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Show A5 The Emery County Review, Tuesday, October 7, 2008 VIEWPOINT Opinion and Letters to the Editor EDITOR’S VIEW Established January 2, 2007 James L. Davis, Publisher & Editor w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w Colleen A. Davis, Co-Publisher, Office & Advertising Manager Josie Luke, Assistant Editor Lyndsay Reid, Advertising Design Paige Motte, Advertising Sales Kathy P. Ockey, Staff Journalist Casey Wood, Webmaster Our Vision To be a valued member of the communities we serve and to be trusted as an honest, truthful and reliable source of news. w w w Our Mission To inform, entertain and provide a public forum for the discussion of events impacting the people of the Emery County area and to inform with news and features relevant to those who call the Castle Valley area home w w w Our Principles We will be ethical in all of our efforts to provide information to the public. We will be unbiased in our reporting and will report the facts as we see them and do our best to focus on the good news of the county, its people, history and way of life. We will be strong and active members of the community and assist in any way that we are able. We will strive to provide the best quality product possible to our readers and advertisers...always. We will verify the details of news we are reporting and if a mistake is made on our part we will correct it immediately. We will always listen to suggestions on how to do our job better. Editorial Submission Guidelines The Emery County Review welcomes and invites letters to the editor and guest opinion articles on public policy or current events. We welcome letters of thanks to individuals who have helped make our community a better place to live, work and play. The editorial staff reserves the right to edit all submissions for space constraints, clarity and errors in fact. Submissions must include author’s name and contact information. Contact information will not be published. Letter’s and opinion articles can be sent to jldavis@theemerycountyreview.com, mailed to The Emery County Review, P.O. Box 487, Orangeville, UT. 84537 or faxed to 435-748-2543. Helping Local Businesses James L. Davis The economic disaster that Washington has spent weeks trying to avert (and years creating) has the country up in arms, with the vast majority of Americans vehemently opposed to a Wall Street bailout. That the economic mess created on Wall Street will eventually make its way to Main Street is of little doubt, even Main Street in rural areas like Emery County. Once again it appears that everyday Americans, just trying to find a way to survive, will carry the burden of mistakes made by arrogance and greed in Washington and Wall Street. What can we do to shore up our own businesses and economy is the real question. Whenever you talk about local business, especially local business in Emery County, it seems that business owners almost feel they have to plea with residents to shop locally and quite often those pleas go unanswered as we collectively do our shopping “out of town.” Local politicians will speak at length about the need to build our economy, to lure new businesses and new jobs to the area. But all of the talk, in the end, appears to be little more than talk when having a business in the county offers no more benefit to the business owner than it would to have their business headquartered elsewhere. Many counties and cities throughout the state, including Carbon County, offer an incentive to local businesses when bidding on county projects or services. When bidding on county projects, services or purchases, local businesses are given a competitive edge, giving small businesses a chance to compete with larger corporations. When placing a bid with the county local businesses are allowed to be up to 10 percent higher than the lowest bid if it comes from a non-local business and still be awarded the bid. Carbon County would rather keep the money in the local economy, going to businesses that pay taxes within the county. In Emery County we have no such policy. The Emery County policy states that the lowest bid does not have to be taken, but purchasers should look at the cost of delivery or other factors to determine if the lowest bid is really the lowest bid. While that may help local business, it doesn’t always and certainly not to the extent that the Carbon County policy does. In Emery County the city of Orangeville has a policy similar to Carbon County’s; and while the merits of a local purchasing policy giving prefer- ence to local purchases has been debated for years, it has never been acted upon. Perhaps it’s time that it was. There are those who have been concerned that adopting such a policy would end up straining already thin county budgets and may in fact lead to less purchasing overall, not to more county purchasing. With that said, the policy hasn’t seemed to hurt Carbon County’s development. In the development of any purchasing policy that would provide a benefit to local businesses, the problem is that the county is only one purchasing authority. There are a number of special service districts that have their own purchasing policies that would likewise have to be addressed to do any real good for local businesses. There are those who have suggested that perhaps of even more benefit to the county and to county businesses would be the development of a single purchasing policy that all county entities and cities abided by. A single purchasing policy would certainly be helpful, especially if it gave local businesses a competitive edge. Such a policy wouldn’t be a bailout for local businesses, it would just be an acknowledgement that those of us who choose to call Emery County home are all in this together, in good times, and in bad. PUBLIC FORUM Old Story Played out in Presidential Debates When watching the Presidential Debate last Friday the roles the participants played became obvious to me. Senator Obama was the student returning home from his first year of college and explaining to his father, whom he is now smarter than, why he should control the family home for the summer, plus he should be allowed to take the family car back to college with him in the fall. Senator McCain, who loves his son and understands the arrogance, knows he is far from earning such responsibility and patiently refuses permission while explaining the reasons for his decision. It was an old story, old dependable dog versus young impetuous pup. I kept thinking of Senator McCain, who as a young Naval Officer was a prisoner of war for five years in the worst of conditions. Even though Senator Obama came across as likable, he has lived his adult life surrounded by people who hate and mistrust our country. Senator McCain, who has literally been through hell for his country, will always love America and seek to improve it, while Senator Obama, who has reaped many rewards from our country wants to transform it. I don’t think these debates ever change anyone’s mind or help the so called great undecided voters determine which candidate will receive their long awaited nod. People watching these things have pretty much made up their minds about whom they are going to support. They watch for the same reasons many go to the races, to see the crashes. In last Friday’s race (debate) I didn’t see any spectacular crashes. But it did reaffirm my hope that the old tested racecar will beat the new flashy racecar across the finish line. - Ned Scarlet Cleveland Bailout Reveals Profiles in Cowardice Susan Estrich If you didn’t know it, you’d never guess that 95 percent of all House members get re-elected every two years without breaking a sweat. You’d never think that the hardest thing about the House of Representatives is getting in. You probably wouldn’t believe that while 90 percent of the American public disapproves of the Congress as a whole, almost as many think that their own representative is the exception, the one good egg in a rotten dozen. Maybe after this week they’ll realize that if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, guess what? The vote on the bailout bill was nothing less than a colossal sham. It might almost be funny, were it not for the crazy contractions it is causing in the economy, not to mention the brazen efforts of both sides to use the crisis for political advantage. This is one of those bills that is supposed to pass by one vote, one of those occasions where neither side wants to take the blame for what has to be done, so both position to try to get as many of “theirs” and as few of “ours” voting yes as possible. Someone wasn’t counting right this week. Back to the abacus. Maybe they should just do it by acclamation, on an unrecorded voice vote. Everyone knows how this movie has to end. But no one wants their name in the credits. To state the obvious, bailing out the bozos for whom 20 or 30 million a year just wasn’t enough is not going to “test” well in public opinion polls. Maybe the representatives from the Upper East Side of Manhattan or greater Greenwich, Conn., can claim that in voting yes, they were truly serving their home constituencies, but for virtually everyone else, this looks like Robin Hood gone wrong -- stealing from the poor to help the rich, not the other way around. Most of us would love to see the Wall Street billionaires and multimillionaires drown in their own debt, if they were the only ones who would. Let them taste what the rest of us deal with every day. Do I care that the boys in the banks are facing disaster? Not even a little. In my day, which is the same day as most of the senior executives responsible for this mess, the smart people went to law school and medical school. We wanted to save the world, or at least the psyche next door. The joke was that only the dumb preppies went to business school. (Did someone say George W. Bush?) Plenty of room in the middle. So should we be surprised that they messed up, these so-called titans of finance with hearts full of greed and feet of clay? No. And is it our job to dig them out of the mess they created? The easy answer, if you’re not responsible for the even bigger mess that looms, is no. The numbers that matter to talk radio hosts are the ratings. No one elected them to put country first. The numbers that matter to politicians in tight races are the ones in the polls, particularly the one taken on Election Day. There’s no second chance if you’re back selling used cars. The kicker to the spectacle this week on the floor of the House is how few of the guys and gals who voted “no” are in tight races, how few have actually turned down contributions from the clowns they were denouncing, how many of them were playing for the stands in the hopes that someone else would do the dirty work of saving the economy. By the time the Democrats finished denouncing the Republicans for deregulating Wall Street and the Republicans finished denouncing the Democrats for giving Fannie and Freddie blank checks, there weren’t enough votes for the cod-liver oil. What a shock. Almost as big a shock as the chickens coming home to roost for greed gone wild. (Copyright 2008 Creators Syndicate Inc.) |
