Letters To The Editor

GASOLINE TALLY

Cry rape and flatten the rapists

The petroleum pirates rape the American people again and no one does a thing to help us. We all, Congress and President Clinton as well, know we’re being had, and all of them are acquiescing out of fear and greed.

Come on, people, raise a little hell. No, raise a lot of hell. Are we going to just roll over while Exxon, Shell, Texaco, Chevron and the other petroleum pirates carry out this farce and bankrupt America? Don’t you feel the rage, frustration, helplessness and overpowering repulsion toward these money mad economic rapists, or shall we just lie back and enjoy it?

Fight back. If nothing else, bombard your representatives in Congress and the White House with letters, phone calls and telegrams. Vent your rage at the authorities who could and should protect us.

Truck lines are teetering on bankruptcy. The tourism industry is falling sharply as summer vacations fade into dreams. And roads and bridges are in the worst condition imaginable.

What do we do? We counterattack. We investigate, prosecute and jail the conspirators, and we fine the crap out of the petroleum pirates for conspiracy and price gouging. I’ve had it - how about you? Larry E. Krueger Spokane

Congress driving the wrong way

The recent rise in gas prices comes with a drop in good sense in the U.S. Congress. As prices rise, politicians hide behind a false message of fiscal fairness and advise that we cut the gas tax. That’s foolish.

Overturning the 4-cent gas tax will not help citizens weather this 20-cent price spike. Oil companies are not likely to lower gas prices. They would rather leave prices high and take the extra profit while the U.S. Treasury loses $4.8 billion in gas tax revenues. Maybe that’s what Congress really wants - a $4.8 billion gift to oil company managers and executives.

What Americans really need is more-efficient cars. If we had more fuel-efficient cars that averaged 45 miles per gallon instead of 27.5, we wouldn’t be so vulnerable. Our demand for gas would be lower.

There already exists a program to bring more fuel efficient cars on the market: CAFE. But, rather than support raising Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency, Congress people are doing their best to weaken it. Last year they voted to freeze standards and this year they are supporting a bill to complicate its implementation.

CAFE is the response we need. Let’s hope our politicians catch on before our limited reserves of petroleum products actually drive prices up beyond our ability to manage them.

I, for one, am willing to pay more for goods and services to offset our crying need for higher fuel efficiency standards. Paul Lindholdt Spokane

Big Oil takes return on investment

Isn’t it amazing that news and government authorities can’t explain the massive oil price increases?

The answer is simple. The sociopaths who control scarce resources and money supplies - in this case the major oil producers - are recouping their losses for the Exxon Valdez and other major oil spills. And they’re doing it on the back of the apathetic sheep of America, the consuming public.

The president and Congress will not lift a finger because oil, among other major industries, owns them lock, stock and barrel. Now you know why special interests spend so much money buying off all your incumbent politicians. It is now pay off time, on your backs.

The flotsam in Washington is now serving their real masters. Big Oil is laughing all the way to the bank and back.

Keep up your whining and snivelling. All they will continue to do is say please until they squeeze every thing they can from the consumer.

Do you feel hopeless, alone and naked in a world of crooks? You are and you will continue to despair until you wake up, grow up, reach back deep and resurrect your Bunker Hill retail mentality. Chuck Huffine Pullman, Wash.

BUSINESS AND LABOR

It’s a whole new game

There’s an old adage that says, “What makes you strong also destroys you.”

So it is with the United States approaching the 21st century: corporations built us up and provided a flavorful life with a high standard of living, and those same corporations now punish, poison and pollute in ruthless searching for excess profit, while our plundered citizens watch their dollars dwindle.

Russ Moritz (“Folks, you’re missing the gorilla on your doorstep,” Street Level, April 28) provided insights that can save us. Some readers now liken him to the Unabomber.

We Americans must somehow realize that the rules changed when we weren’t looking, and today the megacorporations promise not shared wealth but a rush to sail all but a very few of us down the chute, into the wastebasket of history.

If we don’t tame corporate greed, our country’s best days will remain behind it. Fred Glienna Coeur d’Alene

Consider the alternative

Russ Moritz ( Street Level, April 26) provides us good insight into contemporary, mainstream environmental group thinking. It reads like something out of 1960s Pravda, with philosophies extracted right out of “Das Kapital.”

Along with the usual gross exaggeration, obfuscation and panicmongering, Moritz appears to infer that the only solution to his postulated malaise is some sort of Utopian central authority that would, of course, be headed by pure and good people like himself.

During the past several years, I’ve had the opportunity to visit and evaluate several large enterprises in the former Soviet Union. The Marxist system that Moritz by inference extols has led to the most colossal socioeconomic failure in history.

Principal reasons for this disaster were very limited accountability (only to government), lack of profit incentive, and rampant greed and corruption bred by this system. As to environmental degradation, there were no controls whatsoever. Every site I visited was a total disaster that would make our worst cases pale in comparison.

The very thing Moritz is most critical of - profit, because it forces efficiency and accountability to the public - is what makes our system work, though, of course, not perfectly.

Moritz’s key statement about corporations could be better restated to apply to the Marxist system he seems to favor. “The government made us among the poorest people on Earth. And it has ravaged our country and locked us into a system distorted by power, greed, corruption and waste.” It was too inefficient to provide for consumption. M.A. Kaufman Spokane

Moritz-bashing won’t fix real problem

Shame on you, Micheal Senske, Pete Brittain and Andrew Berg (Roundtable, May 2). Our Constitution allows a man (Russ Moritz, Street Level, April 28) to express his opinion, albeit one different from yours.

To lower yourselves to refer him to as like the Unabomber, as a no-growth, tree-hugging environmentalist, and then, Brittain, talking to your truck - come on, now.

You don’t have to look very far east (Silver Valley), north (Canada) or south (Florida and Brazil) to see unbridled corporate land use at its most destructive reality.

The one letter in support of Moritz’s column that day had no name calling and stated some very pertinent information concerning unethical means of achievement through government lobbying by certain corporations.

Moritz has valid points, to a degree. You each have valid points, to a degree. Without all philosophies working together we would not arrive at a workable world. Criticism and rendering judgments have always been the easy parts.

If you think corporations do no wrong, please, at least study the small, not-so-long-ago stretch of history between 1920 and 1929. History repeats itself is a cliche - or it is a reality? I say the latter, but only time will tell. If we blindly let the good times roll along corporate lines, America the beautiful won’t be again. Scoter Pischel Cheney

More at fault than corporations

Russ Moritz’s April 28 commentary, “Folks, you’re missing the gorilla on your doorstep,” is like the chickenand-egg argument. He tries to single out the corporation without an equally important link to government policy that exists on every issue.

Mention is made of corporate subsidies and crime but nothing of similar waste within the government. The consumer is somehow treated as a helpless, manipulated being, incapable of alternative choices, who just turns on the TV and follows directions.

Logging in the Selkirks and Cabinets is on public land administered by the Forest Service. From what I have seen, large timber corporations take pretty good care of land they own.

Moritz is ignorant of mining law, current mining environmental regulation and the economics of mining operations. This is evident in the three anti-mining paragraphs related to ASARCO’s Rock Creek Mine. Comparing the Rock Creek mining plan to what happened in the Silver Valley is like comparing bloodletting to heart bypass surgery.

It would be nice to see a level playing field between the corporation and the individual. Economist Milton Friedman once said the best thing government can do for free enterprise is to just get out of the way.

We have two gorillas on our doorstep that are being fed by a population that has lost touch with the roots of our liberties - the free enterprise system - and where things come from. Jack Satkoski Sagle, Idaho

Wage issue purely emotional, political

It’s no surprise to most of us in this election year that the minimum wage issue is again being dragged out by liberals as part of their class warfare, bash-the-rich strategy.

The question shouldn’t be: Should the minimum wage be raised to help low-income workers? Rather: Should taxes and regulations be cut to spurn economic growth and job creation? The answer is a resounding yes.

The minimum wage was not meant to be a living wage. The laws of supply and demand also apply to the job market. Only 4 percent of the work force earns minimum wage. Many of those who do are teenagers living at home, and they don’t stay at that level long.

Raising the minimum wage will cost jobs. An employer, faced with this mandated increase, will be forced to raise prices of his goods/services to maintain profitability; shift workloads to other employees, laying off minimum wage workers; or just not hire first-time workers, i.e. teenagers.

The minimum wage issue is purely an emotional and political issue. President Bill Clinton ruled out an increase three years ago because he didn’t think it was a good idea. Back then, he could have easily passed it when he had control of Congress.

Cut taxes and regulations on small business. It’s their money, not Clinton’s. Mark Duclos Spokane

ABORTION

Heretics have their crackpot say

This is in response to the article in which nearly 30 Protestant and Jewish leaders are quoted as lending their support for Clinton’s veto of legislation passed by Congress to ban a controversial late-term abortion procedure (“Religious leaders support Clinton veto,” News, April 30).

I find it incredible that they can claim to have reached their position from religious and moral principles, and from their belief in the sacredness of human life! I defy them to provide reference for any Biblical basis for their so-called religious or moral principles.

As for the sacredness of human life, the philosophical argument about when life begins doesn’t exist in this case as it does in other abortion debates. The baby is 95 to 98 percent born, alive and kicking when this most horrible procedure is imposed upon it to render it dead.

As for the mother’s health, since when is it beneficial to a woman to experience a breach birth? They say in the story, “Neither we as religious leaders, nor the president, nor the Congress - none of us - can discern God’s will as well as the woman herself, and that is where we believe the decision must remain.”

What an outstandingly crackpot position.

This is a live human being that is killed. Should we leave it to the mother to decide after the baby is a month or more old that it is her and God’s will to kill the baby? Why not?

These so-called religious leaders are a group of real sick puppies! Geddie H. Fredy Coeur d’Alene

Injustice brought on tears

I cried this May 2 morning, a sadness lurking deep inside, bubbling over and overwhelmed me in a way it never had before.

How can people of good will, people who abhor injustice and prejudice, people who hate violence, abuse and genocide, people who rail against man’s inhumanity to man, be so united in the push for “morality” in the immoral procedure called partial-birth abortion?

When President Bill Clinton is depicted as “crucified and Christ-like” for upholding puncturing the base of a baby’s skull with scissors and sucking its brains out until its skull collapses, and opponents of this unthinkable procedure are depicted as mean-spirited torturers and crucifiers … I cried this morning. Judith E. Scherer Spokane

Clinton earned characterization

Re: Steve Benson’s cartoon depicting President Clinton dropping a partial-birth abortion baby into a garbage can. One reader seems to think Benson crossed the line of decency.

The line of decency was crossed a long time ago. You were upset that the paper would print this “trash”? It was truth that the paper printed. Alberta Murray Elk

THE MIDDLE EAST

Israel Uncle Sam’s water boy, for a fee

Lee Corrigan (“Israelis go too far, too often,” Roundtable, April 27) asks why the Israeli military can terrorize Lebanese civilians with impunity. Corrigan’s own answer touches on anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and once-victimized Jews now victimizing Lebanese.

Being Jewish or not has little to do with what’s happening. Terror in Lebanon is some of what Israel does for the U.S. military.

Israel’s main purpose in the Middle East is to preserve stability for U.S. corporate interests (oil) and to ensure that no radicaliztion of the masses takes place under a powerful democratic leader or party.

The $5 billion per year of no-strings money plus $10 billion per year in loans are dollars U.S. taxpayers fork over to buy weapons and pay soldiers to gun down fleeing refugees. These payments are illegal under U.S. laws barring aid to terrorist nations. However, “terrorism,” like “the peace process,” is a technical term the U.S. applies only to terror it doesn’t condone. Israel dances to the Pentagon’s tune, as do obedient Islamic fundamentalists of oil-rich Saudi Arabia.

Israel has illegally occupied its West Bank war gains since 1967, and the U.S. government has steadfastly been the only nation to back Israel against unanimous world disapproval of keeping land gained by war.

Last months operation Grapes of Wrath in Lebanon is another sad example of U.S. great-power interests doing very ugly things to control an occupied, resisting people. If Israel wouldn’t agree to terrorize civilians, the river of money would stop immediately. It’s nothing religious; it’s realpolitick. The Israelis know it, too. Chuck Armsbury Greenacres

Israel a valiant, valuable U.S. ally

I disagree with Lee Corrigan (“Israelis go too far, too often,” Letters, April 27).

Corrigan has a good point on bloodshed and violence. They are despicable. However, Israel has had to fight at least four major wars in less than her 50 years, and has been since her reinception completely surrounded by sworn enemy states. She has repeatedly had to fend off evil at great expense and the peril to the nation. Thank God she has a friend in the United States.

It is very likely that without our assistance she may have already been swallowed up. Ironically, we depend on the security of Israel even more than we suspect. The Bible clearly points out blessings on those nations who support Israel, and a curse on those who despise her.

We can choose to condemn Israel for fighting for her very existence or support her as a valuable ally and friend. My better judgment suggests that we continue to support Israel. Robert Spaulding Post Falls