Dear Editor:

My grandfather was from Delbarton, W.Va., and back in the ‘40s he worked at Lando Coal Company. When he passed away, I kept a piece of his Lando Script as a keepsake. For those who don’t know, miners were paid in script “fake money” that could only be spent at the company store. If you were deep in debt at the company store then you were a slave to the coal company. Thus the saying, “I owe my soul to the company store”.

Isn’t that the mess we’re in today? Just look at the $800 billion stimulus bill. It’s full of pork, earmarks and special interest payoff spending with almost nothing for quick job creation. The $750 billion bank bailout last fall combined with another trillion that treasury now says we need to spend to cover more bad bank housing loans means our government is printing and spending tons of fake money. They’re just printing money on paper that will soon be so worthless and the interest payback will be so tremendous that every American will become a slave to this mistake.

I called both of our Senator’s multiple times and begged them to vote no on the stimulus bill. I did not have time to send letters because they were pushing this monster through ASAP. Do you think anyone listened to me? NO! The calls were overwhelmingly against the stimulus bill at a ratio of nine to one against. But what did four out of five of our West Virginia’s representatives do … they ignored you and me. They do not recognize that they work for us as elected members of congress … we do not work for them.

I am so angry because congress is full of elected officials who are in positions of life long privilege and they are more concerned with taking care of special interests groups instead of what the overwhelming number of their constituents wants. To me this is an impeachable level of corruption and four of them, Rockefeller, Byrd, Rahall and Mollohan need to be removed. In fact, Term limits need to be placed on congress and if we want common sense decisions in congress then we need to elect ordinary common people. Members of congress need to know it’s short term and be eager to return home after 4 or 6 years to their hometown businesses or jobs. The time served in congress should be seen as a period of civic duty, not a life long position of power and privilege!

Well, that’s just a pipe dream right along with the dream that any of us late era baby boomers with see a social security check. All my life I complained that I’m paying into social security and will never see a penny of it back. Well this gigantic stimulus bill and the gigantic interest will blow away my social security chances…thank’s Obama. The financial crisis that I thought would happen in about 15 years when millions of people my age sign up for social security will start next year because of this crazy spending. And many of America’s young voters will get a chance to experience hyper-inflation much worse that the Jimmy Carter era along with 20 to 25 percent interest rates. The only good thing is a lot of very uninformed American’s are going to get to experience first hand what they voted for.

Clint Maynard

Huntington, W.Va.