Latest bailout has strings attached
To the Editor:
So Congress and the Bush administration finally agreed to a bailout of Chrysler and GM. This bailout, in the form of loans, is quite different than the 350 billion in freebies the financial institutions have received so far.
For one thing, there are strings attached - performance measures and wage cuts by labor. The Treasury Department has been begging them to take the cash and do whatever they want to with it, while naively thinking some benefit may trickle down to struggling homeowners and businesses.
It sure isn’t working out that way. In a recent survey by the Associated Press, none of the financial institutions receiving TARP funds could, or would, disclose where the money went. JP Morgan Chase, which received $25 billion in emergency bailout money said: we have not disclosed where the money went to the public and we’re declining to do so.
Declining to do so? These are public funds! If a small business received a grant from the federal government and then “declined” to say where the money went, they would be thrown in jail.
If there wasn’t class warfare on small businesses and the blue collar workers before, there certainly is now. The fat cats on Wall Street who screwed up this economy with their greed get buckets of money shoveled at them with no strings attached, while the autoworkers get a forced pay cut and the rest of us can only watch, stunned, while the economy collapses around us.
Eric Olsen
Goldendale
KVH should be accountable
To The Editor:
I have been writing articles to the editor for the past three years and trying my best to inform the people of the financial status of our locally-owned hospital, Klickitat Valley Health (KVH).
When the former C.E.O and C.F.O were drawing up contracts and making up severance packages, I told the hospital board they needed to pay closer attention, but they would not listen. Now they are saying at public budget hearings these people entered into various kinds of contracts and severance packages without board approval.
One of the severance packages cannot be located, or was misfiled or discarded by the former C.E.O. Also, one of the best physician assistants is about to leave our hospital because he cannot get the board to give him a valid contract and has been working almost a year without one.
He is working himself to death at the family practice clinic, as well as in the emergency room, and not even making as much as some of the KVH administration.
I, for one, have told the board I will hold them accountable if we lose him. Please contact the hospital board at KVH and demand that action is taken on this contract.
Delbert Brown
Goldendale
Stop payouts to eco-groups
To the Editor:
This is in response to the Letter to the Editor last week on dam proposals:
Dave Thies and the Columbia Audubon Society, which should not be confused with the National Audubon Society, is at it again.
This group, started by Dennis and Bonnie White, threatened to stop the Rabanco dump and got a payout of over $1 million and a percent on all tugs, trains and truckloads that go into the landfill, and they get a cost-of-living adjustment that increases each year. If businesses providing living-wage jobs are made to wait long enough they’ll pay people off or “grease the skids,” as my lawyer called it.
More groups emerged, sensing developers will pay rather than wait after these groups lose, appeal, lose, appeal, ad nauseum. How about this: No cash payouts to any of these groups.
Much of this is hearsay, so I’m asking for concrete statements to send to the district Economic Development Committee, commissioners, state reps, senators, congressmen and the state attorney general to investigate if there’s a case for organized crime and extortion.
Perhaps the RICO Act is appropriate as it appears the same people are behind these different litigating groups. Perhaps we should pass a law making these groups pay damages when they lose.
John Gotts
White Salmon
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