{"id":1318446,"date":"2020-02-27T00:20:23","date_gmt":"2020-02-27T07:20:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.postindependent.com\/?p=994085"},"modified":"2020-02-27T00:20:23","modified_gmt":"2020-02-27T07:20:23","slug":"thursday-letters-rmi-greed-trump-lies-and-trump-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/local-news\/thursday-letters-rmi-greed-trump-lies-and-trump-economy\/","title":{"rendered":"Thursday letters: RMI greed, Trump lies, and Trump economy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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RMI sees only dollar signs<\/strong><\/p>\n

I could say environmental rapists like Rocky Mountain Industrials\u2019 Gregory Dangler make me sick, but the truth is they\u2019re the ones who are ill. The disease they\u2019re infected with is more prevalent in this country than coronavirus is in China. It\u2019s the lust for money above all else.<\/p>\n

In his column in the Feb. 18 Aspen Daily News attacking Glenwood Springs, Garfield County, and just about every other municipal government within 40 miles of Glenwood Springs for their opposition to RMI\u2019s plans to expand their limestone quarry by 16 times, RMI\u2019s chief executive officer promises Glenwood Springs 100 high paying jobs. All RMI asks in return is they be allowed to demolish the mountain that looms north of the city and run convoy after convoy of trucks up and down the pristine Transfer Trail.<\/p>\n

Aesthetics mean nothing to these people. Take your beautiful mountain scenery to City Market and see how many eggs you can buy, they say.<\/p>\n

When I moved to this valley 27 years ago, I didn\u2019t come here to make a killing. I got out of the rapacious environment of the Chicago area to revel in the glory of the magnificent Rocky Mountains and experience the soulful exhilaration of a stroll through a pine forest. I\u2019m convinced the vast majority of my fellow transplants had the same motives.<\/p>\n

Dangler says Garfield County lost 250 businesses from 2007 to 2016. That\u2019s because of the flaky extraction industry RMI is a part of. Aspen Times columnist John Colson hit the nail on the head when he suggested RMI, which is facing bankruptcy, doesn\u2019t have the financial wherewithal to pull off the expansion. Colson suspects RMI will just get all the government approvals lined up and sell the whole kit-n-caboodle to the highest bidder.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t really care if the hasty Bureau of Land Management environmental impact study finds that the precious hot springs Glenwood Springs is so dependent on won\u2019t be impacted. I don\u2019t wanna look up from my bench in the therapy pool and see the RMI limestone train has done hauled away our mountain.<\/p>\n

Fred Malo Jr.
Carbondale<\/p>\n

Probably no landslide for Trump<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mr. Kirchenwitz doesn\u2019t seem to understand that calculations regarding the number of lies that Trump tells are counting repetitions of lies, for instance when you insist that the Chinese are paying for tariffs (which is a blatant lie) and you repeat this hundreds of times it doesn\u2019t take long to tell thousands of lies. The crazy thing about Trump is some of the things he lies about, for instance, saying his father was born in Germany. Trump claimed to not know Rod Blagojevich even though he fired him on national TV!<\/p>\n

Sadly, if Donald Trump got caught with his hand in the cookie jar he would make it a statement of fact that he was just making sure that they were fresh, and Fox news and Trump supporters would all agree that \u201cyeah, he was just making sure they were fresh,\u201d then Republican senators would chime in \u201cwell even if he was sneaking one, he was going to get one after dinner anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n

Regarding landslides, considering that an openly gay mayor of South Bend, Indiana, with a husband holds a slight lead over Trump in national polls; a landslide win by Trump in 2020 seems highly optimistic. I agree that he could pull off an electoral win again, however, it is almost certain that his opponent will have millions more in the popular vote just like the grandmother that got millions more votes than him in the last election. Is that what you presume to call a landslide?<\/p>\n

It does seem quite possible that the Senate may flip in favor of the Democrats, won\u2019t that be interesting?<\/p>\n

Marco Diaz
Redstone<\/p>\n

The rest of the story<\/strong><\/p>\n

Trumpsters continue to celebrate the state of the economy, which in some areas is doing quite well. However there is much more to the story than they and the Fox News crowd will acknowledge since the actual facts don\u2019t usually fit their greatly exaggerated narrative.<\/p>\n

Yes, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has continued to grow during Trump\u2019s reign. But according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, real GDP growth has increased every year for the past 10 years, with three major surges in 2014, 2015, and 2018. Current growth is a continuation of an economic trend that began long before MAGA arrived.<\/p>\n

The national unemployment rate is at a historic low. What Trump apologists don\u2019t mention is that the unemployment rate has been going down for the past 10 years, and again, the trend began years before Trump arrived to claim credit. The greatest gains were made during the previous administration in 2011, 2013, and 2014, with the last two years doubling Trump\u2019s best gains of 2017 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics).<\/p>\n

The Obama years ended at 4.7% unemployment and added 8.1 million jobs from 2014 to 2016; the 78 months of continued job growth then were a modern day record (Money Magazine, Jan. 2017). Unemployment currently stands at 3.6%, but only 6.6 million jobs were added during Trump\u2019s first three years (U.S.BLS).<\/p>\n

One bit of dirty laundry never mentioned by Trump\u2019s cult is the huge U.S. budget deficit, which busted a record-setting 1.1 trillion last year. That was the highest deficit in 7 years (Fox Business News). This was 25% higher than 2018 and will continue to grow (Congressional Budget Office). So much for Trump\u2019s campaign promise that he would eliminate the deficit in eight years! (Trump, 2016, 2017).<\/p>\n

Any Tea Party enthusiast with half a spine, including some of our own local Republicans, should be screaming louder now about the deficit than they did during Obama\u2019s time. Sen. Paul Rand (R-KY) correctly notes that the GOP deficit flip-flop is the very definition of hypocrisy (Rand, 2018, 2019). Sounds about right.<\/p>\n

Cliff Colia,
Glenwood Springs<\/p>\n

via:: Post Independent<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

RMI sees only dollar signs I could say environmental rapists like Rocky Mountain Industrials\u2019 Gregory Dangler make me sick, but the truth is they\u2019re the ones who are ill. The disease they\u2019re infected with is more prevalent in this country than coronavirus is in China. It\u2019s the lust for money above all else. In his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[160],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1318446","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-19 19:16:58","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSKE Ski Country","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1318446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1318446"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1318446\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1318446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1318446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1318446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}