Letters To The Editor

BUSINESS AND LABOR

Kaiser’s ‘better deal’ really lame

It is time for Chris Bowen (Letters, Nov. 30) and the other Steelworker bashers to understand that it is those “good jobs” the Kaiser workers are fighting for.

Sure, Steelworkers get union wages and benefits. But does the better deal Bowen talks about include paybacks for making the company profitable in the 1980s? Does it include the security longtime employees need and deserve for spending their working lives in the service of the company? Does it continue to provide the insurance and retirement benefits that labor organizations bargain for and that their members and families depend on?

It appears that so-called better deal does include erosion of seniority and benefits, mandatory overtime and elimination of union jobs.

Union members do not strike because they want to. They do not strike to “whine.”

Unions must choose battles worth disrupting their members’ families and lifestyles. They rarely do that when it’s only about wages. More often, it’s to protect the things they bargained for in the past, things that make the job good, that keep workplace issues fair. And they fight for things that keep those jobs at home.

Bowen must realize the entire community benefits from union jobs and, most likely, that he makes more because unions raise the standard of living by bargaining for better wages and benefits. Nonunion employers must offer more to compete for quality labor.

Maybe he should quit his job and join a union. Dave R. Scoville, chairman BMWE Local 325, Spokane

Kaiser woefully mismanaged

When we left Trentwood Sept. 30, I assessed conditions at the plant:

Production levels were high but product quality was questionable.

All the equipment was in poor condition and being run into the dirt - again.

The plant was extremely dirty and our health and safety were at risk.

Maintenance personnel were being asked to work overtime every day.

Pro-active crews no longer existed, as we were doing reactive work only. Production scheduling and lack of maintenance personnel did not allow us that luxury.

The amount of contaminants seeping into the aquifer and river was horrendous.

Hundreds of work orders for safety upgrades, some initiated years ago, were not completed. It gives one the feeling Kaiser’s safety program is a sham.

George Haymaker did not lie when he said Kaiser could and should eliminate 600 to 900 jobs. Kaiser management is rabidly topheavy. Cuts should be made in upper-middle and upper management. No business can afford this incompetent, archaic management style. Why doesn’t Haymaker clean the useless, destructive deadwood out of his ranks and hire back the hourly people he needs to operate the plant effectively? He could even step into the 21st century. If he doesn’t, it’s doubtful Trentwood will survive. Marshall W. Bussard Spokane

Wasting big bucks fighting strike

Thank you for your interview with the Erickson brothers, Kaiser employees. The public hasn’t heard enough about the employees’ side of the strike. It’s been told of cuts taken by employees to help Kaiser out of difficult times, but too little has been said about the long hours and hard work endured by the blue collar men and women who have kept the white collar people in their high-paying jobs.

I repeat a part of the Erickson interview that refers to resting and napping on breaks: “The heat in the pot rooms is so horrendous, you’d race through and rest - you had to stop and try to recover.”

They need to recover because they are working 12-hour shifts in temperatures that can reach more than 200 degrees. They suffer heat burns, chemical burns and scald burns from sweating. They earn every dollar they get! They work overtime to raise their standard of living but sacrifice personal time with family.

All the retired people called back to keep Kaiser going are mostly blue collar people and they certainly earned their retirement. They didn’t cross picket lines out of loyalty to Kaiser, but because Kaiser is paying unbelievably high wages. Does this make sense?

I would like to see an accounting of money Kaiser has spent to avoid paying its employees what they deserve. My guess is, it far exceeds the benefits the Steelworkers are after.

Steelworkers’ income helps support Spokane and outlying communities. We will all feel the result of this strike. Joy L. West Spokane

Kaiser has taken the low road

Isn’t it extraordinary that a company that professes to be available “24 hours daily” survived just a few hours with the Steelworker’s Union before it turned down the latest union proposal?

The complete inability of Kaiser to operate in good faith, to observe basic tenets of human decency and to appreciate long-term, hard-working employees may be a surprise to anyone who hasn’t suffered under Kaiser and it’s primary owner, Charles Hurwitz.

We were quite certain Kaiser would try to starve us though Thanksgiving; it’s apparent that starving us out of Christmas is the latest goal.

Kaiser initiated this strike as early as last January, when it began to crucify the overtime hours so many Kaiser employees depend on. It’s important to note; the company quote that the average employee makes $60,000-$70,000 annually is a blatant lie, unless they count the highly paid company employees or the overtime shifts most salaried workers must maintain in order to make a decent standard of living.

Kaiser spent millions training scabs, cutting operations and training company robots to spill out company rhetoric. Rhetoric doesn’t equate with truth.

Not only have we lost our paychecks, we’ve lost insurance benefits, our ability to pay our bills and, most of all, the belief most Americans are brought up with - that we should be able to create our own destiny.

Never have I lived where hard-working, loyal employees are treated with such a lack of concern. Spokane, this affects you. For every dollar our striking employees lose, the community loses. Refuse to deal with a company that does not honor contracts or basic human decency. Terri Mead Chattaroy

IN THE PUBLIC EYE

Judges will face God’s judgment

In the Old Testament, there was a famous king over Israel named David. One day he saw a young lady bathing on her house top. He desired her. He had her brought to him and she became pregnant. He tried to cover it up by trying to get her husband to come home from David’s army for a furlough. The husband refused, so King David sent him to the front of the battle to be killed.

God sent the prophet Nathan and told the king of his sin. The prophet never got up a committee to impeach the king, for David said, “I have sinned, forgive me.” God did forgive him. If there had been a Christian Coalition, pastors and right-wing Republicans in those days, they would have pulled King David off his throne and stoned him to death.

In our time, another leader of a great nation had an affair with a young woman. His name is Bill Clinton and he tried to cover it up, but he was found out. He, too, cried out, “I have sinned, forgive me” and God did, but not the Christian Coalition and some pastors. They cried, “Impeach! Impeach! Get him out of office at any cost.”

Who is justified before God? Those who sin and are forgiven or those who judge and don’t forgive? Lavern A. Taylor Spokane

Anti-Clinton team still pointless

Well, fancy that! Susan McDougal was cleared of all charges. The charges were deemed frivolous.

President Clinton was cleared of all wrongdoing in Whitewater and the other investigations after Ken Starr searched under every rock.

Yes, Clinton had an affair. He kissed and didn’t tell. That covers about half the men in America.

And Starr, former counsel for Big Tobacco, couldn’t destroy Clinton, couldn’t make Clinton so weak that he could be pushed around where the $366 billion tobacco settlement that Republican congressmen turned down was concerned. How great that Washington state’s attorney general, Democrat Christine Gregoire, led the charge to nail the tobacco industry anyway.

Too bad, Starr. You tried your best to protect the tobacco industry by destroying Clinton.

What was so great was that Starr and his right-wing cronies couldn’t fool the American people. Let’s give ourselves a round of applause! Sally Jackson Spokane

GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS

Neither party has patent on badness

I should be used to right-wing rantings in this newspaper, but the Nov. 28 letter from a man in Colville was really over the top. He blames the Democrats for everything except possibly original sin.

Excuse me, but I was under the impression that the biggest defenders of big tobacco and gun manufacturers and distributors were Republican congressmen.

Human beings have many faults and do many bad things, but their political affiliation has nothing to do with it. Greed, avarice and moral decay are evident in some people within both parties, but do not negate the good that others do. The lack of responsibility that he decries has more to do with personal values that people choose to follow, not politics. Dorothy E. Carter Spokane

Democrats, mind your precedents

Forget Bill Clinton for a moment, if you can. Despite what happened in this state, nationally, more Americans voted Republican in the midterm elections than voted Democrat, especially in state and local races. That fact and the polls indicate that the next president of the United States will probably be Republican.

That Republican president will serve under conditions now being decided by the impeachment process in Congress. The impeachment process has a different purpose than a court, whose purpose is to protect society from criminals. The impeachment process is to protect an office from unacceptable behavior by an incumbent. A failure to impeach for certain behavior establishes that behavior as acceptable, just as impeachment establishes that it is not.

The second article in the bill of impeachment for Richard Nixon was lying to the American people. He resigned before the House voted on the bill of impeachment and sent it to the Senate for trial. Had the House done so, whether the Senate removed him from office on those grounds or not, that would probably have inhibited lying to the public afterward.

Many Democrats don’t even want Congress to investigate the charges of possible impeachable offense, but they should consider the prospect of having President Bush II (or Steve Forbes, Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, or fill-in-the-blank) with immunity from impeachment for lying, even under oath, and using the vast powers of the office to obstruct any investigation of wrongdoing.

That is the issue. Edwin G. Davis Spokane

U.S. AND THE WORLD

Urge closing of infamous school

Few people have heard of the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) in Georgia. If they had, more of us from the Northwest would’ve joined the 7,000 in protest at the school’s gates Nov. 22.

For decades, SOA has trained Latin American soldiers to suppress the basic rights of their people. The Department of Defense admits that teaching methods of torture, execution and extortion were a regular part of the curriculum. More than 450 SOA graduates have been implicated in human rights abuses. Massacres, including atrocities against women and babies, too terrible to mention were commonplace throughout Central America in the 1980s. Many such acts were carried out by SOAtrained death squads. Priests and even American nuns have been murdered by SOA graduates.

But these horrendous acts are not a thing of the past. And as long as our taxes keep the School of Assassins open, murder and rape will continue to plague some of the poorest people in the world.

Our Mexican, Central and South American neighbors have suffered enough through U.S.-instigated military coups, bloodthirsty dictators such as Manuel Noriega (an SOA graduate) and deadly hurricanes. In this season of goodwill and compassion, and to show solidarity with the victims of U.S. foreign policy, please help to end the suffering and oppression. Contact all your political representatives and continually urge them to close the School of the Americas, in the name of justice and democracy. Lupito Flores Kennewick

OTHER TOPICS

Story reveals socialist, anti-gun agenda

The Nov. 25 article by Jill Labbe of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, regarding President Clinton and his attack on gun sales, is both informative and predictive. It plainly clarifies the gradual political drive to collectively disarm the law-abiding citizenry. It predicts the eventual political takeover and establishment of absolute authority (oligarchy) over these disarmed citizens.

The amazing revelation of the process is that our obvious socialist society is letting the Clinton-Schumer-Brady bunch get away with it.

As a veteran, when called to duty, I don’t recall any political effort directed toward disarmament. Just the opposite. Like so many, we were taken in to serve the political demands (called national interest). We were armed, trained, dispatched to various arenas to further dispatch the politically declared enemy, then rewarded for doing so.

Now, however, political whims satisfied, we can no longer be trusted with guns except for political dirty work to be done.

I, like so many others, served with honor. For me, this attack on gun ownership is not only unconstitutional, it is an insult to my honor and integrity, both civil and militarily.

Today the brown shirts, tomorrow the Gestapo. Surely, the public can’t be so blind or indifferent to their loss of freedoms. Or could it be I don’t see the big social picture? William H. Turner Deer Park

Let me clarify statements about Marks

Re: “Abuse convictions force man from job” (Dec. 2).

Jonathan Martin misquoted me as saying that the conditions of Wiley Marks’ parole were that he could not be left alone with vulnerable adults. The conditions of parole were that Marks was not to be unsupervised with children under the age of 16, a population which at that time CORD provided no services for.

I did state, however, that as Marks was hired to an administrative position, rather than as a service provider, he was not in a position to be unsupervised with those considered to be vulnerable adults. Kelly R. Busby Spokane

Exceptional park needs protection

Granby Provincial Park, located north of Grand Forks, British Columbia, is a breathtaking and gorgeous country; it is wild. “Super, Natural British Columbia” may have been a Granby visitor’s brainchild.

When Granby Park was created in 1995, the boundaries excluded a crucial piece of the park’s ecosystem, the Traverse Creek area. A mix of river canyon, old-growth cedar and hemlock forest, grizzly bear habitat and historic native trails, these 1,900 hectares form the gateway to Granby Park.

In fact, most visitors to Granby never leave the Traverse Creek area, thinking they’ve seen the park. This is also the home of the Granby grizzly, which has adapted to dry land conditions, may be genetically unique and is considered endangered in Washington.

What’s the threat to Granby Park? Clearcuts are planned for the Traverse Creek area by Pope and Talbot, an American logging corporation based in Portland. Clearcuts will also hurt the growing tourism industry in the region while fragmenting the Granby grizzly’s habitat and the migration corridor between Granby and Gladstone parks, rendering the park’s genetic islands of extinction.

How can this area be saved? Fortunately, the British Columbia government is in the midst of protecting additional hectares in the Kootenay-Boundary region. The Granby Wilderness Society and a number of conservation groups have officially proposed to protect the Traverse Creek area.

This is a small request considering most of the unprotected wilderness around the Granby and Gladstone Park will be roaded and logged by the year 2002, according to forest development plans. Elizabeth Allen, ecosystem defense coordinator Kettle Range Conservation Group, Republic, Wash.