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6A Daily News – Thursday, August 1, 2013 Opinion DAILY NEWS RED BLUFF TEHAMA COUNTY T H E V O I C E O F T E H A M A C O U NTY S I N C E 1 8 8 5 Greg Stevens, Publisher gstevens@redbluffdailynews.com Chip Thompson, Editor editor@redbluffdailynews.com Editorial policy The Daily News opinion is expressed in the editorial. The opinions expressed in columns, letters and cartoons are those of the authors and artists. Letter policy The Daily News welcomes letters from its readers on timely topics of public interest. All letters must be signed and provide the writer's home street address and home phone number. Anonymous letters, open letters to others, pen names and petition-style letters will not be allowed. Letters should be typed and cannot exceed two double-spaced pages or 500 words. When several letters address the same issue, a cross section of those submitted will be considered for publication. Letters will be edited. Letters are published at the discretion of the editor. 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How to reach us Main office: 527-2151 Classified: 527-2151 Circulation: 527-2151 News tips: 527-2153 Sports: 527-2153 Obituaries: 527-2151 Photo: 527-2153 On the Web www.redbluffdailynews.com Fax Newsroom: 527-9251 Classified: 527-5774 Retail Adv.: 527-5774 Legal Adv.: 527-5774 Business Office: 527-3719 Address 545 Diamond Ave. Red Bluff, CA 96080, or P.O. Box 220 Red Bluff, CA 96080 Where are the jobs? Editor: I am writing this letter, not as a person trying to stir up problems, but rather someone who is very concerned about the direction Red Bluff has gone over the last 25 years. Twenty five years ago my family and I lived in Red Bluff, where I worked at Diamond International. The men I worked with had a lot of pride about being hard workers and often discussed issues regarding Red Bluff. The main issue they discussed and feared most was what would happen to Red Bluff if Diamond, Louisiana Pacific and other major industry shut down and left. Most of those in the discussion were near retirement and were not worried about themselves, but rather worried about their children and grandchildren. After working at Diamond for fives years, I had an opportunity to go to work for the State of California in public service, which required me to move my family to the Central Valley. During the time period I was gone there was not a day that went by in which I could not wait to move back to this western-based community, with hard working people. After twenty five years my family and I moved back to be with the rest of my family, I found a lot of things had changed over the years. As the old timers thought Diamond International, Louisiana Pacific and others were ran out of town, due to relentless fines and oversight until it became unbearable to operate. The once slogan of Red Bluff wanting to be a retirement town has been narrowed down to the new slogan of being a welfare town. This is happening due to no jobs being available for people who would rather work to support their families. Now the only major industry in Red Bluff is Walmart and Sierra Pacific, who is also being fined repeatedly and will sooner or later fall to the same fate as Diamond and Louisiana Pacific. My reason for writing letter is because of my concern for the young adults and the future adults of this community. As it stands now their future to gain a jobs to support a family in this community is bleak. I emailed the City Council and received a very courteous reply from the mayor who informed me Red Bluff has not turned any industry down since he has been in office. Although I appreciate the council not turning down future jobs for our kids, I did not see anything in the last six months of City Council minutes ance companies don't train indicating they had discussed the doctors or nurses, medical issue of jobs in the community or schools do. Why subsidize put together a team of experts to the middleman, why not subsolicit industry to come into Red sidize instead those that actuBluff. ally work providing essential It has been brought to my health services. attention by numerous people We also need more strinthat, although Red gent safeguards in Bluff is stuck in the the manufacturing Your mud as far as bringing and distribution of in industry to put peodrugs. At least ple to work, Chico and 106,000 people die Redding are thriving. each year from drugs I would like to see that are properly preRed Bluff back to being that scribed and properly administhriving, hard-working communi- tered, while another 2 million ty it once was. Where people can suffer serious side effects. raise their kids, and mothers do Conversely millions are not have to worry about the day incarcerated each year for their child is going to move away using a plant that hasn't probecause there is no future here for duced one single death or them. serious injury in more than Weldon Shaw, Corning 10,000 years. At the same time our jails and prisons are grossly overcrowded. I of course am referring to marijuana the plant some idiots claim has no medical Editor: use in spite of five US The main flaw with the patients that say otherwise. Affordable Health Care Act, Grass is bad but alcohol, which the Tea party and other which causes around 75,000 Republican supporters demo- deaths each year, and tobacnize as Obamacare, isn't that co, which kills about 443,000 it is too expensive. It's that it annually is OK. emphasizes and builds up the Am I the only one that sees wrong industry. something dreadfully wrong Insurance companies don't here? tend to the sick and injured, Orval Strong, Gerber doctors and nurses do. Insur- Turn Affordable Health Care Act Your officials STATE ASSEMBLYMAN — Dan Logue, 1550 Humboldt Road, Ste. 4, Chico, CA 95928, 530-895-4217 STATE SENATOR — Jim Nielsen, 2635 Forest Ave., Ste. 110, Chico, CA 95928, (530) 879-7424, senator.nielsen@senate.ca.gov GOVERNOR — Jerry Brown, State Capitol Bldg., Sacramento, CA 95814; (916) 445-2841; Fax (916) 5583160; E-mail: governor@governor.ca.gov. U.S. REPRESENTATIVE — Doug LaMalfa 506 Cannon House Office Building, Washington, DC 20515, 202-2253076. U.S. SENATORS — Dianne Feinstein (D), One Post Street, Suite 2450, San Francisco, CA 94104; (415) 393-0707. Fax (415) 3930710. Barbara Boxer (D), 1700 Montgomery St., Suite 240, San Francisco, CA 94111; (510) 286-8537. Fax (202) 224-0454. Commentary Detroit's death by democracy DETROIT -- In 1860, an uneasy Charles Darwin confided in a letter to a friend: "I had no intention to write atheistically" but "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars." What appalled him had fascinated entomologist William Kirby (1759-1850): The ichneumon insect inserts an egg in a caterpillar, and the larva hatched from the egg, he said, "gnaws the inside of the caterpillar, and though at last it has devoured almost every part of it except the skin and intestines, carefully all this time avoids injuring the vital organs, as if aware that its own existence depends on that of the insect on which it preys!" Government employees' unions living parasitically on Detroit have been less aware than ichneumon larvae. About them, and their collaborators in the political class, the question is: What. Were. They. Thinking? Well, how did Bernie Madoff or the Enron executives convince themselves their houses of cards would never collapse? Here, where cattle could graze in vast swaths of this depopulated city, democracy ratified a double delusion: Magic would rescue the city (consult the Bible, the bit about the multiplication of the loaves and fishes), or Washington would deem Detroit, as it recently did some banks and two of the three Detroit-based automobile companies, "too big to fail." But Detroit failed long ago. And not even Washington, whose recklessness is almost limitless, is oblivious to the minefield of moral hazard it would stride into if it rescued this city and, then inevitably, others that are buckling beneath the weight of their cumulative follies. It is axiomatic: When there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate. This bedraggled city's decay poses no theological conundrum of the sort that troubled Darwin, but it does pose worrisome questions about the viability of democracy in jurisdictions where big government and its unionized employees collaborate in pillaging taxpayers. Selfgovernment has failed in what once was America's fourthlargest city and now is smaller than Charlotte, N.C. Detroit, which boomed during World War II when industrial America was "the arsenal of democracy," died of democracy. Today, among the exculpatory alibis invoked to deflect blame from the political class and the docile voters who empowered it, is the myth that Detroit is simply a victim of "de-industrialization." In 1950, however, Detroit and Chicago were comparable -- except Detroit was probably wealthier, as measured by per capita income. Chicago, too, lost manufacturing jobs, to of the Motor City are no more the American South, to south of responsible for Detroit's probthe border, to South Korea and lems than were the victims of elsewhere. But Chicago dis- Hurricane Sandy for theirs." cerned the future and diversi- Congress, he says, should bail out Detroit because fied. It is grimly iron"America is just as ic that Chicago's iconmuch about aiding ic street is Michigan those less fortunate as Avenue. it is about personal Detroit's popularesponsibility." tion, which is 62 perThere you have cent smaller than in today's liberalism: 1950, has contracted Human agency, hence less than the United responsibility, is denied. Auto Workers memApart from the pesky bership, which was matter of "voting in more than 1 million in elections" -- apart from 1950, and now is around 390,000. Auto George decades of voting to empower incompetents, industry executives, scoundrels and crimiwho often were invernals, and to mandate tebrate mediocrities, unionized rapacity -- no continually bought labor peace by mortgaging their one is responsible for anything. companies' futures in surrenders Popular sovereignty is a chimera to union demands. Then city because impersonal forces akin officials gave their employees -- to hurricanes are sovereign. The restoration of America's who have 47 unions, including one for crossing guards -- pay vitality depends on, among scales comparable to those of many other things, avoiding the autoworkers. Thus did private- bottomless sinkhole that would sector decadence drive public- be created by the federal govsector dysfunction -- govern- ernment rescuing one-party ment negotiating with govern- cities, and one-party states such ment-employees' unions that are as Illinois, from the consegovernment organized as an quences of unchecked power. interest group to lobby itself to Those consequences of such power -- incompetence, magical do what it wants to do: Grow. Steven Rattner, who adminis- thinking, cynicism, and sometered the bailout of part of the times criminality -- are written Detroit-based portion of Ameri- in Detroit's ruins. ca's automobile industry, says George Will's email address "apart from voting in elections, the 700,000 remaining residents is georgewill@washpost.com. Will