Pass the Tempeh
In regard to the exchange in your Letters section about soy and meat production between Robert Wolfe (“One Man’s Meat,” June 13) and Eli Ingleson (“Soy and Nuts, Not Meat,” May 30): Companies hawking alternatives to edible animal products may well be citing statistics about greenhouse gas emissions to move tofu. But Wolfe’s skepticism about the impact of meat on the environment is misplaced because the numbers come from a source with far less stake in the matter: the United Nations and the scientific community.
Wolfe is free to spend his time pushing his plate of tempeh away like a fussy four-year-old or speculating erroneously about the impossibility of getting human beings to stop eating meat. For the rest of us, I would suggest taking Mr. Ingleson up on his advice and looking into the many environmental benefits of giving up animal products.
C. E. Dunne
via Internet
Gomez a No-Go
I listened to last Tuesday’s debate between U.S. Senate candidates Gabriel Gomez and Edward Markey. I heard Gomez refer to his nine years in the Navy about a dozen times, with only one quick mention that he was a businessman and not stating what type of businessman he was in. He says he lived the American dream and everyone else should, too, but he doesn’t seem to be in favor of supporting education, a minimum wage hike or anything that would help. Romney made about $200 million from the private equity firm Bain Capital. Gomez is or was in the same type of private equity business. That means buying companies willing to sell, lowering wages, ending jobs, confiscating pension funds, sending jobs overseas or whatever it takes to wring some cash out of those businesses.
Gomez says he is a different type of Republican, but he looks like the same old type to me. He wants to deal with the deficit by cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, education, infrastructure repair, Headstart, Meals-on-Wheels—that is, everything that helps the masses. He does not want anything to change for the one in four profitable corporations which pay no federal tax and still collect subsidies. He doesn’t want to see Citizens United overturned so the public might know who is supporting a particular candidate. He supports the XL Keystone pipeline, although the oil will be exported from a tax-free port on the Gulf and the U.S. will see no benefit but still incur all the environmental threat of that pipeline. Obviously, he doesn’t take global warming very seriously. He is being supported by the oil industry (BP, Exxon, Chevron) and the financial industry (JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo) and it is easy to see why. They are the people he will be working for, not us. He may be young and handsome, but that is not enough.
Malita Brown
Wilbraham
Taxes, the IRS and Karl Marx
When Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848, they presented 10 steps necessary to destroy any free enterprise system and replace it with communism. Step number two is to establish a heavy progressive or graduated income tax. At that time, this country did not have an income tax. It took 65 years for the progressives to sell it to the American people. Back then, it was hard to realize the dangers it brought to this nation. Today, we can see why Marxism considers it a necessary tool to bring down any productive nation and turn it into a socialist state.
The House Ways and Means committee oversees the IRS and is considering proposals to fix our tax system. Recent abuses demand the replacement of the IRS and its 70,000-plus pages of regulations. Kevin Brady, a ranking member of the Ways and Means Committee, recently wrote, “Americans shouldn’t fear the IRS”. I disagree. Every citizen should fear the IRS, and should have feared it 100 years ago. The Marxists knew then it would grow into the monster it is today.
Roy Newsom via email
