About The times. (Gainesville, Ga.) 1972-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 21, 2018)
7A OPINION ®he £ntics gainesvilletimes.com Friday, December 21,2018 Shannon Casas Editor in Chief | 770-718-3417 | scasas@gainesvilletimes.com Submit a letter: letters@gainesvilletimes.com The First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. LITERS Mark Pettitt should resign from board When my husband and I decided to move our family to Hall County four years ago, our No. 1 concern was the quality of the schools. After researching the area, we found that the school superintendent, Will Schofield, has a great record of helping the school system thrive. We also found that the local schools have quality, trustworthy teachers and good parent support. Our children are only in elementary school, but so far the instruction and care they have received has been wonderful. This week, The Times reported that our newly elected school board member, Mark Pettitt, was arrested on a DUI charge Dec. 15. This man already has a BUI, boating under the influence, on his record. Now, he has spent time in jail for a DUI. He is 26 years old, has no children in the system and no formal background in education. Yet, he still has managed to rack up two charges for driv ing while drunk. My family and I are appalled at this news. Mr. Pettitt has not even been sworn into office yet, and he is already trying to “restore” the public’s trust in him. He has shown that he is not ready for the responsibility of being on our school board. I implore Mr. Schofield and the current school board members to ask Mr. Pettitt to resign his post. I also implore the Hall County commission ers who endorsed Mr. Pettitt, including Kathy Cooper, Billy Powell and Jeff Stowe, to formally ask Mr. Pettitt to step down. He has shown that his morals and trustworthiness do not measure up to the standards we expect here in Hall County. I do not trust this person to be the judge of our teachers or of our school budget, or to help enforce the level of excellence we expect from our school system. Leigh Miller Flowery Branch We should be cautious about Mark Pettitt until DUI resolved In the Electronic Media Age, few things go unreported, and once reported, seldom go without comment. During the recent election cycle, we had allega tions of unethical behavior casually tossed around, including an allegation that the Democratic Party of Georgia hacked or attempted to hack the voting system. Locally, during the Republican primary, Mark Pettitt had to address his use of alcohol while boat ing. Mr. Pettitt handled that through the courts, met his court-ordered obligations and defeated his opponents with his campaign “For the Kids.” When and if Mr. Pettitt takes a seat on the Hall County Board of Education, he will handle deci sions much larger than personal public behavior. Until Mark Pettitt resolves his Dec. 15 arrest on DUI charges, I think we should hit pause and delay giving him so much power. Leveling any ethics complaint against a public figure brings out questions on how to define ethi cal behavior. I like the simple definition of just knowing right from wrong and doing what is right even when no one is looking. Once on the school board, teachers accused of unethical behavior will be forced to rely on Mr. Pettitt’s judgment on ethics and professional con duct. I believe the outcome of his second criminal charge related to public alcohol use could disqual ify him from supervising professional educators, being an example for our children and from mak ing judgements on safety and security within our public schools. But, Mr. Pettitt is to be considered innocent until proven guilty. That’s fair. But, giving him that consideration doesn’t mean an automatic pass to the school board, which controls judgement of what is right and wrong and doing what is right even when no one is looking. Until Mr. Pettitt is legally released from his criminal charges, the citizens and parents of Hall County should act with caution and consideration, both in condemning him and in seating him on a public board. Michael W. Parker Flowery Branch To submit letters: Send by email to letters@ gainesvilletimes.com (no attached files) or use the contact form at gainesvilletimes. com. Include name, hometown and phone number; letters never appear anonymously. Letters are limited to one per writer in a month’s time on topics of public interest and may be edited for content and length (limit of 500 words). Letters may be rejected from readers with no ties to Northeast Georgia or that address personal, business or legal disputes. Letters not the work of the author listed or with material not properly attributed will be rejected. Submitted items may be published in print, electronic or other forms. Letters and other commentary express the opinions of the authors and not of The Times. (The (Times Founded Jan. 26,1947 345 Green St., Gainesville, GA 30501 gainesvilletimes.com EDITORIAL BOARD General Manager Norman Baggs Editor in Chief Shannon Casas Capitalists vs. capitalism It’s bad enough when left ists smear capitalism. I hate it more when capitalists do it, too. I’d hoped for more from the world’s current richest man, Jeff Bezos. I love the service he cre ated. Amazon lets me buy Christmas gifts right from my couch. Its prices are so low that the Fed chairman says Amazon probably lowered America’s inflation rate. Entrepreneur Jeff Bezos is a hero. He created lots of jobs and better service, and he and his investors pay billions in taxes. So I got angry when I saw Sen. Bernie Sanders’ opportunistic fundraising let ters condemning Bezos because some of his workers are eligible for food stamps. “In 10 seconds,” whined Sanders, Bezos makes “more money than the median employee of Amazon makes in an entire year.” Well, at least Bezos will stand up for himself and the free market system that created his wealth, right? At first, he did. Amazon called the criti cisms “inaccurate” and “misleading.” It’s not the company’s fault that some work ers qualify for handouts. More people would collect them if Amazon did not hire. By creating jobs, Bezos gives work ers better choices. But the anti-capitalist media don’t report that. They called Amazon a “sweat shop” and “cutthroat corporate jungle.” So Amazon, to my disappointment, caved. The company announced it would pay all its workers at least $15 per hour. MSNBC anchors grinned with glee. Of course, the higher wage will be good for workers who still have jobs. But what progressives don’t understand is that entry-level workers will be shut out. Poor people’s lives are made worse when laws meant to protect them price them out of jobs. Those unhired workers are just as real, even if they’re harder to see. My recent video on this features a restaurant manager who understands that she only got the opportunity to work because when she was a teenager, her boss could pay her much less. Had a higher minimum wage existed then, her labor would not have been worth it to the restaurant, and she would never have gotten a chance to work her way up the ladder. “Minimum wage jobs are an entry-level job to get someone some experience,” says California restaurant manager Merv Crist. “Raise that high enough, you cut people out of the market completely!” That’s not compassionate. Yet progres sives talk as if a higher minimum wage lifts everyone. At least Amazon is just one company, and Bezos just one CEO. If he wants to pay his workers more, fine. Amazon will attract better job applicants. Beginners, kids, the disabled, etc. will still have other choices. They can get jobs elsewhere. Bezos was still a man to like. But then Amazon announced that it would lobby government to force every one to pay what Amazon pays! This entrepreneur I admired turns out to be just another craven opportunist. Bezos knows a higher minimum wage will hurt his competitors more than it hurts him. Amazon has a lead in automa tion. He’s already replacing some work ers with robots. I suppose Bezos is just being clever: He’ll use government to handcuff his rivals — and then pat himself on the back and pander to progressives who believe a higher minimum wage spreads money with no ill effects. If American politicians are dumb enough to think they can raise wages by force, maybe a CEO has a fiduciary responsibility to his investors to pander to those politicians. Bezos has done this before. Amazon didn’t just announce it would build a second headquarters. It started a competition to see which politicians would squeeze their taxpayers most. One city council even voted to grab land to create a new town called Amazon, Geor gia, if the company moved there. That city should be grateful it wasn’t chosen. Now taxpayers in New York City and Arlington County, Virginia, will subsi dize Amazon’s jobs. This is not good for taxpayers or capitalism. Politicians shouldn’t pander to compa nies, and companies shouldn’t pander to politicians. We need separation of shop ping and state. Bezos should stick to innovating, not scheming with politicians. Sometimes the worst enemies of capi talism are capitalists. John Stossel is an author, commentator and columnist for Creators Syndicate. JOHN STOSSEL www.johnstossel.com Criminal justice bill shows GOP divide BY MARY C. CURTIS Tribune News Service Sen. Tim Scott, Republican from South Carolina, was optimistic after the Senate passed an amended bill this week that makes bipartisan progress on an issue — criminal justice reform — that has divided lawmakers for years. Scott, an original co-sponsor of the bill, said in a statement: “By cutting recidi vism, encouraging job training, education and mental health and substance abuse treatments for incarcerated individuals, and making our criminal justice system both smarter and tougher, we have taken a positive step forward. ” The bill is considered a First Step, as it is named, toward addressing inequi ties in the system that disproportionately affect African-Americans and the poor, in everything from arrests to sentencing, and have contributed to a mass incarcera tion crisis. Criminal justice advocates will also point out that the changes are mod est and apply only to the federal system, which truly makes this a first step. In embracing the bill, which is headed to the House for approval, GOP lawmak ers finally listened to arguments that the system discriminates after ignoring those pleas for fear of looking soft on crime — fears that afflicted some Democrats too. But is their action just a blip, a singular moment for a party that has shed the sup port of minorities since welcoming rather than rejecting voters hostile to civil rights, particularly by using a Southern strategy that has helped turn that region red? (It’s a situation President Lyndon B. Johnson predicted when he signed those landmark bills in the 1960s.) Though Scott had support from many fellow Republicans and President Donald Trump, as well as Democrats who have sought reform for years, the only African- American Republican in the Senate did not have that kind of GOP backing last month when he opposed the nomination of Thomas Farr to a federal judgeship. Farr’s involvement with the racially tinged campaigns of former North Caro lina Republican Sen. Jesse Helms, plus Farr’s more recent defense of a state voter ID bill tossed out by the courts for targeting minority voters, were too much for the senator. His party is “not doing a very good job of avoiding the obvious potholes on race in America,” Scott said, while Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, who might have listened to the concerns of his colleague, instead dismissed them as “utterly false character assassination nonsense.” Loss has certainly loosened Mia Love’s tongue. “Because Republicans never take minority communities into their home and citizens into their homes and into their hearts, they stay with Democrats and bureaucrats in Washington because they do take them home — or at least make them feel like they have a home,” she said in her concession speech. Love has earned the right to speak, as well as the scorn of Trump. After Republicans narrowly lost a House seat in Utah to Democrat Ben McAdams in the midterms, Trump singled her out. The president said her re-election campaign distanced itself from his administration. “Mia Love gave me no love,” Trump said, sounding vindictive and a little creepy, “and she lost.” This was the man who had disparaged Haiti, the land of her parents’ birth, when he included it on the list of what he report edly called “s-hole countries.” Love said those remarks were “unkind, divisive, elitist and fly in the face of our nation’s values.” So she probably was not expect ing much after a loss, something Trump hates to be associated with. You could say the only black, female Republican in the lame-duck 115th Con gress spoke up when she had little left to lose. But who could blame her when Trump, her party’s leader, demands loyalty but shows little and has an inner circle that is mostly white and male? Trump ran a campaign stoking fear of dystopian inner-city hellscapes, and rode the “birther” lie of former President Obama’s birthplace to the top. His admin istration’s former attorney general, Jeff Sessions, encouraged prosecutors to get tougher in enforcing maximum sentenc ing guidelines the First Step bill relaxes, while giving police a way out of consent decrees agreed on after investigations of misconduct. Trump had advice for police about howto handle suspects before conviction. “Don’t be too nice,” he said. His language about black and brown asylum seekers hasn’t changed. Nor has his treatment of African-American law makers and journalists, women in particu lar, been anything close to respectful. It was not always this way for the party of Lincoln, which had policies that once enjoyed support from African-Americans; into the 1960s, the GOP at least showed up to ask for their votes. My Lincoln Republican parents found a home there — that is, until my mother, a party activist, was offended at the election season attacks on “welfare queens” and “bucks” buying steaks with food stamps. When Ronald Reagan in a 1980 campaign stop near Philadelphia, Mississippi, cham pioned states’ rights close to where civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964, she recognized the code words and felt downright betrayed. After Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential race, an autopsy recommended a more inclusive GOP tent, and was tossed when it was proven by Trump that division still works. As Mia Love wrote in The Washington Post: “Many on the right claim that some Americans oppose Republicans because of the proliferation of identity politics. But Republicans who accept that some Americans will inevitably vote Demo cratic simply because of their physical features or where they live are buying into the identity politics they so stridently object to.” A microcosm of the country’s divide will be reflected in the incoming Con gress, with Democrats, after the mid terms, reflecting a diverse America, and the Republican delegation more racially and culturally monolithic than the last. If they can figure out a way to coop erate to get anything done, anything is possible. Or maybe that’s wishing for a holiday miracle. Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer and as national correspondent for Politics Daily. Follow her on Twitter @mcurtisnc3.
