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Life & Times Transcript

10/23/06

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

Orange County is trying to avoid a fiscal crisis, but should they shift it to the backs of retired workers?

>> "We are one of the wealthiest counties in the country. To balance the budget on the backs of our retirees is to betray the faith we once had in Orange County."

Val Zavala>> And then, it's one of the most brutal chapters of modern history told by the people who survived it. How one filmmaker is preserving the story of the Armenian holocaust.

These stories and more next on tonight's Life and Times.

Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val Zavala>> We all know all too well that health coverage is shrinking and health premiums are going up, but what happens if you're already retired and then they want to change the rules? Well, that could happen to thousands of retirees who used to work for Orange County and, as Roger Cooper tells us, the county cutbacks could affect old and young alike.

Roger Cooper>> Mary Ann Belletich and Cheryl Case have something in common. Both are retired after working many years for Orange County government.

Mary Ann Belletich>> I worked for the county of Orange for twenty-three years. I was a secretary. I worked in several different departments.

Cheryl Case>> Well, I was there for twenty-nine years. I started in the CAO's office.

Roger Cooper>> Cheryl still has her nameplate from her years as a County social worker and computer support person. Mary Ann has kept mementoes of the retirement party fellow workers threw for her.

Mary Ann Belletich>> They had a big retirement party for me and my book is full of pictures. They were just wonderful with the outpouring of love.

Roger Cooper>> But now in retirement, something makes them very upset. The Orange County Board of Supervisors has just decided that, to avoid a major financial crisis, it must scale back the medical benefits county workers thought they'd be able to depend on when they retired. How much are the cutbacks? It's hard to calculate because it's different for each individual, but in general, it will hit younger retirees harder. The bottom line is that many will get less than they were expecting.

Mary Ann Belletich>> Well, I feel betrayed because it was in our retirement handbook that we would have medical benefits.

Cheryl Case>> It's promised in writing. I've gotten a book like this every year I worked for the county about our benefits and it's always been in there, so that to me is an implied benefit that's going to be there.

Bill Campbell>> Supervisors changed the retiree medical benefit plan both for our active employees and for our retirees.

Roger Cooper>> Board of Supervisors Chairman, Bill Campbell, notes the medical benefit was not vested and could be changed. Further, he says it had to be changed because the cost was becoming astronomical with no way to pay for it.

Bill Campbell>> When we had that calculation done, it came back at $1.4 billion dollars with no funding for it, so that's what triggered our move to make the changes.

[Film Clip]

Roger Cooper>> The benefit change decision was made September 12 at a meeting the supervisors won't soon forget. Some thirty retired county workers let them hear the human side of what they were about to do.

>> "But to place this financial burden upon persons who have minimum options or future years to recover from excessive medical costs is unrealistic and unreasonable."

>> "Hundreds of millions of dollars are being taken from retirees without compensation."

>> "We are having our benefits cut and it amazes me that this can happen after the fact. We're no longer here. It's like we're disposable."

>> It kind of reminded me of being in Chicago at the stockyard auction about how much a pound we're all worth, or whether we have mad cow disease and should be put down, and then the unfunded liability would certainly go away."

>> "Do the honorable thing. Give us a break. We are one of the wealthiest counties in the country. To balance the budget on the backs of our retirees is to betray the faith we once had in Orange County. Thank you."

Bill Campbell>> "Thank you for coming."

Roger Cooper>> After hearing hours of such comments from their own county retirees, it was time for supervisors to take a stand.

Bill Campbell>> "This has not been a fun meeting for me. I suspect it's not been a fun meeting for any of my colleagues."

Tom Wilson>> "This has been somewhat of an emotional day for me to listen to some of the stories that I've heard from the podium."

James Silva>> "There's a rainy day and I think the rainy day is now here and we're having to make some horrible decisions."

Lou Correa>> "I don't think anybody up here is really going to be happy walking away with a vote today."

Chris Norby>> "And the money simply isn't there. I can understand those that have said that this was a promise and you're breaking your promise. It was a promise. This promise was made for some of you very, very long ago, but if the money isn't there, we can't create it."

Roger Cooper>> In the end, all five supervisors voted to change the benefit.

Bill Campbell>> "All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? That passes unanimously."

Roger Cooper>> Supervisor Campbell says rather than drop medical benefits altogether, the county has tried to create a plan that's affordable but still protects workers and retirees.

Bill Campbell>> It had an impact on people in different degrees because we tried to take into consideration where they were in their stage of life. From the county taxpayers' point of view, when the dust settles, we will have reduced an unfunded liability for that plan by over eight hundred million dollars.

Roger Cooper>> But Mary Ann and Cheryl are still fuming over the money that was deducted from their paychecks over the years for the medical benefits.

Mary Ann Belletich>> In 1993, when they started taking the money out of our paychecks for retiree medical, we forego a pay increase for three years to fund this medical retirement that they are now trying to take away from us.

John Moorlach>> We've had a couple of train wrecks in slow motion.

Roger Cooper>> County Treasurer and Supervisor-elect, John Moorlach, has been warning since 1999 that the retiree medical program was headed for trouble. What would he say to retirees who feel betrayed?

John Moorlach>> I think that's an honest feeling. I'm sure they felt that they were entitled to a benefit and they felt that it was vested. Legal analysis shows that it's not vested, that it wasn't put in concrete and it wasn't irrevocable.

Two, the private sector is doing this on a daily basis, whether it's an airline or whether it's General Motors or whether it's Ford Motor Company. Everyone is having their retiree medical benefits changed in the private sector because inflation in the medicine area has just gotten out of hand. It's just become unsustainable.

Roger Cooper>> Not a lot of comfort for two women who made the county their career.

Cheryl Case>> And here they are now. A lot of people retired earlier. They don't have very good retirement pensions. They're driving old cars. They're out there just barely making it and that's not fair to them. It really isn't fair.

Mary Ann Belletich>> Well, I look back and I see where I gave what was left of my youth to the county and now that I'm older, they betrayed a trust and a promise.

Roger Cooper>> Moorlach says it's just part of the new reality when it comes to benefits.

John Moorlach>> So I don't blame them for being upset, but if they talk to their neighbors in the private sector, it isn't as if we're doing anything to our retirees that hasn't been done elsewhere. I think if they look and compare what we've done to what the private sector has done, they'll see that the majority of the retirees, those over sixty-five, are not impacted that much at all.

Roger Cooper>> The Retired Employee Association of Orange County is now deciding whether to sue the county over retiree benefits. It's a time for making decisions and none of them are easy. In Orange County, I'm Roger Cooper for Life and Times.

Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".

Val Zavala>> In September, we celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month where we look at the contributions of Latinos to our culture. Well, now one respected Latino researcher says that, in many ways, there's no one more American than Mexican Americans. David Hayes-Bautista is a nationally known expert on Latino demographics and culture based at UCLA.

He was the first to predict back in the early 1970s that Latinos would be California's majority by 2030. Now he has a new book, "La Nueva California", or The New California, where he responds to people like Samuel Huntington, an author and professor at Harvard.

David Hayes-Bautista>> Now Samuel Huntington's basic thesis is that Latinos are not American. That's his basic thesis. Latinos are not American. Why he starts there, I don't know, but he does. Well, I have a little bit of difficulty with that because, hey, we were here way before the United States of America was here. We helped the United States of America win independence. How can he say we aren't American?

But he claims that we're somehow a threat because we speak Spanish. Well, Spanish has been spoken in what's now the United States since, hello, about 1539, almost a century before English was spoken. We're American.

Val Zavala>> Now your new book is called "La Nueva California" or The New California. Is it a new California?

David Hayes-Bautista>> Well, in fact, I chose that title for a couple of reasons. Some would think I'm speaking of the new California in the sense that here now come all these Latinos to a new California, but in fact it also makes an allusion to the past because it's often said, well, this is simply the return of the Latino majority to California. It was Mexicans primarily who brought California into the modern era beginning in 1769 when the colonists came to California.

I know our fourth grade school history teachers are all Spanish. Baloney, they were not Spanish. They were Mexicanos. But during the whole colonial period, there were never more than twenty Spanish here in California. All the rest of the population was Mexicano primarily. In fact, since about 1790, the average Latino in California actually has been born in California and there are always these little tensions between the immigrants and the United States born in spite of the fact that they can be parent and child.

But when you get another wave of immigration, quite often that child of the previous wave of immigration doesn't quite cut the slack for the newer arrivals that would have to as parents. It's always been these alternating pushes of immigration and then fertility that's the history of California. Spanish has been spoken in California for two hundred thirty years. All of your major institutions, be they health, education, governmental, industrial or whatever, were established in California in Spanish. Spanish is simply not a foreign language in California.

Spanish is an American heritage language. It has been spoken in the parts that are now part of the United States since 1776. We can take us back to the Revolutionary War and many, many occasions and many battles during the American War of Independence from 1776 to 1781. There are many indications where there are more soldiers that spoke Spanish than soldiers that spoke English fighting for American independence. It's simply part of American stories.

Not only did Latinos help fight the American Revolution, we actually provided the core identity. Well, stop to consider this. If we think of who most epitomizes the American, both here and around the world, I think most people would agree that it's the cowboy, the John Waynes.

Val Zavala>> Right. Iconic American cowboys.

David Hayes-Bautista>> Yeah, we don't think of a New Yorker in a three-piece suit. We don't think of a Minnesotan. We think of the cowboy. This expresses America. Well, the cowboy is a gift from Latinos to the rest of the United States. We gave America the cowboy. It has to do with taking care of cattle and Samuel Huntington's Anglo-Protestant population.

If you ever go to England, if you ever got to Scotland, if you ever go to Ireland, they take care of cattle on foot. They walk behind the cows. The cows live in little pastures and live in barns. They brought that method of taking care of cattle to New England, mid-Atlantic states, and they walked behind the cows the way their ancestors had done for thousands of years.

But in the Iberian peninsula because of a different ecology -- you didn't have as much rain. You had a lot less grass. You couldn't keep a cow enclosed in a pasture. You had to let the cow roam around and find grass. So there in Iberia, men got on horseback and took care of cattle on a horse. In Spain, they brought that technique to the new world and it gave us different variances.

It gave us the gaucho in Argentina, the huaso in Chile, the llanero in Venezuela, and the vaquero in Mexico. So when these folks from New England, from the mid-Atlantic, moved out west in the early nineteenth century, walking behind their cows, they got here and they discovered it was a lot easier to get up on a horse. They "Mexicanized", they put the Mexican elements that we had been developing for centuries.

Even the very term, the vaquero, is the way that English speakers pronounce as buckaroo. There's lariat, lasso, the mustang. You have the cattle in a corral, so we have the corral, the rodeo, the chaps which protect the clothing from the mesquite. Not only the techniques, but the terminology was borrowed from Mexicans. If it weren't for Mexicanos, if it weren't for Latinos, Anglos would still be walking behind cows. We wouldn't have John Wayne. We wouldn't have the cowboy.

Val Zavala>> So that's why the whole cowboy phenomena emerges from the west because that's where the Mexicans --

David Hayes-Bautista>> -- we were here in the west. It didn't emerge in the east.

Val Zavala>> No, it didn't emerge in the east.

David Hayes-Bautista>> But that is the iconic identity symbol. I mean, I do this not just to be humorous, but to illustrate how deeply involved Latinos have been with the formation of what we consider American society and identity since day one. We are not strangers. We are not foreigners. We are not immigrants. Spanish is not a foreign language. We are part of America. We have helped create it.

Val Zavala>> And 2001 was a crucial year, correct?

David Hayes-Bautista>> 2001, beginning the third quarter of 2001, of all the babies born in California, more than fifty percent were Latino. Here in Los Angeles County, almost two-thirds, sixty-three percent, of the children born were Latino. What's the issue here?

And when we look at the behavior of Latinos, this is going to be a very good, very strong work ethic, very strong families, very good health indicators. For some people, this is the end of the world. Oh, my God. Well, why? Well, because Latinos are all criminals, they're illegals, they're gangbangers, they're teenage pregnant moms, they're just bad news, so we can't have half the state on welfare. Okay, where are your data sources for that?

Latinos are the least likely to use welfare. There are some stereotypes and very, very exaggerated misperceptions of what Latinos are about. People are afraid of that stereotype, so they get very nervous about, oh, my God, Latinos being half the state of California. If we just look at the data, I don't see any real problem unless we forget to invest.

Now that could be a problem if we forget to invest. But if we invest particularly in the education of these young Latinos being born, I don't see a real problem for us in the future. This return of the Latino majority is the best thing that has ever happened to California ever since 1848.

Val Zavala>> Do you disagree with Professor Bautista? We'd like to hear from you. Email us at lifeandtimes@kcet.org or call us at (323) 953-5555.

Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

Life and Times
4401 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90027

You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val Zavala>> He's spent twenty-five years traveling the world documenting the stories of the men and women who survived the Armenian genocide. He wants to capture their stories on film before they're lost forever to history. He himself is more than ninety years old and time is of the essence.

Every day, Michael Hagopian navigates his way through a narrow hallway in his home-based office in Thousand Oaks. He sits down in front of an old Movieola that still cuts film the old-fashioned way. He has spent countless days, months, years here surrounded by shelves filled with work prints, nearly all of them labeled with Armenian names.

Michael Hagopian>> This guy is Armenian. He's in New York.

Val Zavala>> For the past twenty-five years, Hagopian has traveled the world interviewing survivors of the Armenian genocide that happened more than ninety years ago. He has about four hundred interviews on film.

Michael Hagopian>> I felt, with small funds I had, I wanted to use to get the survivors before they died.

Val Zavala>> Can you give us an example of some of the variety of the people?

Michael Hagopian>> Oh, yeah. They're both men and women. The youngest age probably is about seventy-five. I've gotten them up to a hundred five.

Val Zavala>> The documentary is far from finished, but Hagopian has edited a short reel with clips.

>> "Because they knew that my father was quite a religious man, Armenian, and they made me dig up some of the famous celebrities who were buried in the churchyard, dig them up and made me urinate on them."

Michael Hagopian>> One survivor asked me on film, if the Turks wanted to move us out of the war zone because they wanted to prevent us from being in the pathway and save us, why didn't they take their whole family? Why did they leave them there? It doesn't make sense.

Val Zavala>> Once he made a trip to Vermont to interview a survivor who was a hundred five years old.

Michael Hagopian>> So I made a special trip. My associate producer and I got on a plane and we went over there. We set up the cameras and she would not talk.

Val Zavala>> What? Why not?

Michael Hagopian>> She couldn't talk.

Val Zavala>> Oh, she couldn't talk. Emotionally, you mean?

Michael Hagopian>> Emotionally. Her descendants, her daughter and son, they just couldn't figure it out. It just overcame her.

Val Zavala>> But most survivors were able to speak, sometimes for hours, about their past, recounting even the most barbaric acts.

>> "I saw with my own eyes a woman who didn't have no milk in her breast, so her baby was crying. One of these Turkish soldiers grabbed the baby by the arm, tossed the little thing up into the air and another Turkish soldier caught it with his bayonet on his rifle. She made a little squeak and she was gone."

Val Zavala>> Hagopian himself has a story. He was born in Turkey. His family survived only because his father was a skilled physician.

Michael Hagopian>> He survived because the Turks needed him. He was the best surgeon in town. When the governor got sick or the big mullahs, they called him. But they had him on a list. Every time they'd say, "Doctor, we're going to send you with a nice safe caravan." Instinct told him, so he'd say, "Oh, I'll wait for the next one. I got a lot of patients."

Val Zavala>> His family eventually came to America and settled in Fresno. Hagopian went to Berkeley and Harvard and studied political science, so how did he get into filmmaking?

>> "We used to say that this child was born during the Armenian massacre."

Val Zavala>> He was teaching at UCLA when he realized how little good material was available on Armenian history, so in the 1970s, he started making educational films.

>> "The Christians were gathered from their homes and herded outside the towns."

Val Zavala>> Then he moved on to documentaries.

>> "The darkest invention yet devised by nation states: genocide."

Val Zavala>> And in 1979 to help fund his project, he founded the Armenian Film Foundation. The Foundation has produced numerous documentaries on Armenian history.

>> "This collection will be made available to future generations of scholars, universities, libraries and television networks."

Val Zavala>> Now in his nineties, Hagopian has one more documentary he wants to finish.

Michael Hagopian>> This third film is very important because it's really using the survivors to tell the story. Producers like to talk the story, but I'm trying to tell the story through the mouths of the survivors.

Val Zavala>> The most difficult part will be choosing the best among four hundred interviews. This is an interview with an Armenian priest. He was approached by a stranger asking forgiveness. The stranger, it turned out, had killed the priest's family.

>> "And then he lifted up his arms and asked me for forgiveness and I told him, "God bless you, God forgive you, but I don't know who you are." He told me that he killed father, three brothers and he confiscated our home and our garments."

Val Zavala>> How do you pick and choose from all those interviews?

Michael Hagopian>> You know, an old-timer in Hollywood told me once, he said, "You haven't got a film unless it hurts you to throw out material."

Val Zavala>> The final film will be called "Caravan Along the Euphrates".

[Film Clip]

>> "If you would ask me who I am, I couldn't tell you because I don't know what's my real name. I don't know when I was born. I don't know where I was born. I don't know who my parents they were."

Val Zavala>> What do you want to accomplish before you die? What do you most want to accomplish with this Foundation? What do you really want to get finished?

Michael Hagopian>> I want the truth of what happened to be known and, if through films we can do that, that's the message. I've got the background in making documentary films. I've got the historical and political background. These things combined have made it possible for me to kind of be a pioneer in this method of dissemination about what happened to the Armenian people.

Val Zavala>> He's a pioneer who's committed to leaving a legacy, a legacy that brings to life the stories of those who managed to survive a brutal chapter in Armenian history.

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> Michael Hagopian is being honored this weekend at an Armenian and International Film Festival. For details, you can contact the Arpa International Film Festival at affma.org.

And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Sponsored in part by:


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