Burma disaster and American aid

Myanmar (Burma for the older crowd) — this country controlled by a military government since 1962. Longer than many of this paper’s readers have been alive.

For most of these 45 years they have shown a desire to be left alone and have little or nothing to do with the rest of the world. Especially the evil countries in the West. A government that held “free” elections in 1990 but when they didn’t like the outcome, refused to step down and allow the newly elected government to take over. And, as usual with governments like this, protesters are often shot in the streets, jailed, or only beaten if they’re lucky.

As of May 3, large areas of their southern coastline no longer exist due to a cyclone. A storm that the state-run radio and TV services apparently didn’t think important enough to interrupt the regular broadcasts praising the government to warn their citizens about.

So now the appeal (read demand) goes out to the world they’ve done their best to ignore to pour aid into their country. All this to help prop up a government that by all civilized measurements would be described as repressive at best and more accurately as totalitarian.

But, off we go again. Doing the same thing the United States has done more times than any of us can count. Standing ready to pour millions and more likely billions of dollars into yet another country that will be more than happy to tell us what evil people we are as soon as we’re done feeding and healing their sick and injured.

Time after time, we as a country repeat the same actions in our seemingly guilt-driven desire to be the food and welfare bank to the world. We keep hoping that this time the “locals” will like us more after we’re finished. Just when was the last time that worked out?

I seem to recall that one of the symptoms of insanity is performing the same action time and time again and expecting a different result.

Ted Salmons, Lebanon

The letter was written before Burma started refusing or confiscating Western aid. On Friday it allowed a U.S. cargo plane to bring in aid, but it still refused to admit foreign aid workers.

It must have been an oversight

Mr. Thomas Kraemer has reached an incorrect conclusion to the “missing analog pass-through” problem he says digital TV converter boxes have (to allow continued use of older analog TVs). Step by step he blames “President Bush’s appointed FCC chairman,” then the “Republican-controlled FCC” for the problem. Finally he advises, “Beware that Republicans limited the total number of coupons to save tax dollars.”

Mr. Kraemer, I can assure you such a problem, if it exists, was only a slip in engineering, most likely an omitted specification in a bid purchase design; it had absolutely nothing to do with politics.

At worst, the decision to allow stations to continue analog broadcast came after the box design was done. I worked almost 34 years for two government agencies, several years specializing in video design. This was simply a design oversight.

The design flaw you speak of (passing an analog signal through for certain channels) is a far simpler path than that required for digital-to-analog conversion as the digital channels require.

Somewhere in the design process no provision was made for the scheme to do this.

So leaving this simple circuit out of a complex box is simply an oversight, it wasn’t somehow “engineered” by Republicans.

Gary Hartman, Lebanon

The true costs of energy

In the May 4 Viewpoint, “‘Green’ should not cost more,” Hasso Hering commented that using less energy is the best way to save both money and the natural world. This is true, but is naive given the negligible prospects for a real reduction in total global energy use as global affluence and population increase dramatically.

Most of Mr Hering’s commentary, however, is aimed at convincing readers that the relatively high cost of “green” energy (e.g., Pacific Power’s Blue Sky program) is evidence that energy sources like solar and wind power are currently not sensible alternatives.

This argument would be reasonable if conventional energy was sold at full cost, but it is not. Costs are undoubtedly increased by producers’ compliance with environmental regulations. However, regulations are simply policy tools that set some balance between multiple economic and social goals. They guarantee neither minimal damage to the environment nor the long-term health of the biosphere.

Sooner or later we will pay the hidden costs of carbon-based energy, including a lower-quality environment and forced adaptation to land-use and marine ecosystem changes. Those who pay a premium for Blue Sky or put solar panels on their roofs, do so with the true, long-term total costs of carbon-fuel energy production in mind.

Laurence Padman, Corvallis

Health care for everybody

“Why not just swallow our pride and steal, as in copy, a (health care ) system that already works ?”

Right on, Hasso Hering!

Every industrialized nation in the world beats the U.S. health care system hands down! We spend twice as much, rank No 37 on various quality factors including longevity and infant mortality, leave 47 million people without any coverage and about that same number who are under insured!

Winston Churchill once said, “I can always count on the U.S. to do the right thing....when all else fails!”

But Dr. Marcis Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, thinks we can change our dysfunctional , costly system. “It’s not impossible.” She proposes that there be a single risk pool, everybody in, nobody out. Everyone is provided whatever health care he/she needs without regard to age or medical condition, including medications, mental and dental health, long-term care.

She says, “The most progressive way to fund such a system would be through an earmarked income tax, based on ability to pay..., eliminating premiums, deductibles, co-pays.”

Dr. Angell says, “Yes, we can.”

None of the proposed reforms offers any workable mechanism for controlling the unsustainable inflation of health care costs. So let’s join Dr. Angell and tell our elected representatives yes, we can!

Yes, you can by supporting a single risk pool as the pathway to “Everybody in, nobody out.”

Betty Johnson, Corvallis

Corporate taxes: The other side

Joan C. Wheeler (Letters, April 27) has her Biz School Catechism down cold. I don’t know who is the “successful leader” she quotes saying “the most dangerous myth is that business can be made to pay a larger share of taxes, thus relieving individuals.” But we have all heard about how profits are reinvested, producing growth to make the pie higher.

And we have seen how big corporations operate in the real world where their leverage can manipulate markets and their profits and jobs are sent abroad. And we have seen wealth concentrate in a small elite while the public is stripped of our assets.

This dogma of our economic religion about taxes ignores the fact that private owners of public corporations make a lot of money using the publicly financed infrastructure of America. Taxes are how they pay us back for what they use. Those who benefit greatly from what has been invested in America need to pay back personally; but the institutions generating that wealth need to pay for what they use as well.

Don Caughey, Corvallis

Taxes hurt economy? Not really

In response to Joan C. Wheeler’s anti-tax rhetoric, I must disagree with the premise that taxes are bad for the economy.

Tax money doesn’t evaporate or disappear into an abyss. It is put back into the private sector to build and maintain the infrastructure that is vital to our national security and economy. Tax money spent here, in America, is actually an economic stimulus. The money spent in the war is negative economically. The only American companies that profit from the war are those that have an inside track with Bush or Cheney.

It is very true that we need better oversight of government spending. This has been a great dilemma in the government, as well as in the companies that are awarded government contracts. Corruption is the real problem.

I appreciate the discussion. People on all sides need to have open minds and accept other points of view.

Doyle Winston, Brownsville

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