I have noticed an accumulation of distressing news in the newspaper the last few days:

Perspective section, Oct. 11, 2009 — Greedy investors have turned a mattress company into a very failing company, putting thousands of workers out of work and generating extraordinary debt to pay themselves bonuses and to sell even more worthless bonds.

Business section, Oct. 11, 2009 — Two examples where insurance companies refused to allow life-saving operations. In one example, the person has enough of his own money to circumvent the insurance company and save his life. In another example, a 17-year-old girl is turned down for an operation and dies. Her mother goes to the insurance company to demand justice and an insurance company executive gives her the middle finger.

NBC Nightly News, Oct. 12, 2009, an insurance company refuses to give a policy to a 2-year-old child because he is overweight. Do the parents refuse to feed him and allow him to get sick?

Business section, Oct. 10, 2009 — An investment firm is being squeezed by the government over executive salaries. The single main person getting this enormous bonus and salary is the trader who trades oil shares which result in you and I having to pay more for gasoline at the pump.

It would be nice to read and hear some things in the news where it wasn’t another example of greedy senior executives somewhere making our lives more difficult or impossible just to pursue record profits for themselves.

John Walter

Redmond

Attention, all Americans!

Assuming most of us enjoy and love our country and value our Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as I do, please take the time to look up the following in your own dictionary — socialism, communism, fascism and Naziism — and discover the bottom line in each is definitely government control.

Please do this for your own knowledge and understand, as many of us realize now, that government control is the direction our country is now going.

Then, ask yourself the question, Is this what we want for our great country? Would this control be right and beneficial for our nation? I think not.

We don’t need the government to run almost every facet of our lives and invade our privacy.

Many politicians’ agendas compromise and threaten America’s very security and we all should be deeply concerned.

Be a watchdog and examine a politician’s ideology and if they are placing their program first and ahead of our country’s best interest, next election vote them out of office.

Remember, these people are elected to represent us and not to govern and rule us.

Many of these officials don’t understand this or don’t want to and many want to have this dominating power.

Rollo H. Millette

Bend