Letters To The Editor

GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS

Raise minimum wage, cut jobs

I am very unhappy with the proposal to raise the minimum wage because of the jobs that could be cut. Employers will not be able to afford to pay for all the hours people work.

I think it would be more effective to keep the minimum wage where it is. Raising it would be unfair to owners of small businesses.

I am a senior at Mary Walker High School in Springdale. I work for minimum wage and I would really like to have more money. The problem with raising the minimum wage is that I would most likely get laid off. I would rather have a small amount of money than none at all.

The community I live in does not have many job opportunities for young people. Business owners and employees would stand to be hurt. Jessy Conaway Springdale, Wash.

Republicans waging class warfare

Lost in the recent discussion of the Davis-Bacon Act is the real motivation of the Republicans seeking its repeal: driving down the wages of workers. That’s the Republicans’ real plan.

Throughout the ‘80s, while middle class wages were stuck in the mud, corporate profits, CEO salaries and worker productivity showed dramatic gains. The average American CEO makes 100 times the wage of his workers while the average Japanese or German CEO makes only 10 times the wages of his workers.

Republicans have successfully blockaded any legislation such as striker replacement that would help workers share in increased profits and productivity as they should. They even oppose an increase in the minimum wage, even though numerous studies have shown the move would have little impact on employment.

How are you going to get people off welfare on 4 bucks an hour?

Make no mistake; Republicans would like American wages to more closely resemble those of Mexico. They would like to remove health and safety regulations and kill family leave. Rep. Dick Armey, R-Texas, states flatly that we shouldn’t have any minimum wage at all.

Harry Truman said it best: Republicans are for the minimum wage - the minimum they can get away with. Gregory P. Hande Spokane

Mining office expertise needed

The mining community is once again under attack at the federal level, particularly those agencies involved in mineral resources.

The general perception of mining is negative. Almost always, the examples emphasized are the result of over 100 years of unregulated mining - conditions not permitted today.

I encourage readers to look at their surroundings and ask where each item they see came from. The point is, minerals are mined in the millions of tons. The reader will find it difficult to identify much in his surroundings that does not have a mineral contribution.

In these times of government downsizing, including the elimination of entire agencies, one must consider the national long-term effects of a given decision rather than what is currently politically popular. An example: That division of the Bureau of Mines responsible for the evaluation and inventory of minerals on public lands and the environmental issues associated with those minerals has been selected for elimination. In the Spokane office, I have 15 years of experience. Only one other individual has less. No other agency, federal or private, has that pool of mineral knowledge of the six contiguous Western states. Once disbanded and scattered, it cannot be reconstituted.

There is justification for the maintenance of the Spokane office. I encourage anyone who feels this agency is essential to national interests to notify their congressmembers. There is much more at stake than the local economy and jobs. Dick Winters Spokane

Charity should begin at home

I don’t understand why our military, especially the Air Force, is spending all its time and effort on helping other countries when our country is in desperate need of some help. I’m not saying what the military is doing is wrong, but when we have an estimated 1.3 million to 2 million homeless in the United States alone, we need to start spending a little more time on our own country.

Our Air Force has gone to Japan, Somalia, Iran, Russia, Bosnia and many other countries. The United States has sent to other countries millions of dollars that we could have used for our homeless people. It would be different if the other countries helped us but they don’t. Why do we have to do all the giving? Tina Graham Springdale, Wash.

ABORTION

Anti-Foster drive sort of figures

Since warmaking worshippers of heaven-based, patriarchal gods began conquering the earth-based peoples of the goddess, the fable of Eve’s fall from grace has formed a basis for the oppression of women. As Christianity focused ever more on the spiritual, society became less able to deal rationally with the powerful, mysterious, life-giving forces of women’s earthy sexuality, a frustration manifested in the Inquisition and the witch trials.

It doesn’t surprise me, therefore, that today the nomination of an OB/GYN for surgeon general faces such opposition.

In Dr. Henry Foster’s defense, perhaps the abortions he performed for victims of rape or incest saved lives by keeping desperate women from back-alley butchers who might have taken two lives instead of one. The hysterectomies performed on mentally ill patients, apparently a diversion dug up by opposition from the abortion issue, were accepted within the medical community at the time. Dr. Foster claims to “abhor abortion” and has, through his “I have a future” program, done more to prevent teen pregnancies and abortion than most of us on either side of the issue will in our lifetimes.

I can’t imagine a doctor’s history of performing vasectomies becoming such a controversy. While that procedure happens before fertilization, it clearly interferes with reproductive destiny. A woman’s health issues are between her and her doctor, her and her goddess, or perhaps her god.

When will women have the autonomy enjoyed by men, reproductive and otherwise? C.K. Jones Spokane

Anti-choice Christians not hypocrites

N.G. Hannon (Letters, Feb. 16), who is really misinformed? Stating that Dr. Henry Foster has performed more abortions than he at first said he performed, then admitting to the increased numbers, is not in my world a negative, misinformation agenda of the conservative right.

Devoiding one’s self of Christian morals was never the intent of our founding fathers. The Constitution provides that the government not be run by a specific religious denomination. It does not prohibit a free people from making decisions based on religious views.

Because I and others may choose to walk a narrow path in an attempt to do the right thing, vs. a broad, anything-goes path, does not mean we must leave our country of freedom to be cast into a Third World country. Living our lives based on our Christian values does not make us hypocrites. Saying “wake up, show more love, concern and understanding” and then promoting or condoning the murder of millions of innocent unborn children is the true heighth of hypocrisy. H. Gene Lawrence Spokane

Attack on Foster has Nazi trait

In response to Margaret Schuster’s letter of Feb. 16, it appalls me that someone would write that Dr. Henry Foster’s policies and practices would have made him an “elite.”

Abortion was a crime in Nazi Germany. It was one of the many choices the extreme right-wing Nazi Party took from a populace that wasn’t looking. It is Ms. Schuster the Nazis would have liked. Misinformation was just one more thing the Nazis shared with the current religious right.

What has happened to the American brain and its ability to think? Michael Jepson Spokane

Clever cartoon just a distortion

Tom Bowman’s guest editorial cartoon, “Abortion macht frei” (Feb. 15) was unfortunately well marked. It was, however, insensitive, sensationalistic, tabloid-like and the product of being woefully uninformed.

How dare Mr. Bowman equate the constitutional right of a woman to choose the course of her own destiny to the unjust, irrational and indefensible slaughter of over 6 million Jewish men, women and children whose only crime was a belief different from that of the power structure in Nazi Germany?

Although the historical reference is creative, Mr. Bowman has completely missed the historical point. Of all the lessons we have learned (and are still learning) from the Holocaust, the most vital is the lesson that totalitarianism is inherently evil and that it always results in great tragedy. The beliefs of one political faction are just that - its beliefs. Those beliefs cannot be allowed to supersede the beliefs of others, even though those who support them may march loudly down the streets in brown shirts - or shout loudly at women entering family planning clinics.

The past speaks to us very clearly, if we will only listen. Please, Mr. Bowman, let us learn from history so that our children will not suffer from our ignorance. Angela Mitchell and W. Sean McMullin Spokane

PUBLIC SAFETY

Pay to ride without skull bucket

It appears that Washington’s newly elected Legislature intends to overturn the existing motorcycle helmet law. I’d like to share a few facts in its defense.

When the law was re-enacted in 1990, motorcycle fatalities dropped by more than 50 percent and hospitalizations for severe head injuries dropped by almost 60 percent. Non-helmeted riders have a 27 percent greater chance of dying than helmeted riders. This doesn’t even begin to address those who are injured and left in a chronic vegetative state.

If it is a rider’s personal right to choose to ride helmetless, then they should be able to pay their own medical costs. In a study done by Harborview Medical Center, it was found that medical costs for one year of motorcycle crashes amounted to $2.7 million. Of this, 63 percent was paid by public funds (including Medicaid and the state of Washington), 22 percent by insurance companies, and only 1 percent of the total bill paid by the motorcyclists. Long-term rehabilitation or nursing home care runs the cost up even further because many insurance polices and Washington’s Health Care Reform Act do not cover extended care.

If it is inevitable that the motorcycle helmet law is overturned, then let us ask the motorcyclists to ride responsibly; have catastrophic insurance and an organ donor card. Elizabeth A. Campbell, MSN, RN East Region EMS and Trauma Council

Motorists, consider this

A riddle for the driving public:

What is large, yellow and has flashing yellow-turning-to-red lights all over it? It has a unique sign that often flaps out with an easily read order on it. They drive the same roads during the same hours five days a week, approximately nine months a year. They stop at the same places twice a day every day.

Unfortunately, these endless trips to and fro happen when working folk are on the go. It’s a very annoying vehicle, slowing and stopping, lights flashing and sign flapping, with an easily read message on both sides. Opposite the sign a unique collapsible door opens, admitting or releasing the life and future of an entire community, one step at a time.

Although it’s not much of a riddle as to the identity of described vehicle, it remains a mystery as to why people take such tragic chances when driving by. Bruce Foster Rathdrum, Idaho

LAW AND JUSTICE

I-164 unfair, unnecessary

I am outraged by Initiative 164. I am outraged the state ruled it OK for timber companies and real estate developers to purchase signatures in order to validate the initiative. How dare they subvert the democratic process!

Due to inherent financial constraints, I-164 would prevent local municipalities from regulating themselves to suit their local development needs. It would impose a statewide plan benefiting speculative land purchasers and development companies. It will leave current landowners unable to protect themselves against incompatible development, potentially taxing them out of their homes or destroying the amenities and aesthetics that first led them there.

Tony Delgado (Letters, Feb. 14) rolled the dice when he invested his retirement income in the speculative purchase of timber land for logging purposes. The roll didn’t go all his way. Now, he wants me to pay the difference. I have neither the sympathy nor compunction to cover his bad luck.

Are the land use rules and regulations of this state completely just and fair? Are they implemented with an even hand using common sense? No, but I-164 is a disingenuous attempt to reform the process. The landowner occupying property (or holding for occupation in the near future) for the purpose of primary residence may need some regulatory breaks or mitigation of regulatory implementation; however, such is best handled at the local level.

Neighbors, if you love your neighborhood and want to control its destiny, contact your state representatives and senator. Let them know you want the right to vote on I-164. Sharon L. Sorby Newport, Wash.

Gun distinction irrelevant

I don’t know whether Beth Ashworth (Your Turn, Feb. 8) intended “Uzi” to mean an Israeli-made automatic firearm or merely an assault-type-rifle, nor can I see what difference it makes. Yet again, a gun apologist (Scott Hespelt, Letters, Feb. 14) has lectured us ad nauseam on the difference between automatic and semiautomatic weapons. It is impossible to see how an argument could have any less relevance.

What makes the semiautomatic assault rifle the weapon of choice in massacres is that it can be fitted with oversized magazines of combat ammunition. Pistols and shotguns cannot. Are we to assume that Dean Mellberg’s victims are less dead or wounded than they would have been if he had used an automatic?

If the gun lobby’s traditional argument about the Second Amendment had any validity, these people should be arguing that the ban on automatics is unconstitutional. If not, counting trigger pulls is irrational. The reason for their argument is also unclear; they always seem to deny owning a semiautomatic. Edward B. Keeley Spokane

OTHER TOPICS

Demand end to tobacco use

Corruption, conspiracy, bribery, cover-ups, scandal, tragedy, destruction, disaster, murder, addiction, disease, death, epidemic. Under normal circumstances, any story that contained all of these elements would be the subject of intense interest and scrutiny in the media. Unless we are talking about the tobacco industry, of course.

The corruption, conspiracy, bribery, cover-ups and scandals that perpetuate the tragedy, destruction, disaster, murder, addiction, disease and death epidemic of tobacco is the most underreported story in the media relative to the damage it does. Everybody’s daily quality of life is adversely affected.

I urge everyone to read the January 1995 Consumer Reports feature article on secondhand smoke and the May 1994 article, “Public interest pretenders.” Also, send letters of support for FDA action to regulate nicotine as the dangerous and addictive drug that it is to: Docket 94P-0069, Dockets Management Branch, FDA, Room 1-23, 12420 Parkland Drive, Rockville, MD 20857; and letters to OSHA to support the ruling to ban smoking in all workplaces to: Docket H-122, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, U.S. Department of Labor, 200 Constitution Ave., Washington, D.C., 20210. William Pitt Spokane

Arts will survive end of NEA

In her Feb. 17 letter defending the National Endowment for the Arts, Kathleen Cavender asserted that without this government-sponsored program, we would no longer enjoy such artistic expression as the ballet, symphony, theater or art schools.

The fact is that before the federal government got involved in the arts business, we had ballet, symphony, theater and art schools. We will still have them after the NEA. What we won’t have is the ongoing government-sponsored indecency, attacks on religion, anti-Christian bigotry and hate art by so-called “artists” who cannot get funding anywhere else to support this kind of work. Marilyn Lawson Spokane