The lead headline in the Saturday, March 29 Gazette, “USDA yanks $3.4M in aid to food banks,” calls to mind a recent book review in The New Yorker [March 17] about the Irish Potato Famine, which explained that the famine was “the product … of a particularly virulent form of exploitative capitalism that left millions of people utterly exposed” to a political/economic system that was stacked against them.

March 17 is also the day that our own district attorney, David Sullivan, gave a stirring speech, reported in the Gazette, calling out “dangerous voices coming from powerful positions” and “simply ask[ing] that we remember where we came from.”

Have our government oligarchs become so cruel and heartless that they accept starvation in the name of government efficiency? Have they never learned the lessons of the past, or do they press onward despite those lessons, in order to preserve their own peculiar form of exploitative capitalism?

George W. Kriebel Jr.

Northampton