LETTERS

LITTLE ROCK — Dummies’ politics primer

Bradley Gitz refers to Americans as “ignorant” and a “nation of dummies” because we do not understand how shipping our jobs to foreign countries is actually beneficial. He enlightens us with wisdom from a Dartmouth economist who has concluded that companies create more and better jobs in the U.S. by sending American jobs to foreign countries.

Gitz really must think that we are all products of a “dumbed-down public-education system” to believe such drivel.

Who among us American “imbeciles” really believes, for example, that Whirlpool will bring twice as many jobs back to Fort Smith now that it’s moved to Mexico? A 2006 study by Ann Harrison of UC-Berkeley and Margaret McMillan of Tufts University concludes: “The premise that foreign expansion of U.S. multinationals encourages employment at home is a myth.” Yet this myth is necessary so “vulture capitalism” can continue its quest for maximized profit-before people while academic apologists and politicians provide cover.

The week before Gitz’s column ran, Senate Republicans voted to keep tax breaks for companies that send jobs overseas and not reward them for bringing jobs back home. Their position should tell working folks whose side Republicans are on.

In short, Gitz and his masters can try to send our jobs overseas, lower wages, bust unions and take away benefits we have paid for all our lives, but he should not tell us we are stupid just because we know a rotten deal when we smell it.

M.J. SLAUGHTER

Fayetteville

Let’s crack some eggs

The president’s comments concerning the “you didn’t do it alone” concept is a chicken-and-egg discussion. Of course business needs infrastructure to grow and prosper, but that infrastructure didn’t exist when this nation was in its infancy. It was built on the blood, sweat, tears and sacrifice of early settlers who carved the roads out of the wilderness and began to move goods and provide services where there were none before.

Government was almost an afterthought as it was decided to grow further and the need arose for a more centralized method of maintaining and growing the infrastructure. We the people decided it was a useful thing to establish a bureaucracy to maintain what we had already built while we created businesses to provide more funds for that support.

I believe the sad truth is that the only people in this country who have not directly contributed to our growth and our greatness are the professional politicians (like our president) who have never held a job in business or created anything at all. And the only truly useful government employees are the military who daily risk their lives to ensure that we remain free to pursue any goal we wish.

KENT GOLDSMITH

Conway

Proceed with caution

Penn State had to be punished hard. No organization will ever again be tempted to turn a blind eye to the possibility of such a horror occurring under their leadership.

However, there is a problem when people lead in an atmosphere of fear. Trust is lost, and one person with an ax to grind can turn a person’s life upside down by making false accusations to an administration which, facing the fear of such punishment, is tempted to make a rush to judgment, turning lives upside down without the substantiation of facts.

If you don’t think that it can happen, consider the Duke Lacrosse team before all that horror was resolved. Even though it ended well for the young men accused, theirs was a nightmare that I would not have wanted to have.

THOMAS LAKSO

Russellville

On misleading writing

Bradley Gitz, has strained, if not broken, the bounds of journalistic ethics by selective quotations and perverted writing, in my opinion. Recently he said (in part): “Government at all levels consumed only 8 percent of gross domestic product in 1913. . . . 15 percent by 1938 . . . 30 percent by 1980, the year Ronald Reagan was elected president. It is now 36 percent . . . Congressional Budget Office [predicts it] will rise to 50 percent within [25 years] with calamitous fiscal consequences.”

Granting columnists some discretion in cherry-picking of the historical record, this goes too far, right up with taking quotes out of context. Some detail to clear the record: Government spending in the first decade of the 20th Century was about 7 percent of GDP, spiked in and after World War I to about 25 percent, then fell to about 12 percent in the 1920s. In the Great Depression, spending rose to about 20 percent. World War II government spending peaked at just under 53 percent in 1945, dropped back to about 21 percent after the war, but then steadily climbed under Republican and Democratic presidents until it hit a peak of 36 percent in the 1980-82 recession. Thereafter, government spending was in the mid-30s until the mortgage meltdown of 2008 under the presidency of George W. Bush. Bank and auto bailouts pushed spending to wartime levels of 45 percent.

I see Gitz’s efforts to paint a steady and sinful rise in government share of GDP as simplistic, misleading and shoddy.

ROBERT JOHNSTON

Little Rock

No social engineering

I have been a member of the Boy Scouts of America since I was a Cub Scout in 1948. I was scoutmaster of a troop that had as many as 85 scouts at one time, and led 32 scouts on the trail to achieve their Eagle rank. Parents who entrust their sons to our care are confident that we take our responsibilities seriously. We develop healthy/wholesome relationships with these young men that continue. Many scouts do not have dads involved in their lives. We teach them by example how real men perform their duties and responsibilities to God, country and family.

I can’t tell you how proud I am of the Boy Scouts of America for reaffirming its position on gay scouts. Boy Scouts is not the place for social engineering.

BOB GILLSON

Fort Smith

Dirt road to recovery

Re Floyd Ray Hickerson’s take on Sheffield Nelson’s quest to increase the severance tax imposed on the natural gas industry: Floyd Ray spouted on about the six inches of new asphalt laid down on state-maintained highways in Van Buren and Conway counties from tax dollars already generated by the industry.

I live in Conway County. We live in the country. We live and drive on dirt roads. We all have to coexist with the constant barrage of tractor-trailer rigs and endless dump trucks during the fracking process of a well.

These behemoths come five at a time, every 30 minutes, 24/7, for three days during this process. These trucks wreak havoc on our country dirt roads. The damage is foreign to city folk. It’s called washboarding. It can literally shake your vehicle uncontrollably into a ditch, or worse yet, into an oncoming vehicle.

The county coffers need the increased revenue to repair these dirt roads. Of course, we could just leave this country life that has been taken away from us anyway and move in with old Floyd Ray. That way, we wouldn’t have to witness the disappearance of our once-pristine countryside meadows that have been replaced with towering derricks and rumbling trucks destroying our roads at an alarming rate.

Politics aside, I support the severance tax, for obvious reasons. I live here.

STEVEN A. PALADINO

Center Ridge

Sole solution: Change

The editorial about the Aurora shootings was, as usual, well-written and seemingly “fair and balanced,” which is not quite as usual. With clarity, it identified “the same separate but equal banalities you hear after every one of these dreadful things.” The bases were covered-more gun control, guns don’t kill people, intent of the Founding Fathers, God’s judgment, Democrats’ surrender to the NRA, today’s music and movies, mental health issues and treatment, the criminal-justice system, “bleeding-heart liberals” and “Bible-beating red-state Neanderthals.” Then praise for both presidential candidates for pulling their ads, offering their sympathies and their silence. Oh, the clarity of silence. But silence is not a permanent sanctuary and neither is it a solution for the unimaginable but ever-expanding list of mass killings.

I agree that there is a time for all seasons and sometimes the season is silence. But seasons change. Our country’s growing list of innocent citizens killed by demented gun owners demands more than a period of respectful stillness. It demands change! Not stillness, not silence, not banalities, but change. Sadly, the growing list of mass murders is all that we can expect to change.

But rest assured, we will be given notice by this paper’s editorial staff when the requisite period of silence demanded has expired when they, again, begin to offer up favorite “banalities” from their well-rounded list, no longer banal, likely to be used as reasoned and historical justification for inaction on changes to gun laws.

KEN GRAVES JR.

Benton

But it isn’t autumn yet

The falling leaves drift by my window, in the summer, leaves of green and brown.

My apologies to Ferrante and Teicher.

AL JANSSEN

Little Rock

Not a laughing matter

The Independence County Fair had its usual lineup of rides, entertainment and food, but one stuck out-it was the St. Mary Catholic Church advertising its “heavenly hamburgers” as “sinfully delicious.”

I realize this is an attempt at humor, but is everything joke-worthy these days? Can you imagine Jesus selling sheep in Jerusalem with a banner over his stand reading “Buy your lamb from the Lamb of God”?

Just like bomb jokes are not appropriate at an airport, why is sin something for a Catholic Church to joke about? I believe in the constitutional right to speak, but I also believe that sin is no joking matter, especially considering the source.

DAVID HALBROOK

Batesville

Calamities have come

People wonder why there is an increasing number of droughts, floods, tornadoes, fires, etc. I believe that God has started to judge the world for all its wickedness and man-made traditions. That includes Christmas, Easter, drunken New Year’s, etc.; none are from the Bible and are instead from pagan practices. They added the “mas” to the title “Christ.” In the last part of God’s word, it says that if anyone adds or takes away from his word, he would add to him the calamities written in the book. And the calamities have surely arrived on Earth.

HERBERT PAGE

Conway

Feedback

It’s called integrity

I’m continually amazed that Penn State supporters can’t seem to understand why they are being penalized so heavily by the NCAA for the 12 years of turning their heads from a sick, twisted, perverted and disgusting, dirty old-man assistant coach. It’s almost like they cannot quit drinking the Kool-Aid or are a part of some cult of Joe Pa.

At least the leadership at the University of Arkansas had the integrity to not put football first when they let go of a popular and successful coach who went on a Sunday ride and didn’t come back (minor apologies to Bruce Springsteen).

LANCE THOMASSON

Pine Bluff

Farewell to paradise

Watching the “progress” in the days-long demolition of Ray Winder Field in Little Rock and pondering the UAMS parking lot set to replace it, the lyrics from Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” came to mind: “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”

MIKE WATTS

Little Rock