Readers Write for Sunday, Oct. 25

DELTA BALLOT BOX

Airline employees want fair vote, not shutdown

Your Oct. 18 editorial asserted that "unions try end run at Delta Airlines" and implied that they are fighting a ballot-counting procedure simply so they can strike and shut down the world's biggest airline. This could not be further from the truth.

We have families to support and bills to pay and, especially now, feel privileged to have a good job. We just want to have ballots counted that are actually in the ballot box. If a union is not voted in, so be it. But if a union is voted in, all we want is to be included as active participants in creating the biggest and best airline on the planet. That way, everyone benefits.

JAYNE PETERSON, MINNEAPOLIS

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Really, are flight attendants or airline ramp workers more important than nurses, teachers or other unionized workers?

Every four years Americans make a choice of worldwide consequence, electing a new president. And how is that done? By the majority of voters having voted getting their choice.

JULIENNE WYCKOFF, COLUMBIA HEIGHTS

Graco medical screening

Privacy concerns should put an end to it

Graco's employee medical screening ("Health risks will affect Graco workers' premiums," Oct. 18) involves a breach of medical privacy and should be seen as unlawful.

If we allow Graco and others to continue this type of activity, we can envision more invasive efforts, e.g., genetic screening and behavior monitoring.

D.J. Tice writes in a Oct. 18 column that Social Security is cracking up due to federal policymakers fiddling with it. What makes the liberal establishment feel that policymakers will do any better with national health care? Let the private sector handle it. Entrepreneurs are not perfect, but more reason exists in the free marketplace.

JULIE ZUEHLKE, GOLDEN VALLEY

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D.J. Tice painted a dire picture for Social Security in the not-too-distant future. Various factors, including the present economic situation, have had a detrimental effect on the available funds. He explains this in part due to the need for tapping the Social Security Trust Fund to cover payments to seniors. While these payments are pretty much guaranteed, each dollar paid out from the Trust Fund must be withdrawn from the federal budget.

One big problem that Tice either has ignored or is unaware of is that President Bush was using the Trust Funds to help finance the Iraq war. And while Tice mentions a "restructuring" agenda for Social Security by the Bush administration in 2005, he fails to say that privatizing Social Security was the plan. Just imagine where we would be today if tying our Social Security funds to the stock market had become a reality.

BEN G. ZIMMERMAN, FALCON HEIGHTS

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Yet another column about Social Security reform that manages to avoid the simple, obvious solution: Remove the ceiling on earnings that contribute to the fund. The CEO who earns $1 million contributes the same amount to Social Security as does the working family that earns $110,000. That's ridiculous.

ROBERT ALBERTI, MINNEAPOLIS

MINNESOTA ON THE MOVE

Only sensible centrism will bring prosperity

As a political pragmatist, I was sad to see Nick Coleman (Oct. 19, Opinion Exchange) fall into the fashionable pose of poxing all political parties as unyielding partisans, particularly since what he wisely calls for is "budget cuts and tax increases." His plea to "come back to the middle, Minnesotans" ignores that today's DFL Party has moved far to the center in the last 30 years at the same time the Republican Party has fallen off the right-wing cliff, staking everything on the no abortion, no gay marriage and "no new taxes" platform.

The party of the policies of farsighted Republican Govs. Elmer L. Andersen and Arne Carlson is now the Democratic Party, which invented charter schools and fostered countless innovations and cost savings as well as the "Minnesota miracle" in school finance, while Gov. Tim Pawlenty insisted on "no new taxes" while forcing regressive taxes down to counties and cities. As for the Independence Party, it has demonstrably no constituency.

Wake up, Minnesotans, indeed, and return to prosperity with sensible centrist government led by the DFL. I say this as a full-time member of the MSP Party, Minnesota's Serious Pragmatists.

JAMES P. LENFESTEY, MINNEAPOLIS