Letter to the editor for April. 5

• Published April 05, 2008

If there isn't a supply problem, and Exxon is making $40 billion in profit alone off of the deal, wouldn't that make the whole situation a daylight extortion arrangement? The gasoline companies laugh as they bully us to give up our lunch money, our date money and our vacation money. The government allowed all of these oil company mergers, in spite of the antitrust laws. Now those mergers are holding a death warrant on our economy, and no one seems to notice the correlations.

Isn't it time that we stood up against the oil monopoly?

Alicia Kuhre, Lacey

It's business as usual for Port of Olympia

Add the Port of Olympia to the growing list of war profiteers.

With recent revelations that the Port of Olympia netted more than $400,000 in military contracts last year, it joins a long and undistinguished list of companies profiting off of the illegal occupation and ongoing human tragedy in Iraq. I'm sure port leaders are delighted with themselves now that they have joined the ranks of such notable other war profiteers as Bechtel, Halliburton, General Dynamics and Exxon Mobil.

In justifying turning a profit on the largest foreign policy mistake in the history of this country, Port Commissioner Bill McGregor offers innocently that the job of the port is simply to move cargo. Apparently the content of the cargo is irrelevant to the commissioner; it's all about the money.

In McGregor's view, toxic waste being sent for disposal in developing countries is as clean as wind turbines. Weapons sent to bolster the power of U.S.-friendly regimes who repress their citizens are as sweet as Washington apples.

McGregor's response and failure to consider the human and moral consequences of port activities is troubling, and calls into question his and other port leaders' fitness for public office.

Five years into the occupation of Iraq, it's business as usual at the Port of Olympia.

I guess that's why the next time they attempt to move military cargo through the port in support of an illegal occupation, citizens will again take to the street to try to stop them.

TJ Johnson, Olympia