So, what’s a Yāhoo to do?

JOIN YAHOOS UNITED!
The May 16 issue of The Oregonian (on the web: “Oregon Live”) reports some very informative statements by John Whitty, the apparent inventor and chief advocate of privatizing Jordan Cove’s future property tax payments, so a small, private group can spend those vast, pilfered riches. Whitty grouses that for his efforts he’s been “excoriated by the local paper as a member of a “self-appointed aristocracy”. And he gripes that public meetings about the scheme have given “every yahoo in the county an opportunity to get up and snipe at us.”
Other articles on Mary’s blog have already pointed out that under Oregon’s school equalization program, the State has long subsidized the underfunded Coos county school districts, by giving them tax revenues collected from more prosperous places like Portland. But turnabout, according to John Whitty’s supporters, would not be fair play because passing some of Jordan Cove’s tax payments on to school districts elsewhere would be a “waste”. Does that mean that the state’s present habit of giving money to Coos county districts has been a waste, too? Anyway, what they want is to keep the State of Oregon’s hands off Jordan Cove’s taxes, so they can give them to the same local bunch that has already wasted hundreds of millions on flopped schemes for “economic development”. The mind boggles at what they may come up with this time, but the record strongly suggests nothing good.

Does the Aristocratic Shoe fit?

Now, to get the full meaning of what Whitty said, we need to consider several parts of it. First, we need to identify who the “Yahoos” are, although that may be evident to my brighter readers. Next, I assume that the “us” Whitty accuses those Yahoos of sniping at is the self-appointed aristocracy he belongs to. But since he denies belonging to it, we need to define “aristocracy”, and also whether aristocracies can be self-appointed. Once we’ve done that, let’s see if the shoe fits.
In distant ages and faraway lands, an aristocracy was a ruling upper class that felt different from, and decidedly above, the common people. In feudal China, for example, only the aristocracy could own land. In feudal Japan the Samurai class had the right to chop off the heads of commoners who failed to bow deeply enough. And in medieval Europe, the landed aristocracy not only had the right to make their tenant peasantry do a certain amount of work without pay, but they were empowered to keep them from leaving their domains. That made a lord’s peasants only a smidgen better off than slaves. He could punish them for running away. The term for that is “serfs”. But unlike slaves, serfs could not count on their master to feed and shelter them. It worked the other way around.
When you trace how the founders of those aristocracies of the past made their way to the top, you find that the great majority had done so by force of arms, either through conquest or by offering protection to local peasants who would then agree to supply the food and other necessities to support their armed protector’s lifestyle. Another way, particularly in Europe, was for a king to give land with one or more castles to a warlord who had done him a big service, like winning a battle.

But all those roads to aristocracy came to the same thing: the new aristocrats had created their advancement through some kind of achievement. So, to talk in terms of a “self-appointed aristocracy” is a tautology, like describing a circle as round or a square as rectangular. All aristocracies, then as now, are self-appointed, because they found a way to claw their way to the top, and did it. And this is not such a bad thing, except that sooner or later the dynasty’s founder or, even more likely, his heirs will convince themselves that only they know what is best for their commoners – their YAHOOS. They, the aristocrats, need to run their Yahoos’ lives for them – all for their own good, of course.

Quick! Hide it from the Yāhoos!

So let’s face it, folks: we are the Yahoos, and our local aristocrats hold us in contempt, just like the British nobility disdained the rabble, and French aristocrats looked down their noses at the canaille. But in their defense, all those aristocracies tempered those attitudes with the slogan “Noblesse Oblige”: Nobility carries Obligations. It means that the Lord of the Manor has to do certain things for the subjects in his domain; and even if they don’t always appreciate what he does, why, it is for their own good. This polite way of showing contempt is also known as paternalism. And because during some thirty years of eco-devo activism, John Whitty has consistently practiced paternalism, no doubt can remain that he is an aristocrat. The people – the Yahoos – cannot be trusted to sort out things for themselves; no, the self-appointed eco-devo aristocracy has to do it for them because they know better.
Also essential to paternalism is keeping the Yahoos in the dark, to minimize resistance to the aristocracy’s plans for them. The article in Oregonian proves it well. While complaining about public meetings that had given “every yahoo in the county an opportunity to get up and snipe at us”, Whitty formulated a solution: “If we’re going to craft our own strategy, it might be better for it not to be in an open meeting where the newspaper is writing down everything we say.”
Ah yes, why let on what you want to do to the Yahoos? the autocratic mind prefers secrecy. They don’t believe all that tripe about the sanitizing effects of daylight.
And, the habit goes back decades. Back in 1986 already, Port Commissioner John Whitty was instrumental in selling the ballot measure to the voters that, under false pretenses, persuaded them to give away their right to elect (and recall) the Coos Bay Port Commissioners. This idea actually was the brainchild of a Chicago crook whom the Whitty family had recruited to be Port Manager. And that man’s real agenda seemed to have been to make the Port of Coos Bay unanswerable to the Yahoos, too.
In that same year John Whitty promoted Enterprise Zones for Oregon, and particularly for Coos Bay. Anyone who has kept up on local economic history knows that Enterprise Zones, as a way to stimulate development, are as worthless as they are wasteful. Every major economic development project that occurred in Coos Bay – Bandon Dunes, ORC, and now – perhaps – Jordan Cove, has acknowledged that the EZ tax break played no part in their arrival. And that’s only logical. The original idea behind the EZs was to draw industry to “blighted areas” within Oregon. But when all was said and done, every town in the state could make the case that it had “blighted areas”, so every town ended up with EZs. The only reason they still exist is to promote corruption and cronyism, so useless government officials can do favors for friendly businessmen, who will return the favor in campaign contributions and testimonials praising the officials and who knows what else.
This is the same John Whitty who in January 1999 “angrily responded” to a suggestion by the newspaper that FONSI’s board meetings should be open to the public. FONSI was another eco-devo organization (one of about twenty the Coos Bay area has seen), which was active in promoting the Nucor steel mill for the North Spit and the construction of a 1-foot diameter natural gas pipeline to Coos Bay which, according to the eco-devo crowd, would create 2,900 jobs. The steel mill, not a very serious proposal to begin with, was never built, but the gas line was, and at taxpayers’ expense; but, except for its troublesome construction, it has not created any jobs. But FONSI was not a public body, subject to Oregon’s open meeting laws. It was set up as a non-profit, private corporation – on purpose. So, even though FONSI conducted plenty of public meetings at which overheated members of the public spouted ludicrous ideas about “development”, that was simply to pacify the Yahoos. The real decisions were made at FONSI’s board meetings. And FONSI board member John Whitty warned that if those meetings were opened to the public, people who were “against FONSI’s efforts to get people back to work” could “get into the board’s meetings or read about them in the press”:

“There are people in the community who resist the efforts of FONSI and others to return our unemployed citizens to work. Some of them may have even become members of FONSI (it costs nothing) in an effort to gain information about economic development projects the dissidents can oppose. If these people are allowed to hear FONSI’s plans and strategies or read them in The World, they will be better able to plan tactics to defeat efforts to achieve economic development . . . Why should FONSI encourage that?”

Look in the Mirror

“Why should FONSI encourage that?” Even though that was a rhetorical question, it deserves an answer. That’s because Whitty clearly implied that the Yahoos are nothing but obstructionists who are against everything, and that those same Yahoos have already defeated all of our aristocrats’ grand “development” plans of the past.
Both of those notions, although they are commonly held and propagated, are false. And there is a cruel irony here, because the John Whitty family has been very active and generous in supporting and funding the Coos Historical Museum. Yet despite all that, they don’t know the real facts about Coos Bay’s economic history since about 1975. They either don’t know – or they don’t WANT to know – that the failures of their multiple “development” schemes were not caused by the Yahoos but by their own incompetence.
That incompetence showed in three ways.

First, they fell for a large number of business proposals that were no more than flimsy promotional schemes, by people who had no serious intentions of running a fish waste plant or a chromium smelter, but were merely out to make a quick buck before they skipped town, either by paying themselves big salaries from the government grants and loans they got, or by stock speculation. So those projects were doomed from the start.
Second, our eco-devo aristocrats were utterly incapable of making a realistic assessment of the economic potential of the Port of Coos Bay. That’s not because they didn’t have the information. At various times, highly paid experts plainly told them, but all those reports were ignored; they didn’t fit their delusions.
To put it simply, the economic potential of the Port of Coos Bay is a lot like that of the

Guano Islands, off the south American west coast. Back in the 19th century, European agriculture desperately needed a source of fertilizer, and shippers found it on the Guano Islands, which were entirely covered with yards and yards of bird poop. Since those islands get very little rain, it was semi-petrified poop that still had all of its ammonia, so a bird poop boom occurred, with poop ships carrying it to Europe, all the way around the Horn. Then the supplies ran out, and it’s going to take the birds a few thousand years to build it back up, even though they are exceedingly unselfish with their donations. But unless some other resource is found on or near the remote Guano Islands, there is no reason for ships or new industries to come there; and the same is true of Coos Bay. This was the reason the Maersk container terminal idea never had a chance, and I believe the company knew it, as shown by the absence of any detailed plans, and by their silence during the adulatory festivities conducted on their behalf by our eco-devo politicians. The same was true of the Daishowa pulp mill and Nucor Steel. All those companies had a different agenda: play Coos Bay against a couple of other locations to get more corporate welfare. That was all.
And third, if the world’s economic history of the 20th century has proved anything, it is that central economic planning by an aristocracy doesn’t work; and it doesn’t matter if that aristocracy consists of Kremlin planners or deluded Coos Bay activists.
Throughout their futile efforts to re-invent Coos Bay’s industrial past, our aristocrats have shown utter disdain for the health and safety of us, the Yahoos, and for our wish to lead lives undisturbed by obnoxious and hazardous industries. Their attitudes are well reflected in a sign that used to be mounted over the entrance gate to one of the former USSR’s gulag work camps: WITH AN IRON FIST, WE WILL LEAD HUMANITY TO HAPPINESS.