Tell the Truth 

Editor:

The old canard claiming; "California is losing businesses due to over-regulation" conceals the larger reality behind businesses that leave California (Mailbox, Nov. 9).

Over three decades of deregulation, we've seen accelerated job exports to employ oppressed "Third-World" teens in order to escape the costs of fair wages, workplace safety, employment taxes and the most basic regulations that protect clean water, air and land. Additional deregulation undermined import tariffs and created incentives to deposit untaxed profits offshore.

Tens of millions of U.S. living wage jobs and trillions of dollars in tax revenues have been lost, causing increased U.S. poverty, blight, deteriorating infrastructure, closing schools, poverty wages, homelessness, debilitating college debt, under-insured illnesses, suicide, overdose fatalities, gun violence, youth unemployment and the new growth industries preying on desperate American families with rigged housing markets, pawn shops, storage units, slumlords, check cashing, reverse mortgages, payday loans, rent to own, bail bonds, job scalpers, distressed loan servicing, dollar stores, usurious loans for credit cards, autos, homes and "public" universities, among other symptoms of an under-regulated, corrupt and predatory economy.

How many businesses leave California only to fail elsewhere due to plummeting incomes nationwide? Just a few years ago, dozens of local businesses met at Eureka's Wharfinger building to blame the poor for their problems and closures, not "regulations."

Mr. Brennan's claim that the stock market or official unemployment numbers reflect the public reality is laughable. Stocks soar when major industries export jobs, liquidate assets or another war breaks out, or when fraudulent home loans are bundled and sold as AAA investments. After an inevitable collapse, Wall Street gangsters are bailed out and our communities are left with the bankruptcies, foreclosures and worsening human fallout.

Until we begin telling the truth behind a collapsing economy, environment and society, little will change.

George Clark, Eureka