Prosperity

Right on, President Bush! Stop the trial lawyers and the economy will revive, jobs return, and prosperity will zoom in America! WILLIAM S. GREENE, Granada Hills

Re "How to succeed in business," Opinion, Aug. 2 Kudos to Michael Kinsley for debunking Mitt Romney's jingoistic theory of business success. Still, I doubt Romney is about to concede Kinsley's point: that business success in America today is "the compounded result of previous prosperity. " Neither will he admit that antecedent prosperity often was achieved through shameful, shortsighted exploitation of precious natural resources and cheap labor. Forests were clear-cut, mountains strip-mined and rivers polluted.

"The Moon and Sixpence" by Somerset Maugham. Read by Frank Langella. Music by Don Heckman. (Two cassettes; abridged.) Caedmon. Maugham's fictional version of the life of artist Paul Gauguin, who abandoned family and metropolitan prosperity for Tahitian poverty and art, receives a competent and listenable telling from Langella, whose tone--ever so slightly prissy, superior and detached--is well suited to Maugham's narration, which is all those things.

The television commercial is designed to spark outrage. "Billions of taxpayer dollars spent on green energy went to jobs in foreign countries," it intones. "The Obama administration admitted the truth - that $2.3 billion of tax credits went overseas, while millions of Americans can't find a job…. American taxpayers are paying to send their own jobs to foreign countries. " But the widely broadcast anti-Obama ad, paid for by a conservative group called Americans for Prosperity, is highly misleading - a slick pastiche of untruths, half-truths and exaggerations.

Your recent piece on the apparent prosperity in the Tulare Lake Basin brought on by improved conditions for (some) farmers ("A Golden Harvest for State's Farmers," Nov. 7) was a pretty piece of fiction -- unfortunately, the same kind of story we like to tell about ourselves here. Whether farmer prosperity contributes to real community development and well-being depends on the size and tenure of farms. Those growers benefiting from the "improved" markets are the larger growers who survived the recent shakedown in almost every commodity grown in the valley; these better prices came at great expense to smaller growers, whose losses are still being felt in our towns.

Marco Rubio, the Florida senator and Republican rising star, delivered his inaugural speech on the Senate floor Tuesday, calling for a new "American century" in which innovation kick-starts a new era of economic prosperity. Rubio, elected last November, has been in office for more than six months, but Tuesday was the day set aside for the traditional "maiden" speech, his formal debut in the chamber. The Miami-born son of Cuban immigrants, Rubio, at just 40, is already viewed as a serious candidate for the 2012 vice presidential nomination.

A full year ahead of the next presidential election, the conservative group Americans for Prosperity has whipped out a $2.4-million ad campaign slamming President Obama's stimulus plan. The ads will air over the next two weeks in swing states Florida, Michigan, Virginia and New Mexico. The ad campaign from the group, linked to the conservative Koch brothers, attacks Obama's former support for the solar company Solyndra, which declared bankruptcy this year after receiving $528 million in government loans.

The recent actions of the Oxnard City Council shouldn't come as a surprise. After all, its members were bought and paid for by the same developers who have controlled California politics for the last 50 years. The dissolution of the Planning Commission and the secret meetings at taxpayer expense are just symptoms of the same malady. On a recent visit to San Diego, I was struck by the fact that it has become almost indistinguishable from Los Angeles. The same smog, crime and urban blight.