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Netlets for Thursday, May 7

May 7, 2009 at 5:35PM

Legislature must address financial exploitation

The Star Tribune has recently carried heartbreaking stories of the financial exploitation of elderly and vulnerable people. This year, the Minnesota Legislature can tackle the growing problem by enacting legislation authored by Sen. Mee Moua, DFL-St. Paul (S.F.758), and Rep. Debra Hilstrom, DFL-Brooklyn Center (H.F.818).

This legislation will, among many advances, improve the ways we identify, investigate and prosecute criminal financial exploitation. A recent MetLife Mature Market study estimates that older Americans are losing $2.6 billion a year to these deceptions and that the economic downturn may be increasing vulnerability.

This legislation is a high priority for the Vulnerable Adult Justice Project, a broad-based group of social service, health care, legal and law enforcement organizations. Minnesota lawmakers should not wait one more day before passing S.F. 758 and H.F. 818 into law.

IRIS C. FREEMAN, MINNEAPOLIS

Foreign car owners, and proud of it In response to the May 5 Letter of the Day ("When you start your foreign car, ask if it was worth it"): My Honda was made in the United States by one of 27,000 American workers employed by a company that has been in this country since 1959. I am not ashamed nor will I be shamed into buying an "American" car just because that company put out its first car 35 years earlier.

KATHLEEN FOLEY, NORTHFIELD, MINN.

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I do not feel any pang of guilt whatsoever whenever I start up my foreign car. I bought this vehicle because it was a quality product, with just about the best gas mileage you can get from a nonhybrid, from a company with a fantastic reputation, at a price that was affordable. If any of the American car companies could've done that I would've been more than happy to make my purchase from them.

As it is we now see what the American car company actions have produced. This is the bed they have made for themselves; let them lie in it.

KYLE GREENE, SHAFER

Obama is right to go after corporate tax loopholes ... While not a Barack Obama supporter, I have to side with the president in his plan to close the offshore corporate tax loopholes. All three of Minnesota's major medical device companies, Medtronic, Boston Scientific (SciMed & Guidant) and St. Jude Medical have built offshore plants and moved thousands of jobs offshore purely for the tax benefits that the loopholes provided. These are jobs that were at one time in the Twin Cities area and are now lost. Closing the tax advantages of offshore facilities will stem further job erosion and may bring some of those jobs back.

TED ADAMS, EDINA

... and wrong to back legalized abortion President Obama doesn't support waterboarding because it "violates our ideals." But if waterboarding "violates our ideals," how can it be that dismembering the innocent unborn in an abortion does not?

Writers on these pages are fond of quoting the late Sen. Hubert Humphrey: "...the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped." The innocent unborn are surely in the "dawn of life." Through his ardent support of legal abortion, the government of Barack President is failing the moral test.

Alexis de Toqueville wrote that "America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great." Legalized abortion is not good. By promoting this evil here and abroad, President Obama hastens the loss of our country's goodness and greatness.

MICHAEL W. BIRD, ST. ANTHONY