Letters the week of 5/24/07

Affirmative attack

(Re: "Measuring Equality," Cover story, May 17.) Discrimination is discrimination. Or isn't it? The concept behind affirmative action seems to suggest that discrimination is only OK as long as its victims are white men. At the same time, it's impossible to ignore the fact that white men hold most of the positions of wealth and authority in our country. So what do we do as a society? I don't have an answer.

But what's silly about the proposed ballot issue isn't its critique of affirmative action, but the fact that it wouldn't substantively change policies within the state of Colorado. If we're going to alter the constitution, shouldn't we have a strong reason for doing so?

I appreciate the fact that talking about race in the United States is like walking a minefield, so hats off to Grace Hood for strapping on the Kevlar and giving it a go, even if the tone of her article was blatantly in favor of affirmative action.

Robert Gordon/Fort Collins

Praising PW on QE2

A friend of mine forwarded me Pamela White's Uncensored column, "An apology to QE2," and I just wanted to thank you. It made me laugh, which these days, given the state of our nation, isn't the easiest thing to do. I thought it was right on and said so many things the rest of us want to say.

Paula Kramer/Fairfax, Va.

Danish has no plan

(Re: "Climate change and radical change," Danish Plan, May 10.) I have read several of Paul Danish's recent columns that convey his "nothing we can do" attitude about global warming. It increasingly seems that Mr. Danish is short of ideas in this time of much-needed new visions, whether he is psyched out from Chinese pollution or the methane from cows or advocating building nuclear reactors here in the Front Range, which is a non-solution due to nuclear waste toxicity.

Danish claims that nothing can be done about global warming because China is experiencing a revolution (an industrial one), and their government will not curtail its people's hunger for carbon-based energy. However, Danish fails to note that the already industrialized nations are also undergoing a revolution. Their people want to live in societies that respect nature, that curtail pollution and waste, and that address the burgeoning problems of social and environmental injustice, which includes global warming. Danish misses the point that the developed world is edging toward a sustainable revolution at the same time China and India are industrializing.

The free-market fundamentalists (including libertarians) are partly to blame for the climate problem, as relaxed trade rules and the World Trade Organization have allowed corporations to move their manufacturing to areas that have primitive environmental and labor laws. With the proper leadership, America could have set an example and exported its best sustainable technologies to China and India to stave off this foreseeable problem of carbon emissions and exponential consumption.

However, the deregulation of the corporate world has led to a situation in which special interests, like monopolized energy companies, have a stranglehold on policies such as conservation, efficiency and clean energy. This will be one of the huge negative legacies of the conservative movement, among others. Reforming the corporate system, which is destroying the global environment, is what we as a society should be debating.

Libertarians and free-marketers should be applauded for advocating freedom, both personal and corporate. However, they need to answer some new questions now: Will people be more free if living systems on the planet continue to decline and weather patterns shift for the worse? Will our children be more free if they inherit a compromised and toxic natural world with exhausted resources?

Giving corporations free reign does not add up to increased freedom for all. Pretending that the free market will solve our environmental problems is not responsible thinking.

Douglas Dupler/Boulder

Good riddance, Tony

I have always kind of dug the British way of doing things (truly, it was forced upon me) and still trust the common man's informed, political common sense over there.

My older sister has been revisiting her high school in Kent, England, and she confirms that this remains true. Common people have a common sense about this war, and they recognize above all how unnecessary, expensive and tragically wasteful in terms of the thousands of lives lost it is.

Tony Blair started out as a promising star of the British Labor Party until he succumbed to Bush and Cheney's thirst for American Empire or International Manifest Destiny/Pax Americana. His popularity, like Bush's, is at an all-time low, and I'm sure people there are as relieved to get rid of him as we are here.

Good riddance, mon.

Grant D. Cyrus/Boulder

Health-care woes

I am writing to express support of HB 1355. This bill is a necessary and initial step in health-care reform. We need to stop discriminating against individuals who have health conditions they have no control over. People with mental-health issues do not choose these disorders — they have no choice. We do have a choice about stopping insurance companies from punishing an entire company if one of its employees becomes depressed and needs to treat the disorder appropriately.

Mental illness is the leading cause of disability in the United States and results in 217 million days of work lost annually due to productivity decline, which is more than most chronic conditions. Each year, businesses accrue $116.6 billion in substance-abuse costs, $205 billion untreated mental-health costs and psychological problems account for 65 to 85 percent of employee terminations. The total estimated loss to Colorado businesses due to absenteeism linked to untreated depression is about $886 million per year and $170 million in medical costs.

Health insurance should protect consumers, not insurance companies. The governor needs to support HB 1355; Colorado cannot afford to wait.

Chris Habgood/Greenwood Village

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