New teacher union hire an embarrassment

To the editor:

The Clark County Education Association should be ashamed of what it is doing.

The union hires John Vellardita as its executive director, even after this guy and 16 other defendants have been ordered to pay $1.5 million in damages to a parent union for conspiracy to make the union ungovernable. Mr. Vellardita’s share is $77,850, the largest amount of all the defendants (Sunday Review-Journal).

What the devil are CCEA officials thinking?

Mr. Vellardita is supposed to start work Monday, according to Ruben Murillo, president of the education association. Mr. Vellardita is going to represent teachers, and union officials say they are OK with this bad guy. What does that say for the teachers in this state?

While serving the union in California, Mr. Vellardita met secretly in Chinatown to discuss union business, where he ordered colleagues to shred union documents, hide union members’ files and alter union files. According to a union attorney, Mr. Vellardita and others broke into a union office and terrorized a security guard. After leaving the office, they threatened a witness and yelled, “Sellout! Scab!”

Folks, there were 14 applicants for the job, and who do association officials choose to represent them? John Vellardita.

With his track record of misdeeds, it seems no one can trust whatever he says or does. I, for one, will not believe anything the teachers and their union say when they choose to bypass credible applicants for a person like this. If the teachers want to be respected and accepted, they should dump this bad apple as quickly as possible.

BRADLEY KUHNS

LAS VEGAS

New law

To the editor:

A Wednesday letter headlined “New cellphone law hardly an imposition” expresses a very dangerous idea: It’s OK to criminalize something if the prohibition of that object or behavior does not put an intolerable burden on the average person in the opinion of lawmakers.

Apparently, laws aren’t passed anymore because they are required, they are passed — and behavior is controlled — merely because the government can do so.

Note that this letter does not even attempt to justify the new law; it merely says that in the writer’s opinion, other people can tolerate the resulting lack of freedom. Using this as justification, we can outlaw almost anything and tell the supposedly free citizenry, “Quit whining, you can get along without it.”

I say instead let’s promote and expand freedom and limit unjustified government intrusion and control.

James Moldenhauer

North Las Vegas

On the job

To the editor:

The Wall Street occupiers are merely a mirror image of the Tea Party — neither group has the slightest idea how to create jobs, and right now it would seem neither do the so-called job creators themselves.

But, then again, these so-called job creators are not in business to create jobs, only to make themselves richer, jobs be damned. In fact, they have departments set up to make sure they don’t need to hire people by making existing workers work harder and longer. So you can take with a grain of salt all this CEO talk about how they would just love to hire more workers but can’t do so.

One of the lamest excuses given for this reluctance to get off their backsides and increase production is the “lack of certainty.” Well, if you are looking for certainty in anything in life, you are either an eternal optimist or a damn fool. Life itself is a big gamble — and what about that old right-wing canard about “risk taking” being one of the driving forces of industry? So they sit on their mountains of cash afraid to make a move because they “can’t see any certainty out there.”

Actually, the truth of the matter is they aren’t stupid enough to produce goods when there is no demand for them. That’s partly because they won’t take their eyes off the bottom line long enough to hire more workers who will spend their wages on their products (and the products of other companies), which in turn will increase more demand, which in turn will produce more jobs and a prosperous economy.

So being as industry won’t participate in this “pump priming,” somebody has to. And guess who has the resources to do so? The much-maligned, mean old government. Trying to convince a bunch of tea partiers in Congress who know nothing about economics of that, however, is another story, as they are pulling the other way by calling for less government spending, not more. They are also insisting on tax cuts for millionaires, who do nothing at all to stimulate the economy.

So a bunch of Tea Party nuts are stymieing our brilliant president’s efforts to “prime the pump,” hence the economy and job creation keep sputtering along and the rich sit even harder on their riches.

I know that the right-wingers in Congress scorn Keynesian economics for their own reasons, but it works. At least it always has, to varying degrees.

DANIEL OLIVIER

BULLHEAD CITY, Ariz.

La-la land

To the editor:

Dr. Dipak Desai was sure competent enough to notice the camera trained on his face upon entering court on Tuesday (Wednesday Review-Journal, front-page photo). He seems to be glaring at the camera lens with his usual creepy and stern expression.

I truly hope that the judge made note of this.

Dr. Desai obviously knows when he is having his picture taken. But, of course, in court he merely stares straight ahead as if he is in la-la land. Sure looks like he’s playing possum to me.

Todd Wheelan

North Las Vegas