Letters To The Editor
OVER THE LINE
Ski hill getting dairy’s treatment?
Re: Schweitzer Mountain. In a recent article, U.S. Bank’s chief attorney, Peter Holmes, remarked, “We can’t have the same people managing who have proven to be inadequate managers in the past.” We learn that those same managers have handled Schweitzer since 1963.
Holmes also pointed out, “Schweitzer had its best season while under (attorney Ford) Elsaesser’s charge” - Elsaesser being U.S. Bank’s and Holmes’s choice for court-appointed receiver.
Odd, though, 34 years - and Elsaesser and Holmes had the “best year.” Not bad for a couple of lawyers. Perhaps they ski as well.
The last major bankruptcy handled by Holmes and U.S. Bank was the Foremost bankruptcy in which 120 Washington state dairy farmers lost nearly everything they owned. Readers may recall a Spokesman-Review article describing the Congressional hearing where Holmes and the directors of U.S. Bank were called “bad faith actors” by a bevy of dairy industry representatives.
In addition, their “management” of Foremost became fodder for a new and more detailed study of dairy processing company failures. Add to this a two-page article about Holmes and U.S. bank in the Wall Street Journal that detailed a grand jury investigation into the financing of Foremost and it does raise some doubt regarding Holmes’ statements about the owners of Schweitzer.
Most troubling is the obvious fact that U.S. Bank seems to have become involved in the financing of two separate companies, both suddenly bankrupt, but both with a line of buyers a mile long.
This could lead to a rerun of U.S. Rep. Charles Stenholm’s (D-Texas) statement regarding Foremost: “What the bank did was pitiful.” J. Michael Yeager Deer Park
Property owners’ antics keep getting by
Re: “Big landowners able to ax tax bills,” (Dec. 7).
The ability of some North Idaho lakeshore owners to shift more of their tax burden to the public while diminishing the public’s lakeshore access has struck me as a taxation-without-representation issue since long before I saw this in the newspaper. I daresay it’s a trend that will continue until, if ever, taxpayers organize to challenge it. Philip J. Mulligan Spokane
SPOKANE MATTERS
Want your power rates to go up?
I do not understand the people who complain about gas and electricity being so expensive.
When utility companies hold public meetings about increasing costs to customers, very few people show up. Then, after the price of gas, electricity or telephone service increases, everyone is unhappy about it.
Sometimes, most of the people who show up to testify at these public hearings are stockholders who favor a rate increase.
Please, people, pay attention. Washington Water Power Co. will hold a meeting for public testimony at the Education Service District offices, 910 N. Ash, on Dec. 17 at 7 p.m. Please attend - or don’t complain in the future. M. Elizabeth Berg Spokane
Emissions test all cars on our streets
What’s all this about drivers who live outside the city not being required to have emission tests? A huge amount of these people drive through the city every day, to work, shop or whatever, and contribute to the foul air of Spokane.
Every car on our streets should have to have an emissions test and a sticker that shows they did. Maybe then we would have some progress in cleaning up our air. Dorothy S. Carter Spokane
LARCENY
Happy face and its sentiment both gone
I rent a small space in a large indoor marketplace here in Spokane where I sell crafts and antiques. I’m a single mother of a 7-year-old boy. I collect happy face McCoy pottery. These items make me happy.
I’ve been short on money lately and decided to part with one of my happy face cookie jars (big yellow smiling face with “Have a happy day” painted on the bottom). I priced it at $90 (high book is $100). Whenever I look around my small booth, I gaze at my cookie jar and smile. I’m sure it will make whoever buys it happy, too.
Yesterday, I noticed the lid of the cookie jar was gone and I began to cry. A dealer or collector must have had the cookie jar without a lid (they are hard to find) so he or she decided to help themselves to mine. I cried most of the day and night.
What is this world coming to? Something as petty as that! I want that person to know that this act has hurt me deeply. How ironic that what that smiling cookie jar stood for, in my eyes, was happiness, peace and love. Happy holidays! Perhaps other people have stories about getting ripped off during the holidays. I’d love to hear them. Jennifer Lee Salmi Spokane
Nativity thief will get comeuppance
It was very discouraging to find the beautiful Nativity scene missing from our front yard on a recent morning. Someone decided to show how daring they were and stole it in the night. The did it, in my opinion, to impress someone. They more than likely tossed the pieces into the garbage.
I’ll admit I was very angry for awhile. That anger turned to hurt. I hurt for the person or persons responsible for this because God will punish them.
Most important, let’s not forget the true meaning of Christmas, which is the birth of Jesus Christ. Folks, don’t let vandalism and theft deny us from showing this. Pamela M. Billington Spokane
PEOPLE IN SOCIETY
In givers’ faces, a beautiful sight
There is power in wealth and those who are generous with what they have are the most powerful of all.
Powerful was the 82-year-old woman who bequeathed nearly $20,000 to the Christmas fund. If she was a widow her gift was certainly more than a “mite.”
Yet, there remains power in the giving of a mite. Has there ever been a more beautiful front page photo (Dec. 8) than the 10 beaming children offering their four-months’ savings ($44.92 of sacrificed allowances and birthday money) to other children they cared about more than themselves? Greg G. Wilkinson Spokane
Casto children bolster my faith
After reading your story on the Casto children (Dec. 8), my faith in the future of our society is feeling much better. Thank you! Tim B. Osborn Pullman
Exotic dancers can do better
Reading the article, “Deja Vu,” I was appalled. Although I’m only 15 years old, I’d like you to hear me out.
As for the subhead, “I didn’t have a choice,” everyone has a choice. It may not be glamorous but we all have a choice. A living can be earned in other jobs. You may have to work twice as often, but it is a choice.
As Alicia Erickson said, yes, Jesus loves her. But he is sickened by what she does. Romans 12:1 states, “Dear brothers, I plead of you, give your bodies to God. Let them be a living sacrifice, holy, the kind you can accept.” Romans 12:2, “Don’t copy the behavior of the world, but be a new and different person with a fresh newness in all you do and think.” Is taking off your clothes and creating fantasies for a room full of strange men a holy testimony?
I feel extremely overwhelmed that an 11-year-old should feel the need to lie about his mother’s job because he feels ashamed or embarrassed by it. Jacque Steeve Spokane
THE MEDIA
Killings should be attributed to hate
I am writing in wonder about the 14-year-old who allegedly shot Christian students as they were gathered for prayer. What if these students had been homosexuals, blacks or Jews? The media would be crying out about hate crimes and for the need to crack down on perpetrators of hate.
Why is it that since they were Christians being shot by an atheist, it isn’t considered a hate crime?
I feel for the victims and the young murderer, and pray for each accordingly. I feel, though, for justice’s sake, that we need to call it what it is: a hate crime against Christians. Let’s not leave out Christians when they are victims of hate. Tom E. Schulz Colville, Wash.
HEALTH CARE
Market’s values bad for what ails us
Editor Chris Peck’s insight into health care capitalism is badly biased by his naive and misguided enthusiasm for the market-based medical reform that is presently misshaping and restricting health care for a growing number of Americans (Perspective, Dec. 7).
HMOs, bloated with investor capital and seeking the best return on their investment dollars, are eagerly enrolling the profitable healthy, excluding the unprofitable sick, and offering doctors “incentives” (aka: bribes) to become cronies in greed, collusion and profit-taking.
Hospitals are being taken over at a record rate not because HMOs are more efficient. For-profit HMOs are actually 8 percent more costly per patient than nonprofits. It’s happening because of fraudulently inflated billings, exorbitant payoffs to executives and board members, and kickbacks to doctor-investors and investment bankers.
The losers in this race for a better bottom line are the patients.
Instead of the once vital human relationship that used to exist between doctor and patient, care seekers now face the fine print of the HMO contract and it’s cold, profit-driven imperative of serving not patients but stockholders.
In the headlong race to commercialize medicine, we find shortened hospital stays for new mothers, elderly patients warehoused in cheap nursing homes, mental patients denied treatment, doctor choice curtailed, financial incentives that reward under-care, business arrangements that allow corporations to control patient care, access to health care restricted, and the pursuit of corporate profit the new nexus of medicine.
Welcome to the wonderful world of marketplace medicine. Russ Moritz Sandpoint
GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS
IRAs just more government nonsense
Re: Front page Dec 4. article subtitled, “New Rules offer more people a chance to save, buy a home or pay for college.”
Indeed, some lawmakers seem to think they’re offering us something; a great opportunity, more choices, hurray for the tax-cutting Republicans!
Is anyone buying it? Does anyone else feel like a circus animal, jumping through a bunch of arbitrary hoops, when we should be walking free in the jungle?
Government doesn’t really “give” anybody anything because it can only take - rob Peter to bribe Paul. We’re the ones earning our retirement, home and schooling; it’s our energy, tears and wisdom that create wealth, while government is nothing but a loaded IRS gun, waiting to shuffle our wealth around for the political benefit of the Washington, D.C., thugs pretending to help us.
Isn’t it time we end the federal income tax - not flatten, replace, or reform, but stop the thieving altogether? How much better could our money be spent by us?
Think of trillions spent on empty wars the last 50 years, billions spent on welfare and failing retirement schemes that have corrupted America’s social structure, countless billions spent on medicine (rising costs, fewer choices, declining quality), federal law enforcement (Ruby Ridge, Waco, drug war, Richard Jewel, crime), price subsidies and corporate welfare (fouling the market while helping only an influential few).
Am I some kind of extremist weirdo because I don’t realize how badly we need strong federal government to take care of us?
IRAs are nothing but a politician’s worthless Band-Aid on a bloodbath caused by government. Greg D. Holmes Spangle, Wash.
Commentary too presumptuous
Seldom is one subjected to so much overt bias as that dished up in Paul Lindholdt’s “A wake-up call for xenophobes, a revival for the avaricious” (Roundtable, Dec. 7).
Lindholdt opens with an explanation of freedom of speech, stating in passing that freedom of speech is something abused by “hate groups.”
I presume Lindholdt, as do leftists, defines “hate group” as any group espousing a more conservative philosophy than that espoused by Lindholdt and his ilk.
In the course of the article he managed to subtly ridicule older people, those who fear one-world government, religious people, conservatives and others. In addition, he was able to expertly offer up explanations of what the audience was thinking - a remarkable feat of intuition in light of the fact of his liberalism and the audience’s conservatism. How could Lindholdt possibly know that they were “wondering when Russians would be pounding down their gates,” or that the audience “shuddered in dread” at something asserted by the speaker?
I suppose this is what one should expect from a man who describes Al Gore’s impractical, unprofessional, unscientific book, “Earth in the Balance” as a “practical cultural analysis of our environmental crisis.” As you may recall, Gore offers, as a partial solution to our environmental problems, banning of the internal combustion engine.
Lindholdt’s bias against opposing points of view is disturbing but one would hope that instead of ridicule he could employ substance and objectivity in debating same. Gene K. Ealy Coeur d’ Alene
OTHER TOPICS
Decide barging issue scientifically
The salmon recovery debate is reaching the point where some groups are trying to get politics to replace science. The various groups that want to breach dams on the Snake River seem to believe that will not happen until smolt barging is stopped.
The fatal flaw in that logic is that more evidence is building up that shows there is a better return of adult salmon and steelhead when the smolts are barged than when the smolts are left in the river.
In 1995, 250,000 Chinook smolts were PIT tagged at Lower Granite Dam. Part of them were released into the river and traveled through all the dams, while the rest were barged to below Bonneville. In 1997, when the first of the class of 1995 fish returned, the ratio of returning adults to the counting station at Lower Granite Dam was 2-to-1 barged smolts over in-river smolts.
Since many wild Chinook are three ocean fish, there will be more of the 1995 class returning the summer of 1998. The final results of this carefully crafted study won’t be available until after the 1998 upstream migration of the class of 1995 is complete.
Are proponents of “no barges” so afraid the results of this study will support barging that they are now mounting a political drive to legislate the elimination of barging? Good science does not rule out alternatives until the data show it should. Society cannot solve complex biological problems with political positions any more than a kindergarten class can determine the sex of a cat by voting. Hobart G. Jenkins Athol, Idaho
We expect lower fuel prices
In your Dec. 1 front page article concerning weapons inspector visit to Iraq, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan was quoted, “It will be necessary to increase the amount of oil sold by Iraq …” The article went on to say, “thousands paraded through Baghdad in a mass funeral for children whose deaths are blamed on U.N. sanctions.”
Now that we’ve been manipulated into releasing more Iraqi oil, we feel certain that our own gas prices in America should decline, making it possible for American families to have more cash on hand with which to feed our children. Mr. and Mrs. Scott Mihalchean Spokane