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I agree that the plan for the casino in Cascade Locks has gone on long enough and should be carried through. However, I disagree with the suggestion that the comment period be extended by 60 days. We have already had years to comment.

It has been reported that Friends of the Gorge, in a last-ditch attempt to kill the casino, are trying this ploy of 60 days extension to delay until after we have a new governor, as both candidates have spoken out against the casino.

I am a native of Hood River and feel that Gorge land is being returned to those who once owned it and deserve it. The Gorge will not be damaged. It is too bad there are not Friends of the Tribes, or Friends of Cascade Locks organizations to give them support.

Ruth Turner
Hood River

Use birth control

When I was younger I always wanted to live in Hood River. Now being 21 and working I see that Hood River is a rather pricey place to live. Yet it seems to me a massive amount of 20-something girls are making it work?

So I ask myself how, and the answer is very, very simple. The baby boom hitting Hood River among young parents is appalling.

I for one am sick and tired of working while these girls sit at home popping out child after child after child that they cannot afford to provide for and in reality are not ready for. The amount of abuse to the Oregon state benefits is ridiculous. Girls that should be looking forward to college and getting married and being young have exchanged those joys for a food stamp card and apartment paid for by HUD.

My only wish is that these girls be made to work or do something with their time aside from having more babies and letting taxpayers pay for them to live. It’s unfair and really casts a nasty light on the youth of today.

My final thought on all of this is: Birth control is free from the state just like every other assistance you’re enjoying.

Ashley Brasuell
Hood River

End ‘hypocrisy’

The emperor has no clothes.

Neither, apparently, does the president, the secretary of defense or the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and the intrepid volunteers at WikiLeaks.com, on the other hand, deserve to be revered as patriots and heroes in the tradition of Nathan Hale, Patrick Henry, Philip Berrigan and Daniel Ellsberg.

Like the Pentagon Papers, which exposed the hypocrisy of the Vietnam War, the 76,000 heretofore “secret” documents posted on the Internet by WikiLeaks have exposed the hypocrisy of the ill-conceived military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Once the news appeared simultaneously in the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel, the Administration and the Pentagon sprang into action. Unfortunately, their goal was not to follow up on the accusations and fertile leads but to “spin” the news and discount the significance of the material.

The Administration flacks claimed they already knew about the revelations and the leaks provided no new data. “Nothing to see here; move on, move on.”

I hope that is not true. If it is, the president “already knew” the war in Afghanistan is going from bad to worse; that field commanders have been covering up civilian massacres and underreporting casualties; that the Pakistani ISI has been funding both sides of the war; that the U.S. deploys “death squads” like the 373rd and unmanned drone attacks are Al Qaida’s greatest recruitment tool.

Secretary Bobby Gates calls the leaks “cowardly.” This from a man who sits behind a desk and commits thousands of our brightest and best youth to fight and die on foreign sands for other people’s gas and oil. The hypocrisy is overwhelming.

This is a defining moment in our history. If President Obama lacks the courage or moral fiber to drastically alter the course of our involvement in Afghanistan and to begin to bring our troops home, we will once again have to take the streets and force an end to war as we did in Vietnam.

Sam Dunlap
Home Valley, Wash.

ANOTHER VOICE

Trust the local currency to sustain community

By KAREN HARDING

I would like to pursue a statement I made in my recent 52 Faces interview (July 31). It was about RiverHOURS, the Columbia Gorge local currency. It is time to emphasize that money is a human invention. It is a tool that we use to get the things we need and want. We create it and we can agree to improve it, so that we can provide more solutions to current problems.

We at the Gorge Local Currency Cooperative have put in a lot of time and energy on the RiverHOURS System, in order to show the larger community a new way forward. We need to realize that a group of very powerful bankers do not control the flow of needs and wants in our communities unless we let them.

There are no laws against our use of other currencies as long as required government taxes are paid in the legal tender, Federal Reserve Notes. As we have to use our federal dollars for expenditures outside of the community such as taxes, our use community currencies for local labor and products, will free up more money with which to work.

Currency, current, flow, money ... is not flowing very well right now is it?

“Fish in water” presumably take the water for granted, the way we take our use of money as an absolute given in our lives. The difference is that fish didn’t invent water.

Money as we know it was not created overnight. It is a tool that humans evolved over thousands of years to assist the flow of our needs and wants, from simple barter, to commodity money such as salt or wheat, to metal coins, to paper dollars, to checks and credit cards, and now on the Internet with credit clearing systems.

As civilizations have increased in numbers and complexity we have grown to accept each new form of currency.

At this time, however, on a personal level and on a community level we are struggling to live with diminished resources, and increasing problems. Do you feel that important decisions in your life come down to money: your career decisions, your health decisions, your family decisions?

Do faraway banks control our lives? If this tool in our tool box isn’t working, are we willing to work with a new one?

Yes, it is time to re-evaluate our wants and needs. It is definitely time to be smarter about our use of resources, personal and global. I hear voices in our community calling for us to “tighten our belts,” presumably down to a bare survival level.

We live in a world of scarcity, but what is it that is scarce? Needs are plentiful! Work should therefore be plentiful! Some resources are limited, but it’s money that is scarce.

If money were sufficient would we take care of our community needs? Would we plan for a future with less available natural resources, and more available human resources? There is plenty of work caring for the children, the elderly, the sick, our bioregion, our watershed.

We have transportation, food, energy, housing, learning, and spirit needs. Would we call local leaders wasteful and extravagant for funding programs that enhance our basic human community, if money were not scarce?

We welcome your help. If a RiverHOURS system is adopted by a local government, to supplement the dwindling amount of revenue they have for necessary services, local acceptance would be vital. Widespread community support, by trading with local currency for local labor and products, would demonstrate the potential for local currency to supplement local budgets.

A local government would issue a carefully agreed upon amount of RiverHOURS, printed by the Gorge Local Currency Cooperative, by spending it for necessary services. The community would benefit by continued circulation of these RiverHOURS many times their value in trading.

The local government would accept back for payment of agreed local fees and taxes, an amount of RiverHOURS equal to what they issued. Should other communities follow, our regional currency system would expand and the resulting prosperity would be Gorge-wide.

Our existing RiverHOURS system has been successfully operating for more than five years, and is ready to move step-by-step to a larger scale. Our cooperative has shown that the creation of currency does not belong only to the banks; that we can trust each other with the exchange of local services and local goods; that we can administer a supply of local currency, without bank debt, for the health of our local communities; that community is about more than barest survival, it is about working together to enhance our lives as human beings.

Karen Harding, of Mt. Hood, is a member of the Gorge Local Currency Cooperative steering committee.