Export-Import Bank support is needed
Last year, 44 Tennessee companies did $226 million worth of business selling transportation equipment, manufactured chemicals, food and wood products and other goods to foreign purchasers with the help of financial assistance from the Export Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im).
For 81 years, Ex-Im has enabled U.S. businesses of all sizes to compete against foreign companies that enjoy aggressive support from their countries' export credit agencies. Unfortunately, interest groups with a rigid ideological agenda have succeeded in blocking a congressional vote to continue the bank's operations.
Now the bank's charter has expired and can no longer help U.S. businesses. These interest groups do not represent the real voice of Main Street, and they threaten thousands of American jobs. Ex-Im financing has helped Tennessee boost jobs in difficult economic times when every new job is important.
Contact your member of Congress and tell him it's time they stop playing D.C. Politics and listening to ideologues. Ask them to support the bank, and make the statement we are proud to build products for the global market in Tennessee.
David F. Melcher, President & CEO Aerospace Industries Assoc.
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We don't know a lot about Iranian nukes
Listening to Obama and Susan Rice, the Iran Nuclear Deal sounds like a no-brainer: Iran must reduce their stockpile of enriched uranium by 98 percent and their centrifuges by two-thirds; Iran's hundreds of billions of dollars in frozen assets won't thaw until it does so; and Iran's ability to make a nuclear weapon is pushed out a decade to 15 years.
That gives the U.S., says Hillary, time to work on Iran's "behavior," which we evidently failed to do when the Iranians were in a position of weakness.
The obvious question is, 98 percent of what and two-thirds of what? The amount of nuclear material that 1) we know about or 2) the Iranians actually have. The gap between 1 and 2 is, well, who knows? But given the past "transparency" of the "death to America" regime, a betting man would assume it is substantial.
The biggest concern about the deal is that we don't know what we don't know; but what we do know about what we don't know is that what we don't know is quite a lot, and the people we are dealing with want to keep it that way.
Regis Nicoll
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Editorial pages offer 'cool' reads
Every once in a while, I read an article in the newspaper and say to myself, "That was really cool!" On July 11, that happened not once, but twice.
Rachel Schulson, in her Times column titled "How Colorado Lowered Teen Births, Abortions," noted the teen birth rate in Colorado dropped 40 per cent in four years because the state offers "free, reversible, long-acting contraception to teenagers and women of limited means."
What a great outcome: Fewer teen pregnancies and fewer abortions.
In "Defrauding the Nation's Poor" on the Free Press page, columnist Michael Gerson discussed "the broad and growing collaboration between government and business to systematically defraud and exploit the poor through state lotteries, payday lending and payday gambling."
He calls for a "renewed effort to help the poor by refusing to cheat them." This won't cure poverty, but it would be an excellent start.
If you did not read both of these columns, I highly recommend that you find a copy of last Saturday's Times Free Press and read them.
Jim Olson
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Book review unsettles reader
This is to you, David Cook: What was going through your liberal brain when you didn't like Harper Lee's new, unreleased book and proceeded to reveal the entire book chapter for chapter?
I've never had someone that's not even a literary book critic to tell me what books not to read. How dare you!
Dennis Brown, Lookout Mountain