Safety will suffer if ATC is privatized
Privatizing air traffic control is a terrible idea. The single most important task of ATC is to keep us safe. With multi-millions of passengers traversing our nation on a daily basis the idea of handing over this most important function to profit hungry moguls is ridiculous. The only goal of a private corporation is increasing financial gain for its shareholders. History has shown that corporations collapse under their own greed, as we all well know from the 2008 debacle. A private corporation will seek out efficiency gain at the expense of quality and safety. The airline industry will suffer greatly as trust in their ability to keep us safe will decline. Shifting to unproven and untrustworthy corporations will negatively impact that record and the trust of all travelers.
TOM MCMANUS, ROSWELL
Next president must confront Islamic terrorism
The greatest foreign policy challenge facing the next POTUS is not containing Russia, China or North Korea. It is stopping the spread of the cancer of Islamic-inspired terrorism. We will need all the nuclear powers including Russia to accomplish this. ISIL’s plan is to directly, or through surrogates, implant the cancer of Islamic terrorism through a toehold city in each and every vulnerable or unstable Muslim country. Defeating Daesh in Syria will do nothing if it reappears in Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Nigeria and possibly Gaza. We must keep these toeholds from becoming cities that enable ISIL’s surrogates to then expand and terrorize the local populations and rape the local economy to fund its expansion. Like modern efforts in fighting cancer, we must simultaneously poison, burn, strangle, starve, and infiltrate these cancerous cells and immunize these potential toehold cities before they are taken over by ISIL. We must also look ahead to identify where ISIL plans to infect next, and immunize them, before the cancer cells arrive, by helping make the countries more stable.
KIRK G. WILSON, ALPHARETTA
