Letters to the Editor

Help the Big 3

To the Editor:

In W.W. I, 1918, Ford built cars and trucks for the American and British forces in Europe. Plus Ford built helmets, gas masks, howitzers, and patrol speed boats putting the boats on the assembly line like their cars.

Again in W.W. II, 1941, Ford built cars, trucks, tanks, Ford Jeeps, put B-24 bombers on the assembly line, building 8,685 in record time, which may never be matched again. GM and Chrysler built many cars, trucks, and tanks for the WAR effort. We defeated Germany, because we were able to out manufacture the Germans, thanks to the big 3 auto companies and our Armed Forces.

December 7, 1941 Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and later lead the Bataan death march, using engines that powered their planes that were built by TOYOTA AND MITSUBISHI plants in Japan. The City of Indianapolis just ordered 85 Camry Hybrid cars and the Monroe County Sheriff's Department just bought some of the same. This is a total insult to our Veterans, Ford, GM, Chrysler, and to the American people.

BUY from the American companies. Ford has had a hybrid for a number of years, GM has some now, and Chrysler is not currently producing any now. I personally could care less how good these Japanese cars and trucks may be, all the profits go to Japan.

REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR, we may need THE BIG 3 again.

Cliff Burton,

Spencer, IN

Rail and mass transit need stimulating

To the Editor:

While the stimulus bill includes many good provisions, such as investments in wind and solar energy, it also contains funding for massive environmental destruction and climate change-causing infrastructure: highways.

Instead, our country should invest much more in high speed rail and mass transit.

Driving tons of metal around when all we need to move is a 150-pound person is insane from a resource point of view: what a waste of oil that we import from other countries. When we add climate change concerns, we are committing mass murder to future generations, with billions of people predicted to die this century according to top scientists unless we make major changes very fast.

Rather than more highways and decades of continued oil addiction, we can have 200+ miler per hour trains running on solar and wind energy. This will exponentially reduce the consumption of gasoline and diesel that sucks $700 billion from our country's economy annually.

The stimulus bill helps somewhat toward this goal with renewable energy investment, but it also does the opposite by investing in new highways that will continue our fossil fuel addiction for decades to come.

While we need to make sure our bridges do not collapse, nearly all new road and highway construction should cease, and be replaces with passenger rail development: a wondrous way of travel that is ten times more energy efficient and hundreds of times safer than driving. Look out on the landscape, trains are luxurious and pleasant.

More importantly, why more people are not heeding the concerns of top scientists on climate change deeply troubles me. Too many people are invested in companies that make highways, cars and coal generated power. They just stick their heads in the sand when climate change is mentioned.

For future generations this is just about the only issue that they will care about. Whether we can keep our climate livable or not is the number one issue affecting our children, and we need to transform all of our priorities, and above all at this moment the hundreds of billions of dollars in this stimulus bill to meet these needs. Otherwise we are just wasting this money on a gas guzzling infrastructure doomed to fail, and devastating our environment in the process.

We can create a much better, more efficient world, in which we can move around at 200 miles per hour while we relax, eat, read the paper or meet people from around the world as we go to and from work: all while getting exponential fuel savings.

Chad Kister

Nelsonville, Ohio