Readers share views on Donald Trump, Kansas, wealth disparity
Ides of March
Establishment Republicans would do well to heed Shakespeare’s warning in “Julius Caesar” to “beware the Ides of March.” Front-runner billionaire Donald Trump will almost surely win enough delegates to make his quest for the Republican presidential nomination a fait accompli.
Trump is the ugly consequence of rising inequality, stagnant wages, manufacturing jobs being shipped overseas and Wall Street nearly vaporizing the U.S. economy. So now we have vulgar, invincible Trump in all his inflammatory, racist, rhetorical glory firing up his army of know-nothing voters.
Trump vows to make America great again by building a wall, deporting 11 million illegal immigrants, keeping out Muslims and sparking trade wars with China, Japan and Mexico. What could go wrong?
Well, consider, Trump is the only candidate endorsed and admired by white supremacists, Sarah Palin and Vladimir Putin.
Friends, Trump lemmings, countrymen, before the die is cast and we suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, let us come together to bury Trump, not to praise Trump.
Shakespeare might have been thinking of Trump when he wrote, “The evil that men do lives after them.”
Let’s deliver the unkindest cut of all to Trump when we vote in November.
Jeffrey Bushman
Kansas City
Kansas ruins
I just read the March 8 article “Kansas lawmakers weigh strategies to impeach top judges.”
Republicans who have gotten Kansas into the financial state that we are in are tired of the state Supreme Court trying to maintain adequate school funding. This makes it even more difficult for them to come up with money to fund the state.
They have raided Kansas Department of Transportation funds and have just recently cut funds to higher education. The Republicans will not admit that their tax cuts were not a good plan.
I think it is high time that Kansans start looking at a strategy to impeach those who are ruining the financial stability of our great state, beginning with Gov. Sam Brownback.
Tom Taylor
Overland Park
Kansas courts
The right-wing conservative Legislature in Kansas is at it again. This time the lawmakers want to amend the state Constitution to make it easier to impeach members of the state Supreme Court.
One Republican senator says the bill is not an attempt “to go after judges,” but that is exactly what it is. Republicans are mad at the Supreme Court because of recent rulings on school finance and social issues.
The proposed bill would allow impeachment when justices “attempt to usurp the power of the legislative or executive branches of the government.”
But what do Republican lawmakers think the job of the judiciary is? Certainly it is to interpret laws and determine their constitutionality. But the role of the judiciary in both national and state government is also to check the power of the other two branches.
It is called separation of powers and checks and balances — two constitutional principles of our democracy. Hopefully, reason will prevail when the bill reaches the floor of the Kansas Senate. An independent judiciary is necessary for our governmental system to function properly.
Patrick Sirridge
Leawood
Wealth disparity
Oxfam, an organization dedicated to fighting world poverty and injustice, recently released findings that are deeply alarming in their implications.
▪ In 2015, just 62 individuals had the same wealth as 3.6 billion people — the bottom half of humanity. This is down from 388 individuals as recently as 2010.
▪ The wealth of the richest 62 people has risen by 44 percent since 2010, an increase of $542 billion, to $1.76 trillion.
▪ The wealth of the bottom half fell by more than a trillion dollars in the same period, a drop of 41 percent.
I think it’s obvious that unregulated capitalism presents the greatest threat to our nation and humanity — far greater than terrorism. We need political leaders who will rein in the Shkrelis, Kochs and Sinquefields, and the giant banks and corporations, whose ethical standards extend only so far as their profit margin.
The Great Recession under President George W. Bush should have made it obvious: You can’t trust people whose only interest is getting as rich as possible as quickly as possible.
Michael Zygmunt
Kansas City
This story was originally published March 14, 2016 at 10:00 AM with the headline "Readers share views on Donald Trump, Kansas, wealth disparity."