Speak Out 6/27/11

Littering

FOR Mayor Rediger, you got to remember that everyone under 70 is a young person. Go get 'em Harry. I don't see too many over-70 folks tossing beer cans and liquor bottles.

Financial meltdown

A few years ago, when the country plunged into the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression, many of us thought politicians would face up to the terrible consequences brought about by unregulated greed. Instead, it seems that some very misguided politicians have decide to take it out on teachers, policemen, fireman and other public employees who had nothing to do with the shadowy, criminal world of collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps and offshore "special-purpose vehicles" that were the real cause of the problem. With absolutely no regulations on these criminals we can expect another meltdown in the near future. As long as we continue to let corporate lobbyists write our laws this will continue the destruction of the middle class in America.

Real competition

I agree with Congresswoman Jo Ann Emerson's point in her editorial June 21 in the Southeast Missourian that we need competition in the health insurance industry. However, I hold Republican obstructionists responsible for preventing a meaningful incentive for real competition in the private health insurance state by state monopoly by pulverizing the attempt to include in the Affordable Health Care Act a public option. That would have forced the competition the congresswoman correctly claims is lacking.

African vacation

I want to go on vacation but can't afford it. I don't see why I must help pay for Michelle Obama and her children to go to Africa on vacation and I can't afford one for myself. It appears to me there is something wrong with this picture. Millions of Americans out of a job and can't afford to even feed their families as they would like to, and Michelle Obama takes a vacation to Africa on taxpayer money. Don't try to tell me this is a business trip. We all know we don't take our children on business trips. These people have little respect for the working-class people of America.

Political issue

YOU just knew the decision to blow the levee at Bird's Point would eventually become a very partisan, political issue. Believe it or not, some Republican critics of the decision are now saying the levee was blown because Illinois is a blue state and Missouri a red one.