Netlets for Wednesday, Jan. 30

President Bill Clinton's recent campaign trail outbursts serve as an ominous warning against yet another Clinton presidency.

Recognizing and respecting boundaries has been an ongoing and well-documented problem for the former president. His strongest supporters, including his wife, have enabled and tacitly endorsed this behavior, regardless of the harm it inflicts.

As a Democrat who twice voted for President Clinton, I am appalled by his recent unbridled attacks.

I wonder too, whether the oath Clinton took as our country's president is now taking a back seat to a Faustian bargain he has made with his wife.

JEFFREY GOLDENBERG, HOPKINS

Every household is accountable A Jan. 21 letter on outsourcing was passionate, emotional and illogical. In the democratic, capitalistic country of the United States, consumers want the highest quality, best delivery, for the best price. That often times comes from U.S. employers and employees and sometimes from non-U.S. employers and employees.

Working-class Americans don't need to "suck it up and lose their jobs silently to help their upper-middle-class neighbors get bargain prices at WalMart." There are two points here:

• Wal-Mart benefits many American consumers and I believe over 250,000 employees (not counting WalMart's U.S. and non-U.S. suppliers). I suspect the majority of the benefactors are not the upper-middle class.

Our government can and does help through encouraging investment in education and skills. Yes, it could be more (or less -- that is up to the voters and their elected officials to decide).

But on a micro level, every American household is to be responsible and accountable to be a valuable contributor to earn a living wage, and every American deserves the right to be a consumer voting with their earnings for the best quality, delivery and price.

TIM JANKA, MAPLE GROVE

Change, this election cycle, media notwithstanding Gary Gilson's Jan. 21 letter responding to Nancy Barnes' Jan. 13 article is off-base. While I'm sure the Columbia Journalism Review is a respected publication, it isn't relevant to this issue. Special interest interference in our campaign finance procedures and the resulting "special influence" cozy relationship between lobbyists' and their new/old politicians friends is a contributing factor to why we do need change this election cycle.

I also took graduate-level journalism classes during my MBA, Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota studies, and they opened my eyes to the influence established media organizations can have either positively or negatively in the communities they serve. To have your paper print Gilson's defending of your "skewed campaign coverage" is wrong. Presidential campaigns with huge war chests filled up with "special interests" money is not a good reason to only report on the front-runners and not all the candidates. Change has to happen from the outside or the status quo will continue; how else could of man of such obvious limitations as George W. Bush be reelected in 2004? Gilson's reference to "bullying party operatives" is an effort to silence the majority; it shall not succeed this time!

TIM MCDEVITT, FALCON HEIGHTS

Merit pay in the financial world The Jan. 21 letter writer had it right when he noted that Citibank, Merrill Lynch and other financial "wizards" were poor examples of money management. Then in the business section of the same paper we were informed that our very own MoneyGram company was no better.

But our titans of finance are not as dumb as they appear. The top five "leaders," who are paid well to work for betterment of MoneyGram, will collected an additional $37 million if they can bring the company down.

Now, is that pay for merit ---or what?

A lot of profit in the pharmaceutical industry The lone statistic in George Will's valentine to the pharmaceutical industry (Jan. 20) indicates that if we were to strip all profit from that industry, the drug portion of our national health care tab "would be reduced only from 10 percent to 8 percent." Did Will stop to think that he was admitting that one-fifth -- 20 percent -- of the money America spends on drugs is raked off in profits?

That figure staggers economic sanity even before we compare it with the profit par in other industries. According to Hoover's Handbook of American Business, in the period from 1992 to 2001, pharmaceutical kingpin Merck never posted income of less than 15 percent of sales. So Merck's worst profit year was still more than three times better than General Motors' best year for that period; three times better than the best year for Boeing; four times better than the best year for Wal-Mart; five times better than the best year for Citigroup, America's biggest financial company; and almost twice as good as the best year for America's biggest oil company, Exxon-Mobil.

Rather than dispensing partisan placebos, perhaps Will could explain to us how the magic of the marketplace not only created, but continues to sustain, an industry that defies the economic laws that supposedly enforce the best interests of the consumer.

And if Will could snap out of his fatcat infatuation long enough to check a fact, he'd find that his praise of the "industry responsible for the fact that polio is no longer a scourge" is dead wrong. Writing about Jonas Salk's development of the first polio vaccine on p. 411 of his history "A Dream of Greatness," Geoffrey Perrett notes: "The pharmaceutical companies . . . had contributed not a dime to Salk's researches." The funding came from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis -- nonprofit, of course.