Letters in the Editor's Mailbag.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Deregulation opened door

The survey regarding the collapse of Enron and WorldCom, conducted by Barna Research and reported in the July 26 Register-Guard, was completely flawed. Deregulation wasn't offered as a choice for the root causes of corporate bankruptcies, but the deregulation that began with President Reagan and continued non-stop all the way through the Clinton presidency is what opened the door to the crooks.

Greed has always been with us. Ken Lay, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, et al. didn't suddenly become more greedy, they simply became less regulated, and that gave them the opportunity to rip off their stockholders. (For specifics, check out Molly Ivins' column in the same day's edition.)

Ironically, Republican presidents kicked off both the regulation and deregulation movements. But unlike Reagan and Bush, Teddy Roosevelt understood that unleashing greed is a bad idea.

FRED M. COLLIER

Eugene

Give president free hand

In the early days of the ballistic missile programs, when failures were many and successes few, we called missiles "civil servants." Why? Because they wouldn't work and you couldn't fire them. Many of the problems we have with the war on terrorism are caused by bureaucratic bumbling and protection of turf.

Few who read this will remember World War II. During that war President Franklin Roosevelt had authority to hire and fire whomever he pleased for any reason or no reason at all. It didn't matter if his action conflicted with civil service rules or union agreements.

We are now in just as serious a war with opponents who mean us just as much harm as the Japanese or Germans ever did. Our commander in chief should have the same authority as did Roosevelt and Harry Truman. The quibbling over the wording of the homeland security bill is simply done by politicians to frustrate the president.

The president needs to be able to clean house in the new agency and prune away whatever dead wood is causing difficulty.

CALVIN W. HURD 

Florence

A home-grown enemy

Homeland security? Domestic acts of terror? Will big businesses such as Enron, WorldCom and their ilk (i.e., George W. Bush and Dick Cheney) continue to get away with holding us all hostage as they further erode our national security in the most basic of ways?

Never mind al-Qaeda; our worst enemy is the wolf tending to us, the sheep.

BEATRICE GRACE

Eugene

Closure's ethics ignored

We, the staff and board of Sexual Assault Support Services, want to voice our support for the former staff of the All Women's Health Services. We are also concerned that the clinic's staff, community and clients were not notified prior to closure. Even clients who had appointments on the day the clinic closed were not informed.

This clinic performed many needed functions for our community. It provided high-quality naturopathic and primary care medical services, and hosted a women's acupuncture clinic. It also provided accessible abortion services to all of southern and much of eastern Oregon. For many women, traveling to Eugene was already a financial and logistical hardship. Many women - particularly low-income women - will no longer have access to abortion services, so how can abortion be considered an option?

Clinic administrators want the community to believe this was a sudden business decision. We cannot let this rest so easily. The clinic did more than conduct business. Administrators had an obligation to consider the impact that the clinic's closure would have on women's lives, and how it would affect the availability of necessary medical services. This was much more than a "business" decision - it was an ethical decision, and should have been considered as such. Not taking the time to work with the local medical community to meet women's needs is tantamount to medical abandonment, a much more serious offense than a poor business decision.

As the staff and board members of an agency that works to help women meet their medical, legal and emotional needs, we find the closing of this invaluable community resource deeply disturbing.

NANCY GLINES, Executive director

CAROLINE FORELL

and DONNA MATTHEWS,

Co-presidents

Board of Directors

Sexual Assault Support Services

Eugene

Closure is good news

The hand-wringing and angst expressed in Bayla Ostrach's July 22 guest column may be understandable when the closure of the All Women's Health Services is viewed as people losing jobs. But for many, the closure is good news, because it brings relief from its relentless taking of human life.

No medical director has been forthcoming; few doctors in our area offer abortions. Is it any wonder? Who could live in a home built or furnished with the blood money of hundreds, even thousands, of babies?

Ostrach and others have expressed shock, etc., that women from California to Salem are now (euphemistically) "without services." These women will, in fact, find it more difficult to take their children's lives; they may need to undergo the discomforts of nine and a half months of pregnancy and experience childbirth. They may give their child up for adoption - or, on seeing the beautiful and innocent face looking to its mother for love and life, they may decide that the demise of All Women's Health Services was fortuitous indeed.

Babies and children are not disasters; our ways of avoiding them, however, are disastrous. We throw out the bath with the baby: Social Security funds dwindle because fewer people work to sustain them, schools close (a classroom of 30 children a week, according to the All Women's Health Services figures), and we all become a little harder and colder. To me the sun shone brighter and Eugene looked more beautiful than ever on the morning the All Women's Health Services clinic closed its doors forever.

BARBARA BREADEN

Eugene

Tax studded tires

All the concern about the deterioration of the streets and who should pay for the repairs ignores a major source of damage. We have traveled over all of the 48 contiguous states, and nowhere except Oregon and Washington is there evidence of rutted roads resulting from studded tires.

If these tires are so important to the users, let them pay a substantial fee. Snow park permits are sold to those who want access to snow-related recreation. If snow access is so vital that studded tires are the preferred way to travel, let there be a fee each year of $100 per vehicle with an extra $20 per tire over four. At least such a fee would be applied on a basis of "he who rides must pay," and not some illogical political basis.

L.F. SMITH

Eugene

U.S. aids Palestinians

Nadia Sindi's July 27 letter to The Register-Guard is filled with false accusations.

The reality is that the United States has sent hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinians, especially through U.S. Agency for International Development funding - more than many other countries contribute to their welfare. The Palestinians also receive humanitarian aid from Israel and assistance from the United Nations. Unfortunately, the Palestinian Authority leadership has proved to be corrupt, so the people do not get all the aid that is intended for them.

In addition, the U.S. also spends billions on foreign aid annually to Egypt, Jordan and other Middle East countries.

Sindi's paranoid conspiracy theories match those by some others from her native Saudi Arabia, where human rights and democracy are extremely limited, and where the majority of the people apparently refuse to believe that most of the Sept. 11 terrorists were Saudi Arabian Islamic extremists. Her anti-Semitic canards about the Jews are completely false, and her depiction of Israeli Prime Minister Sharon as a fascist war criminal is also false. Sindi's notions are simply not credible.

LIBBY BOTTERO

Eugene

See forests from ground

Unlike the two men from the timber industry whose July 20 letter supported logging national forests, I haven't been in a plane lately. However, I've seen things from the ground that they seem to have overlooked.

I've seen the effects of fire on old growth as I've hiked through the area of the 1991 Warner Creek fire. When I first saw the area in 1996, it was full of foot-high seedlings of fir, hemlock, cedar and pine, growing among ferns and wildflowers. These plants thrived in the shade of the burned trees, even on the hot western slopes. The seedlings are now over four feet tall.

I've also hiked through replanted clear cuts. One had been replanted unsuccessfully several times. Its latest trees looked sickly in the bare and eroded soil. Even when the trees thrive, nothing grows around them but thistles and blackberries. Few plants have the root systems to survive the hot fires and herbicides that accompany clearcutting.

Seen from the ground, a replanted clearcut looks sterile and monotonous, while the Warner burn has a vitality and beauty that have thrilled hundreds of hikers.

The Warner burn was saved from logging by protesters who built and occupied an emcampment in the road. They wanted the burn to grow back naturally to show people how well a burned forest can recover on its own. At least five of these protesters have fought forest fires. At least three are doing so right now.

CAROL FEINBERG-McBRIAN

Eugene

Whose hands are clean?

I read in the July 24 Register-Guard that President Bush was thinking of sending a reprimand to Israel for bombing a home in the Gaza Strip, destroying the founder of the armed wing of Hamas but also destroying his family and others. That was very unfortunate. Why he hid there among his family is one question. But I began to wonder what nation's hands are so clean that it could throw the first stone of condemnation.

My country bombed innocent civilians in Nagasaki and Hiroshima to speed the end of World War II. I still feel pain for that. What about the Germans, whose hands are bloodied forever by their crimes; the English, who massacred an entire Indian gathering of innocent people as well as having a history of arrogance, cruelty and murder we can read about in any history book; Russia, famous for its massacres; Turkey, which massacred the Armenians, etc.? Certainly those Arabs who have a philosophy of murdering innocent citizens not of their belief, sending them to Allah for judgment, are in no position to judge.

While I hope we have progressed to the point where nations no longer murder innocent people, we cannot throw stones.

ANN WHITE

Eugene

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