Letters for October 16, 2003

Thank you for so eloquently illustrating what liberals stand for. Your article shows your true colors and those of your liberal friends. It’s OK for you to say and do as you please (have another Diet Coke, Deidre) and at the same time be a screaming hypocrite when conservatives question whether or not liberals (and Democrats in general) really love this country.

What many of your liberal followers fail to mention is that America’s lackluster economy and threat from terrorists rests on the shoulders of your hero, William Jefferson Clinton. While Ole Bill was busy holding up his pants with his ankles in the Oral Office, he was committing treason by not protecting America. Who is responsible for the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001 and the need for us to be at war today? How about the guy who failed miserably at his job for eight years––Slick Pants Willie.

Thank God for reasonable Americans who can see through the liberals’ radical “I hate America” crap. One of your readers suggests we should “impeach Bush.” How about we throw Ole Bill in prison instead?

Jim Ballard
Reno

Free trade enslaves
Re “Globalization good” [RN&R, Letters, Oct. 2]:

This is a response to the letter decrying opposition to globalization. I am the local activist who went down to Cancun and who’s traveled through some of the Third World and seen what results when societies “open themselves to the change called globalization.” I’ve passed by maquiladora zones (on-the-border factories) in Ciudad Juarez and in Honduras where people are, in effect, indentured servants to the factory owners, working 10-hour-plus days for a barely livable wage, so we can buy cheap Volkswagens and appliances. I’ve seen hundreds of acres of woods and jungles cleared to raise cows for meat that is sent to this country, so we can eat in McDonald’s, while thousands of people in those very countries are hungry and starving.

I adamantly disagree with the statement that globalization and free trade have lifted the standard of living of the world’s poor dramatically—especially in recent decades. The notion of free trade is a lie. What is accomplished at the WTO by representatives of the world’s nations, the more powerful of which come representing their corporate sponsors, is protected and enforced trade for the rich and powerful nations and enforced submission through economic means for the impoverished and developing nations. It is not the protestors who pose a threat to efforts to end world hunger, poverty and ignorance; it is the WTO.

There are hundreds of sources for learning more about this, though one must look beyond mainstream nightly news reporting to hear a viewpoint differing from the corporate media party line. A good place to start is www.globalexchange.com.

Dan Gingold
via e-mail

Raid on ants
The ant works hard in summer’s heat, building his house, storing food for winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs the summer away. Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant is allowed to be warm and fed. The networks arrive and film the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home filled with food.

Jesse Jackson and the NAACP demonstrate in front of the ant’s house singing “We Shall Overcome” to rolling cameras. Harry Reid, Bill Clinton, the ACLU and PLAN exclaim in an interview, “The ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper” and demand a tax hike on the ant to “make him pay his fair share!”

The EEOC drafts the “Economic Equity and Anti-Grasshopper Act” retroactive to last summer. The ant is fined for failure to hire a proportionate number of odd-color, gender-friendly, secular bugs. Broke, unable to pay his retroactive taxes, the ant’s house is confiscated by the government, under siege by liberal Democrats.

Hillary Clinton gets her old law firm to represent the grasshopper in a defamation suit against the ant. The case is tried by a panel of federal judges, appointed by her impeached husband, Bill. The ant loses the case.

Finishing the last bit of the ant’s food under the roof of the ant’s repossessed house, which crumbles around him because he fails to maintain it, the grasshopper plays victim, waiting for his entitlement check.

The ant disappears. The grasshopper is later found dead in a drug-related shoot out at the ant’s old house, now abandoned. The house is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the once-peaceful neighborhood.

Moral of the story: Success is not an entitlement. Vote Republican.

Eddie Anderson
Reno