Letters To The Editor

Tue., Nov. 3, 1998

CITIZENSHIP

So much depends on you - vote

What is happening to our great nation?

Middle class America is dwindling. Corporations are taking over. Greedy politicians are bought and paid for. Our elderly are being kicked around. Loss of Social Security and medical benefits and corporations raiding retirement funds has become all too common.

Our children’s future is at stake. If we don’t stop this deterioration of our nation we will have only ourselves to blame. Middle- and lower-class working people are the majority. The majority must remind our “leaders” who they work for. We must stand up for our children, grandparents and ourselves. This is critical to America’s future.

The changes coming our way will not be for the good of the majority if the majority doesn’t speak. In America we have the right to be heard. It is time to make yourselves heard.

Voting isn’t just another right in America, it’s your responsibility. Make the government work for the people, and not just the ones with money. This is our country, too. Tell them we still know who this great nation belongs to. Let them know we still know why this nation was founded. Stand up for what’s right.

Get out and vote! Your children’s lives depend on it. They don’t deserve to inherit the problems we have allowed to happen. You have no right to complain if you don’t vote. Power to the people! Jack D. Anderson Newport, Wash.

GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS

Space: Time for a course correction

Re: “Visionaries, not bureaucrats” by Johannes M. Hacker (Opinion, Oct. 29). How typical that someone from the Ayn Rand Institute blames us liberals for NASA’s failure to ignite the American public with the grand adventure of space.

The Mercury 7 astronauts of the 1960s were just as much a political creation then as Sen. Glenn’s flight is today. Funding for orbital flights and lunar exploration resulted more from a perceived need to get there before the Russians than from the pursuit of pure science. The Pentagon linked up with the major corporations that depend on NASA for tax dollars to hijack space in the late 1970s. Since then, payload profit has been the driving engine behind the program, not the abstracts of research, science or heroic exploration.

To see NASA as a cog in the “welfare-state machinery” that has been transformed into a “foreign-aid program” is astoundingly naive. What is going on is the spectacle of our tax dollars (public money), lent to foreign researchers, coming back to us as corporate sales (private profit).

Rather than turning space over to “commercial, nonpolitical sponsorship,” a case of giving the foxes the keys to the hen house, we the U.S. public should insist that we get back on track the grand vision of exploration of the heavens - and wrest control away from the Pentagon and its puppetmaster industrialists. Fred Glienna Coeur d’Alene

We need sense, not skewed semantics

Re: “We need visionaries, not bureaucrats” (Opinion, Oct. 29)

I couldn’t have said it better than Johannes Hacker. And in keeping with the Clinton administration’s politically correct desire to avoid using such offensive words as “freedom,” much less something really inspirational, such as “international space station freedom,” we should also remember that phrases such as “power failure” have now given way to “power outage” to avoid any negative connotation to the inevitable mistakes that must be made in any progress. After all, we are not even allowed to fail any longer, but must be “retained at the current level of the curriculum.”

Particularly noteworthy was the comment I heard recently on public television relative to a Mir space station problem. The Russian commentator was relating the fact that the word “fire” was unacceptable to use in connection with the problem. It wasn’t, after all, a fire. It was merely “the unplanned burning of an oxygen cannister.” How reassuring for all freedom-loving Americans, to know that if one of their houses burns down tomorrow, it will not have been due to a fire but rather to the unplanned spontaneous combustion of faulty wiring or the unanticipated striking of a match by a 10-year-old boy at home alone after school while his mother was at work enhancing the financial well-being of her nuclear family. Judith Maibie Spokane

What’s wrong with this picture?

Re: Susan F. Martin’s Oct. 19 letter concerning the state welfare system being discriminatory.

I agree with Martin that the 80-year-old woman was born in the wrong country to receive welfare benefits, the United States.

I, too, was born in the wrong country to receive Social Security benefits. After working 29 years under Social Security-covered employment, I receive approximately half the amount new immigrants receive for whatever reason - immigrants who have not paid into the Social Security System.

I have appealed to the Social Security system requesting a hearing and have been ignored. Ed B. Booher Airway Heights

Leave health care to private sector

It’s a little more than ironic that those responsible for breaking our health care system are those traveling around the state, feeling sympathetic and saying they want to fix it. The problem is not the doctors driving around in their Lexuses nor is it the insurance companies and their corporate greed.

The problem is the government trying to stick its nose into private industry that it knows nothing about. The state’s solution is to take control. After pitting patient against doctor against insurance company, the state will step in and save us all.

The bottom line is, the state cannot pay for medical costs with anything except the money taken in (taxes). What it’s doing (for those on subsidized Basic Health) is taking in money through the tax system and paying it out so that it can determine who should have to pay how much.

Private insurance companies do not have the option of this brand of extortion and when it comes right down to it, who do you think would be the most effective - private companies that are forced to be profitable (“profit” is not a dirty word) or the government, which is not effective or efficient at anything. Gary M. Dean Spokane

BUSINESS AND LABOR

Kaiser plans bode ill for all Spokane

Just as real estate prices in a given area tend to influence each other, so do wages. If Kaiser succeeds in ousting the United Steelworkers of America and reducing wages at Mead and Trentwood to the $8-10 range common for Spokane semi-skilled workers, the rest of the area will be depressed as well.

The huge profits that “Chainsaw Charlie” Hurwitz and Kaiser executives made recently should be shared with the community that made them possible. Coater lab techs saved Kaiser $300,000 last year in coating costs alone. And hardly a day passed that some hourly wage person did not make a personal contribution to the bottom line worth thousands of dollars, yet Kaiser wants us to give up another hundred jobs and our retirees’ medical benefits.

If a rising tide raises all boats, Hurwitz and company are trying to sink Spokane. Another analogy is the tent pole. The highest wages and benefits in an area support people’s expectations for their own compensation. If you remove that support, then the next level (the top of your sleeping bag?) is the most they can expect. J. Steven Dodge Spokane

U.S. AND THE WORLD

Flawed policy fights the last war

The recent murder of Bishop Gerardi brings into sharp focus the poor human rights records of many countries in Latin America, especially Guatemala.

Our government seems to be able to discover human rights violations by nations far away but cannot detect violations by countries not far from our borders. Guatemala has a deplorable record on human rights dating back many years. But for some reason, our government has not discovered this and subsidizes Guatemala instead of being critical of its human rights policies.

Our government does this to combat communism in Latin America, seeming to not care one way or the other as long as a Latin American regime is anti-communist.

We can no longer afford to give our backing to states that terrorize their own people, regardless of whether they are anti-communist or not. Our policy in Latin America seems to be based on the theory that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. When we give our backing to a bunch of thugs, we become participants in this conduct.

Many of our leaders do not seem to know that the Cold War is over, even though our policy vis-a-vis Guatemala wouldn’t be fruitful even if that were not the case.

As Shakespeare said, “He who sups with the devil needs a long spoon.” Edward Doherty Spokane

MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES

Don’t tear apart services

Spokane Mental Health has many valuable years of providing excellent mental health services to our community. To fragment these services would cause confusion and lack of protection to a most vulnerable group.

I have been a client of SMH since 1981, when I was a single parent with a major mental illness. The phone number of SMH was always posted on my refrigerator and my children knew they could call that number day or night and receive assistance if I became unable to function.

I am also a registered nurse with many years of experience in psychiatric nursing. On the basis of my professional experience, I also rate SMH as an excellent organization, serving the needs of the community very well.

I’ve been told that the commissioners are not allowing public input at their hearing on this matter. How is it possible that they do not want to hear the opinions of the consumers who use these services? What does that say about their prejudice toward the mentally ill?

County commissioners, please do not tear apart that which has served us so well, especially not without first hearing from this vulnerable group of consumers. Ellen F. Perrine Spokane

Dismantling services a disservice

I commend County Commissioner Kate McCaslin for her admission that her action to request bids on the 1991-2001 mental health contract was based on insufficient knowledge and research (“Upheaval at Mental Health,” Oct. 7).

I expect her fellow commissioners could have said the same thing. I think she will realize this is a much bigger issue than she thought because of the numbers of people who get mental health treatment of one type or another.

Putting all mental health services provided by Spokane Mental Health Center and associated agencies up for bid individually makes about as much sense as saying we no longer need the Spokane County government; we’ll just put all its functions up for individual bids.

Spokane Mental Health has long been recognized nationally as a distinct and outstanding example of a mental health center. Allowing it to be dismantled would be a grave disservice to the community, the mental health center’s many underpaid and overworked employees and the people whose lives it touches. Many more than the “14,000 mentally ill people in Spokane” are helped directly or indirectly by this agency and its partners every year.

Furthermore, Casey Kramer’s plan would have a managed care company overseeing all community mental health services. The backlash against managed care companies confirms what is obvious: they manage expenses, not care, and take health care dollars to pay themselves.

I hope the commissioners will think long and hard about what would be the best thing to do. David G. Grubb, M.D. Spokane

Change will only be for the better

Spokane Mental Health is a monopoly and, like all monopolies, abuses its power and engenders stagnation while providing only as much as it wishes. It has made this a closed mental health community. You either go along with its practices and beliefs or you can’t admit your patients to the psychiatric ward at Sacred Heart Medical Center.

Like all monopolies, it fosters self-protection and self-enrichment. It walks in lock step with Child Protective Services and the local school district to the point that if your child is abused by a teacher here, you have nowhere to turn for help and, unless you can afford an attorney, no protection either.

As for “quality” of care, most people I know who have had dealings with SMH don’t feel there is any quality. In the past, the counselors you saw were not licensed by the state because they didn’t have the required degrees in psychiatry. Mental Health, because it was a monopoly, was exempted. The volunteers are also exempt and in a city so prejudiced as this one is, the risks of misreferral are too high.

So, Mental Health is breaking up. People will have a choice. They will have access to different treatment plans and to medication that the current powers may not approve of. And children who are being abused by teachers will have a voice in their defense - which they don’t have now. Judith Jones Spokane

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