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Letters: North Korea after Kim Jong-Il, brown vs. green
Going over listeners' responses to past broadcasts.
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Kai Ryssdal: President Obama had a phone call with John Boehner today. He urged the Speaker of the House to go along with the Senate's deal on a two-month extension of the payroll tax cut.
We talked to small business owners yesterday, asking whether the standoff in Congress. and ensuing uncertainty is affecting them. 'Yes' was the general answer. But Bill Thon of Tallahassee, Fla., says there's no reason it really should.
Bill Thon: It's really pretty insignificant. I think businesses should hire when they've got a lot of business and need the help, and when they don't, they need to let people go. I think that's the way it's always worked, and you don't need to be an MBA to realize that.
We talked to USC professor David Kang Monday about North Korea after the death of Kim Jong-Il, and what it might take to get that country to something resembling a functioning economy. Kang said there's lots of potential there.
But Amanda Rich of North Bend, Wa., says we should be careful what we wish for.
Amanda Rich: The last thing the world needs is another China. North Korea's environment is already in a perilous state, and the country is home to several endangered species. While the people of North Korea might end up better off with a more active economy -- assuming the new government stops exploiting them under new prosperity -- the devil we know may be better than the devil we don't.
This week we told you that UPS is trying to make its trucks more energy-efficient. Brent Gardner-Smith of Basalt, Colo., said the headline on our website, "Brown goes green," gets it wrong.
Brent Gardner-Smith: I think "green" is really now an abused word, right up there with "sustainability." Driving trucks, no matter how efficient they are, is not good for the environment. Driving trucks is still a "brown" activity. The more accurate headline, and frame, for this story, is "Brown goes less brown."
Send us your comments. No need to call UPS; the Internet works just as well.
i think we are much worst then North Korea in our standing in this world. unless your are white and see all the riches you and your people have gain under the pretext of so call democracy (aka colonization of resource, people, religion and couture)! i mean, i can't tell if American are proud to be stupid or just proud to be xenophobes, anyway so many angry gooberheads in this country are pee off at our corporate feudalism, its easy to point a finger to a dictatorship and say hey we are better then them and here is how we should treat them! we would weaponizing liberty or democracy or save the planet at a point of a thermobaric bomb or a depleted uranium bunker buster, I mean who really cares if American dump thousand gallons of dioxin poison of agent orange that cause hundred of birth defect to generation of Vietnamese and ho don't for get the 100 thousand tons of unexploded bomb in Laos! but Hey compare to north Korea we have no problem conducting human experiment on unsuspected american children and pregnant women with injection of uranium (aka boston project 1996), or the fact that hillary clinton had to apologizes for conducting human experiment by giving syphilis to children. you know we isolate north Korea like iraq so innocent north korean would starve just like under the sanction against sadam. we as a country knew about it and we let it happen again and again. this is the type of people we are. Ya. we go around telling how other country how to behave only if they don't sell their resource to us. but hey! if you mass murder 1000 of your people like uzbekistan in 2002 its ok as long as you sell us all your uranium! freedom and liberty and democracy and human rights it just a propaganda branding and pretext for our war machine and oil companies! facts are facts
