A recent letter from Blair Bateman (“The D word,” Nov. 8) caused me to reflect on the last 60 years and when I first went to the polls with my father to vote in 1960.
It was Kennedy vs Nixon, and Dad cautioned me not to vote for Nixon, as it would cancel his vote. (My father was a Roosevelt Democrat.) He also made the prediction (14 years before it happened) that, if Nixon were ever president, he would be a failure.
The vice president (Spiro Agnew) also had to resign in disgrace. He also cautioned me about the Republican Party — that their only agenda is to make the rich richer, and that anything else is just a smokescreen. After 60 years of voting, I see that my father’s words were prophetic then and are as true now as ever.
Since Reagan’s supply-side/trickle-down economics, things have obviously gone their way. They fight minimum wage increases and unionism. They promote part-time jobs, fight Medicaid and threaten programs that help low-wage people. Often, the motto of many large and small businesses seems to be “The less I can pay you, the more there is for me.”
They claim to be “conservative” but attack public lands, the EPA and the Endangered Species Act. We have seen attacks on clean water and air and attacks on education. Utah has the lowest per-pupil expenditures in the U.S. Attacking and changing all four voter initiatives passed by the voters show that the one-party GOP system is a failure.
I agree with one writer that Utah’s politics are “dangerously out of balance.” These are not conservative values. It only reflects greed.
We have always criticized China, Russia and Cuba for their one-party systems, but we’re hell-bent to create our own. We can’t go on thinking nothing’s wrong.
Anton Oscar Olson, Salt Lake City