PUBLIC FORUM\U.S. workers harmed by sale of technology.

As an aerospace worker for over the past 16 years, I have gained and lost by U.S. trade with other nations. The problem is that U.S. corporations are willing to sell the technology used to make their product in exchange for big foreign contracts. They do not care where their products are made; they only care about making a bigger profit.

If this is the cost of belonging to a world market, U.S. corporations should be required to give some of the profits we helped them make to retrain workers for other fields of work. Executives receive golden parachutes or bonuses while employees get taxed for using the money they saved in a company saving plan after being laid off.

Federal retraining programs like the Job Training and Partnership Program are limited to the latest "hot or growing" professions and hurt those industries by overloading these jobs, causing more unemployment and lower paying jobs.

American corporations do not want to be "world class manufacturers." They want to be world class brokers of technologies.

- George Martinez

Lancaster

Rent control rebuttal 

I wish I'd had the opportunity to speak to columnist Dennis McCarthy prior to his publication on March 7 of a one-sided view about Proposition 199.

Proposition 199 intends to bring about one simple, needed change - the gradual phase-out of mobile home rent controls. The initiative ensures that those who have rent control at the time of the election will keep it as long as they live in their homes, whether that is for one year or 30 years.

Rent control may have seemed like a good idea many years ago, but it's had unintended consequences far worse than the problems it attempted to solve.

Rent control creates a premium value for the tenant-owned coach sitting on rented land. That overpriced coach must be paid for by the same low-income families the laws were enacted to to protect. Basically, people are charged thousands of dollars extra to acquire the rights to a rent-controlled home. Of course, overpaying at the front end negates the advantage of having lower rents.

In the past 15 years California lost more than 200 parks and their several thousand housing units, largely as a result of rent control restrictions. That's a serious loss of affordable housing that is unlikely to be replaced; there is simply no incentive to build a park that may be regulated out from under an owner.

- Dennis Wolcott

Californians for

Mobilehome Fairness

Los Angeles 

Okinawa rape verdicts

Regarding guilty verdicts for three U.S. servicemen in the rape of a Japanese school girl, March 7:

Six or seven years in prison doesn't seem like enough punishment for kidnapping a 12-year-old school girl then brutally raping and beating her so badly she had to spend two weeks in the hospital. But I suppose we must take comfort in knowing that these convicted rapists will be serving their time in a Japanese prison and not in an American prison.

In Japanese prisons, prisoners work, eat, sleep and do what they're told. If they don't, they're punished. And if there are any "prisoner advocates" who try soliciting sympathy for the "cruel and unusual" punishment prisoners suffer, they'll find that the Japanese people have no interest in anything that imprisoned child rapists have to say.

It is only in America that we elevate criminals to celebrity status, rewarding them with media coverage and financial gain for committing crimes against innocent law-abiding adults and children.

- Annie Caroline Schuler

West Hollywood

I was elated upon hearing and reading about the stiff sentences meted out to the three Americans who raped the innocent 12-year-old girl on the small island of Okinawa.

I was there in 1945 and we servicemen had a reason to be there, but why are we there now? Let's put our tails between our legs and get out of there.

- William Fleishman

Van Nuys

Marathon left a mess

On the day after the L.A. Marathon, at Figueroa and 27th streets, yellow "caution" tape was strewn on the ground near a couple of traffic sawhorses. I gathered up the tape and since there was no dumpster to put it into, I stuck it under the sawhorses, hoping that whoever retrieved them would also dispose of the tape. The next day the sawhorses were gone, but the tape was still there, in a pile in the gutter.

Is it too much to expect even the city of Los Angeles to refrain from littering - or to expect the mayor to ever say a word about it? Has L.A. come to mean Littered Area?

- Joe O'Brien

Panorama City

Crime and guns

Regarding 1994 violent crime rates in California cities, Daily News, Feb. 20:

Very enlightening, but not surprising in this decaying society we live in in Southern California.

I guess the Los Angeles City Council, the Los Angeles Police Commission, the district attorney, the county sheriff and the police chief overlooked these facts when they all took positions of opposition on the proposed concealed-weapons legislation in the state Assembly.

- George H. Carver

Los Angeles

In response to the Public Forum "Violent crime" on Feb. 26, I agree with the questioning of why Los Angeles has one of the highest violent crime and murder rates in the United States. However, I also agree that firearms need to be controlled. I don't agree that all guns should be banned, especially from individuals who have been effectively trained and responsible in its use.

I do believe that one of the answers lie in restricting the accessibility of handguns, such as the Saturday night specials, from the perpetrators of violent crimes, particularly in our youth. This is the segment of our community most affected by handgun violence.

This issue is currently being addressed by the California Wellness Foundation, which has developed a public service announcement for prime time television. It communi-cates that more adolescents die from gunshot wounds than from car crashes. Considering the number of cars in Los Angeles, this is a staggering statistic.

- Hon Tran

West Los Angeles 

Child support

This is a urgent plea to single mothers who are completely fed up and frustrated with the lousy job being done by the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office to get out and vote against District Attorney Gil Garcetti on March 26.

Those of you, like myself, who have had the great misfortune of depending on Garcetti and his henchmen in the Family Support Division to enforce child support orders know how incompetent, ineffective and chaotic the system is. Garcetti promised to come down hard on deadbeats, but he's done nothing.

We desperately need an advocate for our children who will make a difference, someone who will make child support enforcement a major priority. We cannot afford to let this glad-handing publicity hound continue to let us down. Name recognition is no reason to re-elect a loser.

- Jannette Lyon

Lake View Terrace

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Gil Garcetti