in a now "questionable" election is the party that declares victory, i.e.,Trump's party, and his party controls the postal inspectors, the FBI, and the White House. The GOP will insist that it won, and stick to the story. 

No need to worry about a federal prosecution, even if one's fingerprints are on the stolen ballot and saliva on the stamp. Federal prosecutors won't be interested in this crime. Moreover, in the rare chance of prosecution,you will be protected by a blanket pardon, just like the January 6 rioters. Whatever you did, you did for a noble purpose, and Trump protects his foot-soldiers.

Here is how to do it  on a wholesale level, in Oregon or any state with clusters of Democrats in certain areas, most likely in the state's most urban area.

Create disturbances in that area on or before election day. Find rough guys to march, block traffic, and generally disturb the peace. Make pretext accusations about suitcases of ballots based on photographs of the trunks of cars or Amazon delivery vehicles. How can anyone prove there weren't suitcases of ballots in that vehicle? Flood the zone with accusations. The goal is to create suspicion that votes in Portland's Multnomah County, Detroit's Wayne County, Atlanta's Fulton County, and Phoenix's Maricopa County were "questionable" and therefore should be uncounted.

One fact is on Trump's side: The vote in those counties will almost certainly be more Democratic than it will be in rural parts of the state. Aha!! That Democratic imbalance is proof of vote tampering. Accuse. The fact of accusations make the votes "questionable." 

Will any of this happen? I expect it. After all, it did happen.

Republican officeholders and voters ratified this strategy by rejecting the candidacies of Mike Pence, Chris Christie, and Nikki Haley who called it out. They instead chose Trump. Trump tried this approach in 2020, but was confounded by Republican officeholders in key places who found the idea new and transgressive. Things are different now. Those people are gone. A Republican-majority Senate confirmed election deniers into the positions that confounded Trump in 2020. Voters chose election deniers in state and local offices. Trump changed the norms, telling Republicans to cheat, saying it aloud, in public, on camera. Cheat like hell. 

Until a Republican candidate or officeholder openly and publicly condemns Trump for this corruption -- and very few dare do this, and those who do become pariahs -- I consider them to be a quiet consenter to Trump, a collaborator. They are protecting their careers in GOP politics rather than fulfilling their oaths of office. 

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We are picking a fight with Canada

Do any of my readers dislike Canada?

Does anyone think Canada was a bad neighbor, a threat, or that it was taking advantage of us?

Does anyone feel a happy twinge of national pride when we see our president troll, insult, and start a trade war with Canada?

I don't.

The Trump administration is destroying over a century of good relations with a neighbor, ally, and trading partner, and for what? So that the U.S. would look bigger on a map? So that we could absorb Canada and then ourselves have to deal with the Canadian issues such as Quebec's French culture? So we could bring our own success and expertise to relations with their indigenous people? 

Trump posted this image on Truth Social. Take that, Mark Carney!

I don't get it. Bullying Canada is bad economics, bad foreign policy, bad trade policy, and bad politically for Trump. This is the baggage Republican candidates carry as the price of not having the courage openly to criticize their party leader. If they reject the baggage, then object, loud and clear. Silence is consent. Silence says this is normal and OK.

My Canadian college classmate, Sandford Borins, is professor of Public Management Emeritus at the University of Toronto. Originally an economist, he began to study and teach political narrative. His comment on relations with the U.S. was published at http://sanfordborins.com and republished at his own Substack: https://substack.com/@sandfordborins

Guest Post by Sandford Borins

Since the Government of Canada rejected a trade agreement with the Trump administration on August 22, Trump has “renamed” Lake Ontario and released numerous memes disparaging Canada and Canadians (Trump bodychecking “Governor Carney” to the ice) and his cabinet secretaries have followed his lead (Bessent calling Canada a “little yippy dog,” Hegseth ridiculing a Canadian Armed Forces recruit). One wonders if the cabinet secretaries’ response is coordinated in some way, such as with a memo from the Chief of Staff, or if they know that an essential job requirement is to mimic Trump’s puerile verbal attacks.

Not Just Dissing

Prime Minister Carney has referred to this as “doing memes” and “throwing shade.” Similar terms, originating from contemporary culture, would be trolling, dissing, or talking trash. But all these terms connote reciprocal actions. People diss, troll, or talk trash to one another. This round is almost entirely one-sided, with few if any Canadian public figures or even ordinary citizens responding to Trump and his acolytes in kind.

Something more substantial is going on, and I think it is important to call it by its name. Using lies, ridicule, and threats, Trump has launched a campaign of psychological warfare against Canada, so that he can live rent-free in Canadians’ heads, distracting and demoralizing us. It has similarities to psychological warfare used by both sides during World War II and during the Cold War (Radio Free Europe, Radio Moscow). The big difference is that in the past psychological warfare relied on official radio stations. Now it can readily be waged through the universally accessible affordances of social media.

Trump’s campaign against Canada might also be intended to build support for the Republican Party in the mid-term elections by defining another enemy and encouraging Americans to unite behind his party to fight us. My concern here is not whether such a campaign is plausible or effective. Given the history of solidarity in war and cooperation in peace between the two countries, such a campaign would strain credulity. It will be for American pundits and pollsters to probe its effectiveness in the weeks leading up to the midterms.

The psychological warfare is intended to capture attention, which it does very effectively because Canadian media report every attack and the Canadian public then discusses the attacks at length. The attacks contain two contradictory messages, the first that Canadian individuals and firms are dishonest, taking advantage of the US, and the second that Canada and Canadians are weak. The first is easier to shake off. Canadians follow the law when they do business with the US. There is no dishonesty. The message of weakness is more problematic, because of the US’s advantage of scale as an economy and a population that are an order of magnitude larger.

Fall in Line – Or Else

The message of weakness has several dimensions. The Trump administration is saying that it can inflict more economic damage on Canada than Canada can inflict on the US. The renaming of Lake Ontario is intended to convey the message that the US can redefine our geographic reality. The threat is that the US can make Canada, in Trump’s words, “fall in line” in terms of its culture and its trade, strategic and military alliances with the rest of the world – in effect to make Canada a vassal state.

The timing of these intensified verbal attacks may be a response not only to the impasse in negotiations but to the Alberta separation referendum. Perhaps Albertans who feel that Canada is weak will vote for separation, not necessarily because they believe Alberta on its own would be any stronger, but rather because they see Alberta separating from Canada as the first step towards its annexation by the US.

The timing is also ironic because the commemoration of the 25th anniversary of 9/11 is also a commemoration of everyday, but extraordinary, acts of Canadian solidarity with the US. Perhaps Trump and his lackeys are hoping that their verbal attacks will obscure recognition of our shared history.

Fighting Back

Prime Minister Carney has said that Canada will not negotiate with the US until Trump and his followers cease their attacks. In the next few days before the Trump administration’s counter-counter-tariffs take effect, we will see if he maintains his resolve.

How should the Canadian public respond? First, we should recognize that while Trump has been waging psychological warfare against Canada almost since the day he was elected in 2024, the current trade impasse has led to a major intensification. It is important to call this what it is. We might wish the media would not keep reporting the latest anti-Canada memes, but that is impossible. Just as Prime Minister Carney’s Davos speech was an important act of truth-telling about the Trump administration’s hegemonism, it would be equally important if he or someone else in the government would engage in truth-telling about Trump’s psychological warfare. Then we can discuss what patterns of thought and action can help evict Trump and his administration from our heads.

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A meet-and-greet event for Denise Krause on Sunday

My wife and I are holding an event on Sunday afternoon for Denise Krause, candidate for state Senate.

People will arrive. I don't know how many -- I am guessing 50 -- but I am OK with the uncertainty. More is better.

People don't RSVP to political events anymore. That's OK, too. 

I have made no secret of my hope that a good, reasonable Democrat holds onto the Oregon state Senate seat being vacated by Jeff Golden.  

Denise Krause won a contested primary, and in doing so,  made some Democrats unhappy with ads that said that politicians in Salem had not solved problems. That seemed to some Democrats like criticizing her own team, since Democrats currently have a majority in state offices and the Oregon legislature. I don't consider her criticism disloyal to fellow Democrats. Democrats in Salem could use some shaking up, and the best way to do it is by a Democrat who wins in a downstate district despite an avalanche of Republican advertising. That gives her credibility.

Krause wants to be a change agent in Salem, and that requires calling out things that need fixing in a Democrat-majority state. It means that the centers of Democratic money and orthodox policy have had to endure her criticism. For example, I have heard her say it was a mistake a decade ago for Oregon to cut the regional colleges like Southern Oregon University out of a state system of higher education. SOU did not screw up. It was set up to fail, and other regional colleges are next in line. This steps on toes of those who thought that was a great idea, including supporters of Oregon's flagship universities. 

I don't know her Republican opponent, Brad Hicks, except by observation. I don't doubt that he is a "nice person" and is earnest in his desire to "do a good job" as he sees it. But once again the state's Republican juggernaut is pouring a million dollars into a campaign to add to the Republican team. Republican candidates can pretend independence, but dare not exercise it. It is Trump's party on issues that interact with the national government, and dozens of issues do, including  Medicaid funding, election districting and certification, mail balloting, reproductive rights, immigration enforcement, forest management, and many more.

As Trump said this week: "I'm asking you to pretend I am on the ballot." 

I feel sorry for Republican candidates because I understand their dilemma. If Trump cares about the issue, Republican officeholders need to be Trump-compliant or else they get squashed like Mike Pence. Or like Reps. Thomas Massie and Adam Kinzinger; or Senators John Cornyn, Thom Tillis, and Jeff Flake; or the Indiana state senators who tried to buck Trump on his gerrymander demand. It is why Republicans who could stop the pay-to-play corruption instead are silent as Trump collects some $2 billion in payments in tribute by foreign countries and American businesses. It is why my congressman, Republican Cliff Bentz, did not dare say aloud at a Rotary meeting a single thing he disagreed with Trump about. He was being cowardly, yes, but he was exercising survival instinct. 

Denise Krause's invitation says "RSVP optional, but helpful." That is a polite way to negotiate the consistent pattern in local political events that people are unreliable about RSVPs. I don't mind not having an advanced count of people. I urged Denise to invite as many people as possible, and I am doing so as well, right now. Why not? I have a microphone and audio system; seating and good food for 50 or 60; and standing room and a variety of beverages for hundreds.   

She has invited people to ask hard questions. I hope they do. Tough questions are good preparation for the million dollars worth of ads that Republicans are spending to sink her campaign. She will stay until all the questions get answered.

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Artificial intelligence: a warning.

Artificial intelligence is good for some things.

It is dangerous for others. Watch out.

A.I. is a persuasive bullshitter.

First off, let me acknowledge that A.I. can do miraculous things. I asked it to do a plausible third verse to Robert Louis Stevenson's poem, "Requiem," and it did, instantly, and the new verse was very credible as a continuation of the poem. It "got" the poem. It understood the subject, the mood, the "meaning," in the deepest sense.

I asked A.I. to do the lyrics and music in the style of Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction" or Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run" on the subject of my congressman Cliff Bentz. It took seconds. It was good. It absolutely "got" the genre.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AETAGivArxw

In preparing my amicus curiae brief to the Supreme Court on tariffs, I asked an A.I. program -- Claude -- to put into format ready for submission some research I had done about the First Congress's Tariff Act of 1789. I was fascinated at the detail of the law. It specified hundreds of tariffs on matters as small as swine bristles, and I used that detail to make the argument that Congress, not the president, was better suited to write detailed tariffs. Claude understood my instructions and instantly formatted my introductory paragraphs, making them ready to include in the brief. It understood all the technicalities and special rules. My attorney checked its work. It passed the strict review and conditions for Supreme Court briefs.

But this post is a warning. Here is why: The Oregon Department of Revenue is questioning a complicated point on depreciating money I spent on grape plants in 2023. I told Claude the problem, and asked it to analyze the situation. It came back in about 90 seconds with an analysis, telling me my position was exactly right. It raised some issues, then explained why they would be resolved in my favor.

I was thrilled. I shared the good news with an attorney who has deep experience with AI. He is an early adopter who uses AI in his legal briefs. He gave me a warning and a suggestion. "Artificial intelligence programs are designed to give people what they think will satisfy you," he said. "Tell Claude that you ran its good news past your attorney and he thinks your opinion is wrong and misses the important issues. See what you get back."

I did just that. Claude thought for 90 seconds and reported back that my attorney and I were astute to question its earlier report, and in fact there were several outstanding issues that could completely reverse its prior opinion. It wrote that until certain facts are clarified, which it had not considered before, no real opinion can be made one way or the other. Moreover, it warned that if certain elections and boxes weren't marked in the original return in an unintuitive and unlikely way, then the Department of Revenue's position is correct and I owe taxes, penalties, and interest. 

Oh.

This post is not about the merits of my case, although, yes, we clicked the right box. This post is about the danger of using AI for anything of consequence. The agreeability of AI makes it easy and fun to use -- so affirming! -- but that is why it is dangerous. It seems credible because it confidently tells you plausible information you may be pleased to hear.

What is my lesson from this?

-- Trust, but verify.
-- Check with a human with knowledge and experience.
-- Humans aren't obsolete.
-- And maybe the most important one: Character matters. A.I. is a people pleaser, not a truth teller. It is a bullshitter. It confidently reports information without knowing or revealing its limitations.

An employee who confidently assures us that some task has been done and checked -- maybe some document filed on deadline or an outside door secured and latched -- we do not want to know that, probabilistically, based on a review of thousands of past filings or the incidents of doors being secured and latched, information scraped from billions of lines of text and data held in the cloud, that, yes, those tasks were done. We need to know the truth: was the document filed on deadline and is the door locked and secured. An employee who bullshits us is dangerous.

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Shop your politics

Headline:

MapQuest Sees 1.5 Million Downloads After Defying Trump's 'Lake America'

I downloaded MapQuest to my phone. 

MapQuest Icon

Google and Apple changed the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America on their maps. MapQuest did not. 

I wanted to send a signal to the marketplace that I liked what MapQuest did.

I try to do business with people and brands that represent my values and politics. I own Lilly stock because I thought the company might do well, and I liked their GLP-1 product, Ro. I buy Bounty rather than Brawny paper towels because the Koch Brothers own the Brawny brand. I try not to shop at Home Depot because Home Depot's owner is a big Republican donor. I liked Amazon and Jeff Bezos better when he was the nonpolitical owner of The Washington Post, leaving it alone and letting democracy live in the light, rather than cowering in fear of Trump. 

Last year I bought a Chevrolet Blazer electric vehicle rather than a Tesla. Damned if I was going to send Elon Musk an extra nickel. I want to feel good about my car, and I wouldn't feel good about a Tesla. I would feel like I sold out, that I tolerated Musk's White-supremacy racism, and cavalier chainsaw cuts to government. 

Politically-influenced shopping is complicated by crosscurrents. I bought the Blazer from a local dealership, TC Chevy, owned, by a Republican, Alan DeBoer. I like the fact that DeBoer has been civic-minded and philanthropic locally, without being a showoff about it. He had been a Republican state Senator, in the Oregon 3rd district Senate seat I write about frequently. Public campaign reports show that he donates to Republican candidates in amounts befitting his business success, but he isn't Trumpy or an election denier, and I consider that a positive. I perceive his political motivation to be mostly frustration with Democratic groupthink in Salem. He isn't wrong. I have urged the Democratic candidate for state Senate, Denise Krause -- the Democratic alternative to Republican Brad Hicks, who I have described in posts to being tethered to Trump -- to do her own untethering from the Portland-centric Democratic consensus.

I am not embarrassed to be driving a Chevy with a license plate holder that says TC Chevy.

I buy Hoka athletic shoes now, and not Nikes. The Hokas are more comfortable, with a slightly wider toe box and softer cushion than the soft Pegasus variety of Nikes I formerly bought. I feel bad abandoning the Oregon-headquartered Nike, but I am conflicted. Phil Knight gave $2 billion to Oregon's Health Sciences University. That gets him some latitude. He has given millions of dollars this cycle to elect Republicans to state offices, and that is a negative. I am also conflicted because I own Nike stock. I bought the stock before Knight became locally famous for big contributions to Republicans. Maybe Republicans with narrow feet will buy Nike's shoes. I hope so.

I like shopping at Costco. They pay their employees well and they treat their vendors fairly. They demanded that Trump return the tariff money that courts determined was charged illegally. Good. I have an indirect personal interest in Costco. Valley View Vineyards makes and sells some excellent premium wines, and I hope they buy grapes from me that end up in their $25, $35, and $50 bottles of wine. They also sell award-winning inexpensive wine of blended varieties, Rogue Red. Costco carries it. The owners of Valley View tell me that Costco is very fair to deal with. 

The surge in MapQuest downloads shows that I am not alone in doing politics-influenced shopping. The discussion around artificial intelligence reveals the value of location-tracking data. That data gets sold to advertisers. I am no longer offended by my lack of privacy. I expect it. I assume that my car, my phone, and every app I have ever added to my phone tracks me. Google knows what is in my emails. My browsers track what I type. AI reads my blog, and reports as fact that pumice soils create excellent wines based on the micronutrients available to the capillary roots of grape plants in the extremely fine-grained pumice. I trained AI.

We are constantly sending signals into the great collection of available data in the mysterious cloud. The cloud is omnipresent and is striving to be omniscient. It knows what we buy and consider buying. There is no hiding. All we can be is a tiny bit intentional. 

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Guest Post: Labor Day, 2026

Labor Day picnics, with political speeches, used to be a thing.

Tam Moore remembers them. They reflected the political energy of workers advocating for workers. Thank unions for the eight-hour workday, the two-day weekend, and worker safety rules.

I have a tiny memory of those Labor Day picnics myself.

My memory is of one of the Labor Day gatherings at TouVelle State Park, alongside the Rogue River about a mile and a half upriver from the family farm. My parents attended. U.S. Senator Wayne Morse spoke.The date was 1953 or 1954. I was either three or four years old. There was some kind of drawing for a raffle prize. Senator Morse, at the microphone, called for someone to pull the ticket out of the hat. He pointed to me. I pulled the ticket. I still remember the event and it changed me in one, tiny way I remember every month when I get a haircut.

I stood right next to him. I saw his face and his huge, bushy eyebrows. They looked like spiders to me, with huge black legs sticking out of his face. Scary! That is what I remember.

When I get haircuts today I chat with the stylist. I ask if they have ever heard of Senator Wayne Morse. They are young. The 1950s, '60s, and '70's are ancient history to them. None have heard of him, a disappointment since he was such a hero to me during the Vietnam era. I tell the stylist to trim my eyebrows, and I tell the story of scary old men with bushy eyebrows. 

Tam Moore is a veteran TV and print journalist, now in his tenth decade of life, looking good and still engaged with this community in multiple ways.

Tam Moore, TV journalist

Tam Moore at 90

Guest Post by Tam Moore

Labor Day 2026

I just got up from the breakfast table at my senior-living facility after a most enjoyable series of conversations remembering what Labor Day used to be. My recollections, both as a journalist and for a brief four-year term as a local government politician, are far different from those of my tablemates.

Labor Day, to me, was a big thing.

Not just a celebration of the working man and woman, or recognition of great historical events in U.S. history of organized labor –- Formation of a women worker’s association in 1843 at a Lowell, Mass. textile factory; the 1871 organizing of workers by Mary Harris “Mother” Jones after her dress shop was destroyed by the Chicago Fire; cigar-maker Samuel Gompers’ 1886 formation of skilled-workers unions as the American Federation of Labor. See AFL-CIO timeline.

My first job out of college in 1956 was in Eureka, California, as good a labor town as one could find, with organized longshoremen, millworkers, operating engineers, electrical and communication workers, carpenters and laborers. They celebrated with speeches and a big picnic in Sequoia Park. I, a starting broadcast news reporter, went along for the fun because political candidates for local and statewide California offices came to Sequoia Park every two years kicking off their campaigns for the November general election.

When I returned to broadcasting in 1976 after overseas duty with the U.S. Army, home became Medford, Oregon. The Central Labor Council held a huge picnic at TouVelle State Park every Labor Day.

Pencil, camera and microphone in hand, I was there listening to candidates for local and statewide Oregon offices.

When I moved briefly into broadcast management, part of my job dealt with unionized electrical workers. I respected the way labor leadership looked out not only for member wages but for working conditions, and shared management’s concern for worker safety.

During my brief four years as a Jackson County Commissioner, public employee labor unions were on the rise – and they cared about their members. One of my most significant ex-officio tasks during that time (1975-1979) was serving on the governing board of the Western Oregon Health Systems Agency (HSA). It was tasked with allocating on a regional basis the capital investment of local and federal grant money for the first magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT) machines. That process was stymied for about a year until the Bay Area Hospital District in Coos Bay named one of its directors to the HSA board. He was also the business agent for the Longshoremen’s local. He knew how to negotiate. Within 75 days, all of those expensive machines had designated locations filling real regional medical demands.

This Labor Day, according to the state AFL-CIO, there are just three picnics – at Oaks Park in Portland, in Lane County and in Deschutes County. The Central Labor Councils, which used to organize regional celebrations, folded in 2015. Some became regional chapters of the  Oregon AFL-CIO.

Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics data put 1989 as the high-water mark of union organization in Oregon, when 21.6 percent of the workforce paid union dues. By 2010 the percentage dropped to 16.2 and hit a low point of 13.5 in 2016. Last year Oregon had 283,000 union members, 15.1 percent of all wage and salary workers. Public sector unions dominate that total –education, state employees, local government employees and public safety workers. Health care union membership – nurses, behavioral health and long-term care membership is on the rise according to some sources but BLS doesn’t break out data in its 2025 Oregon report.

So Labor Day 2026 has come and gone. If you want to see a politician, turn on your TV or look in the margins of your social media feed. If you want someone with shared interest in your community. or skills to help negotiate a thorny public problem, you aren’t likely to find help at a picnic today celebrating a heritage which marked the first Monday in September since that big 1882 parade in New York City. Today at the federal level, there’s an acting secretary of labor after the Trump 2.0 appointee resigned under scandal. Acting Secretary Keith Sonderling celebrated with a press release highlighting the August jobs report and by visiting workers at a Westin resort and spa in Las Vegas.

The rest of us are on our own.

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