Thank you again, Free Lance, for your always-objective
journalism, and for printing a wide array of viewpoints, rather
than pursuing a thinly-concealed
”
ideological agenda
”
, as some papers do.
Dear Editor,
Thank you again, Free Lance, for your always-objective journalism, and for printing a wide array of viewpoints, rather than pursuing a thinly-concealed “ideological agenda”, as some papers do. That’s why we know we won’t waste our time writing this response to the February 22nd Guest View, (by someone who lives in San Diego), that implies by citing only WISCONSIN’s “cheesy” statistics – that our nose-to-the-grindstone LOCAL public-interest workers haven’t ALREADY “bitten the bullet” to help balance our city and county budgets.
Though it’s John Steinbeck’s birthday, it’s not fiction that we worked our way through grade school in the local fields before a then-“radical” change: the installation of “port-a-potties”. The deadly e. Coli bacterium was common in those fields, with their literally obscene working conditions, before Governor Jerry Brown’s prior incarnation and some unionization of farmworkers. (Fair-minded family farmers “had a tough row to hoe”, and said they could ill-afford such health precautions, if their Big Agribusiness competitors weren’t also required to provide sanitation.) Steinbeck, (whose father was Sheriff of Monterey County), observed in his 1930’s Nobel-Prize-winning “The Grapes of Wrath” that the “can’t even eat on that” 5-cents-a-bucket strike-breakers earned wold drop 2 1/2, if the off-duty deputy sheriffs hired by big corporate growers-in those long-gone “BAD old days”-as union-busting “goons” broke the pickers strike. That prophesied the declining pay-and-tax bases in today’s economy.
This paper has accurately and assiduously reported our snowballing budget crisis. A “small p” party of spendaholics trippled our national debt between 1981 and 1989. President Clinton inherited a $290 billion deficit and, with help from Republicans, balanced the budget and started paying off the national debt;spendaholics doubled that national debt again between 2001 and 2009. “Voodoo-spendaholics” bankrupted our country with tax breaks for scheming Wall Street billionaires and job-exporting multinational corporations during military misadventures costing us 3 trillion dollars (once the last shattered soldier’s treated). Now they want to kick their addiction by only giving up their least favorite brand of liquor: paychecks for the only groups left to stand up to them and Wall Street “banksters”- teachers, cops/deputy sheriffs, firemen, and other public-interest workers.
But those good folks in THIS county ALREADY took the painful “furlough.”
Karen and Tom Lantz, Hollister
