Aspen’s new image

Dear Editor:Part of the answer to Andy Stone’s column (“The wheels are spinning,” June 28) asking the perennial question, “What’s the Matter with Aspen?,” may lie in the analysis and writings of William M. Sullivan co-author of “The Good Society” who suggests in more recent work that:”Today’s ascendant images of work have made shibboleths of individual ‘competitiveness’ and strategic ‘flexibility’ in career. While the professions are central to the knowledge economy, their structures of corporate membership and loyalty rarely figure in descriptions of work’s future.”That future is often depicted as a globalizing march toward a “frictionless capitalism” based upon information and communications technology, a global market from which individuals may profit but to which they must unquestioningly submit.”Similarly, the Aspen bubble of real estate values is fueled by the same policies which support redistribution of wealth, corporate welfare and escalating Wall Street profits while other sectors of the economy are failing. Learning from our failure in allowing American manufacturing to collapse while remaining dependent upon imported energy and the resultant trade deficits should be alarming. Are we going to sacrifice everything to “frictionless capitalism?”Should we not keep some of our own “olive trees” alive as Thomas Friedman suggests? Or, do we simply plow under the once happy ski resort in order to get a new 400 horsepower hybrid Lexus?Aspen is being remade in a new image. The tensions in the community are the “friction” to a remaking that is accelerated by the current unbalanced growth of financial market profit-taking coincidental to the current war profiteering which further fuels those sectors of the economy subsidized by a “War President.”Impeach Bush and help save Aspen.Sven Erik AlstromAspen/Lawrence, Kan.