I was disgusted to read the story in the Oct. 19 Valley News, “Feds Halt Nursing Home Payments.” Disgusted not so much because of the shutdown of the Brookside facility in Wilder, but because the federal government — this wretched federal government under which we are currently suffering — were the ones to close the operation down.
The state of Vermont should never have allowed the purchase in the first place and should have been the one to end its operation when it proved to be as substandard as we had reason to believe it would be, through the investigative reporting in the Valley News back when several Vermont nursing homes were being sold.
People in these facilities are among our most vulnerable citizens. They have devoted their lives to their families and their state and now deserve the most caring and humane treatment we can provide them. Instead, they are simply grist for the money-grubbing mill of the corporatocracy, and every Vermonter should be ashamed that we have turned over the care of our elders to them.
Dale Copps
Windsor
Borrowing from a Jim Morin comic, I hope any of you who voted for Donald Trump are getting what you asked for, what you signed up for. Trump’s running the government as if it were his private business to bankrupt, financially and morally.
Anne Peyton
South Strafford
The 35 low-income apartments in Hartford, Hillcrest Manor, just cost $285,714 per apartment to redevelop. Am I the only one who thinks that is a little pricey? The average single-family house in Vermont is about $215,000. But the politicians were there patting themselves on the back. Another case of complete disregard for the taxpayers who subsidize it.
Larry Brodeur
Claremont
I’m fundamentally optimistic that the political and global angst we experience now is part of a long process of maturing — understanding and adapting our approach to all the cultural differences with which we’ve become increasingly aware; and that the result of this process, difficult and uneven though it may be, will be a new and ever more fruitful time in history.
But today there exist unresolved problems with the threat that, if not resolved through diplomacy and cool heads, could lead us into global instability and nuclear conflict. We are a nation which, over the past 80 years, has become a strong world leader — helping to maintain global political stability, contributing to technical progress and the solution of major problems. Yet we now have a president who has shown irrational behavior, a love for autocracy, seems narrowly educated and to know little about the foundation documents of our nation, belittles those with whom he disagrees, and often behaves like a child having a temper tantrum. I agree with those who voice the opinion that he should never have been elected.
But this letter is not primarily about Donald Trump. It’s about the 40 years leading up to his election: The growth of distrust in government; growing injustice in our distribution of wealth; lack of congressional action to create living-wage employment for all in the face of changing technology and the impacts of international trade; growth of political corruption in both parties as Congress became dependent on satisfying big-money supporters; wrong-headed action of the Supreme Court in Citizens United, equating money with speech and ignoring big-money’s role as the root of corruption while opening the door to big money — consequently forcing all members of Congress to play the money game or go home.
The combinations of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and the growing injustice in the distribution of wealth have violated the principles of democracy, reducing the influence that the great majority of citizens have in government and gradually passing ownership of Congress and the presidency to the wealthy.
Maybe it’s time to dismantle this march to plutocracy!
Charles McKenna
Wilder