Bishop should help sisters
9/4/2018
Why could not Bishop Daniel Thomas assist Little Sisters of The Poor and the monastery where a group of sisters are living. Both groups are in need of upgrading the facility. Yet, he gave a $4 million loan to finish construction of a new church, which was to be debt-free. How could that be? Now, the Little Sisters of The Poor have to find another facility to accommodate seniors who wanted to live there.
Shame on Bishop Thomas for not assisting Little Sisters of The Poor and the monastery.
DIANE REICHOW
West Toledo
Rename consumer office
Now that NAFTA has been renamed the United States and Mexico Trade Agreement, it should only follow that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau should be changed. It would be more fitting to be the Bank, Credit Card, Payday Loan, Student Loan, and Anybody Else That Steals Money From Consumers Consumer Protection Bureau. It is a mouthful, but that is what this agency has become.
TERRY MYERS
Maumee
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Don’t trash pension efforts
Years of hard work by Teamsters, retirees, and other unions to reform the faltering multiemployer pension system finally are paying off. Earlier this year, congressional leaders formed a bipartisan pension committee to solve the nation’s looming pension crisis by November. Those lawmakers are working hard to come up with a real fix.
But instead of lauding the effort to save the retirements of some 1.5 million retirees, including more than 60,000 in Ohio, that are in desperate need of quick action, The Toledo Blade in its July 22 editorial, “Bail out Central States,” turned up its nose. Evidently, legislation to save the hard-earned nest eggs of people in our community deserves the editorial board’s disdain.
Nothing could be further from the truth. More than 300 multiemployer plans across the country, including the Teamsters’ Central States Pension Fund, are in danger of failing.
The Butch Lewis Act will solve the problem. The measure would boost financially-troubled multiemployer pensions. It would create an agency in the Treasury Department to sell bonds. The Pension Rehabilitation Administration would lend money from the sale of the bonds to troubled pension plans to be repaid over 30 years.
Workers and retirees just want what they have earned and what is rightfully theirs.
CHUCK COLLINSON
South Toledo
Editor’s note: Mr. Collinson is president of Teamsters Local 20.
Trump updates Nixon strategy
President Trump has updated the “Nixon Southern Strategy,” and it goes like this: In 1968, Richard Nixon pandered to white supremacists to frighten blacks away from the Southeastern states’ voting booths. He disguised his efforts as “law and order” and “states rights” politics.
Mr. Trump has the State Department and ICE agents denying passports and revoking citizenship to legal Hispanic-Americans in the Southwestern border states. I suspect the policy’s intent is to create fear and deny Hispanic-Americans the right to vote in the upcoming election.
It’s strategically similar to Nixon’s divisive politics of 1968, except Mr. Trump is targeting Hispanics, 70 percent of whom just happen to vote Democratic. This is another ugly and divisive scheme that the Trump Administration is using to suppress Democratic voter turnout. It’s very cleverly timed, but evil, truly evil.
LARRY ROSENBERG
Toledo