by David M. Kinchen
Editor, Huntington News Network
Hinton (HNN) — This is the seventh installment of an occasional series
expressing approval or disapproval of recent news events, commentaries, etc.
Thumbs Up for approval; Thumbs Down for disapproval. I welcome
contributions, which will be credited in the item. Contact me at
davidkinchen@hotmail.com.
THUMBS DOWN to the state of West Virginia for not acting rapidly to come to the aid of Hinton to stop the landslide that threatens the city in and around 11th Avenue and Temple Street. Since the fall of 2004, the slide has forced the evacuation of three houses and has destroyed the sidewalk and cracked the pavement of Temple Street, also known as Highway 20, a main access road to Interstate 64 and the outside world. Mayor Cleo Mathews says correcting the slide problem would cost at least $1 million—mostly in the form of a retaining wall. The city has no money for the wall. Not even a promise has come from the folks in Charleston, Mathews says. The retaining wall is being designed, but neither the state Division of Highways nor the so-called rainy day fund has come up with the cash to build it. In the immortal words of the late great bluesman John Lee Hooker: “I need some money.” Come on, Bob Wise and Joe Manchin, do the right thing: Fix our sliding hill! If it were in Indonesia or Sri Lanka, somebody – maybe Sandra Bullock – would have donated the money.
THUMBS UP to Paul Krugman, a respected economist at Princeton University and a New York Times columnist, for writing (in the NYT, Jan. 4, 2005) that the proposed Bush Administration privatization of Social Security “will fatally undermine Social Security….“ --- fixing a program that has worked fine since it was created 70 years ago this year. Krugman refers his readers to his “long-form debunking” of the administration’s propaganda in the online journal The Economists’ Voice (www.bepress.com/ev).
In his column Krugman states: “Here’s the truth: by law, Social Security has a budget independent of the rest of the U.S. government. That budget is currently running a surplus, thanks to an increase in the payroll tax two decades ago. As a result, Social Security has a large and growing trust fund. When benefits payments start to exceed payroll tax revenues, Social Security will be able to draw on that trust fund. And the trust fund will last for a long time: until 2042, says the Social Security Administration; until 2052 says the Congressional Budget Office; quite possibly forever, say many economists, who point out that these projects assume that the economy will grow much more slowly in the future than it has in the past.“
Just the other day—Jan. 6, 2005—the New York Times reported that Bush’s own party is divided on how to allocate funds in the proposed private accounts, which depend on the stock market for their returns. I’d rather take my chances on the dogs in Cross Lanes or a lottery ticket at the Pit Row on the Hinton bypass! Stay tuned, for more, as the powerful AARP and the vast majority of Democratic Party legislators gear up to oppose the privatization plan, which more and more reminds me of the disastrous attempt by California to deregulate its utilities, the latest creative accounting effort at Fannie Mae and a series of business ethics malfunctions too numerous to repeat here.
THUMBS UP to Cathy Seipp, a West Coast-based columnist for National Review Online and a member of Dennis Miller’s “Varsity” panel, for recently calling for an end to the use of the word “neocon” or “neoconservative” as a code word for Jew. Seipp denounced this practice as a form of anti-Semitism on a recent Dennis Miller show. Using the word “neocon” is a specialty of Pat Buchanan on the extreme right and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd on the left. I admire much of Dowd’s work, but her “Bush World” book and audio seemed to me over the top in the use of this coding. America’s Jewish community is loyal to this country and – like most of the nation’s gentiles – supports the right of Israel to exist and prosper, along with Turkey, which has diplomatic relations with Israel and is also a democracy. These two nations are the only two in their neighborhood that are democracies. American Jews as diverse as Norman Mailer, Gene Hackman, Harvey Keitel and “Catch-22” author the late Joseph Heller have served this country honorably in the military. The loyalty of the Jewish community in this nation shouldn’t be called into question any more than the support of Ukrainian-Americans for democracy in that country, or justifiable pride by Greek-Americans in the success of the 2004 Olympics in Athens. View Pictures.