Dear Editor:
Regarding your editorial about the Grand Jury
”
inquiry
”
into VTA’s wasteful practices and governance flaws, as James
Madison said in The Federalist,
”
A bad cause seldom fails to betray itself.
”
Dear Editor:
Regarding your editorial about the Grand Jury “inquiry” into VTA’s wasteful practices and governance flaws, as James Madison said in The Federalist, “A bad cause seldom fails to betray itself.”
What has taken the grand jury so long to investigate the cesspool of VTA wasteful socialist transit? I stopped attending VTA meetings in 1986 when I realized that transportation was not their highest priority, their pension plans were (and are). Did the Grand Jury inquiry go far enough? No. Who did they consult? The people causing the waste. If you were trying to promote fire safety, would you consult an arsonist? Then why did the Grand Jury consult the executive director of the Mineta Institute, the executive director of the Bullet Train, the namesake of the Diridon Station, past president of the American Public Transit Association, the Honorable Rod Diridon?
They went to the architect of socialist transit, asking for solutions, so it is no wonder they failed to give the right answer to Secretary Mineta’s “crucial question.” No wonder their recommendations miss the mark, fail to prescribe a cure for VTA socialism.
The Grand Jury reminds me of a surgeon who finds a malignant tumor and prescribed a band-aide. Having identified the Frankenstein in our midst, the Grand Jury white-washes him. Harvard Professor’s Gomez-Ibanez and Meyer, in “Going Private: The International Experience with Transport Privatization” had the right answer: privatization. The Grand Jury inquiry is a cop-out. The Politico-Transit Alliance and the Boondoggles Empty Seat Transporters Association will ignore them, just as they ignored the MIT study that concluded that VTA is the worst run transit agency in the nation.
I predict that they press on, trying to repeal Prop. 13’s super-majority requirement for tax increases, impose taxes disguised as fees, heap more transit expenses on the back of motorists, and perpetuate their Marxist-Leninist philosophy.
Until our politicians are replaced by enemies of socialist wastefulness, and our business leaders get out of bed with the public-sector unions who milk agencies like VTA, we will continue to suffer the consequences of what Lincoln called “a House Divided Against Itself.”
With the debate raging in the conference committee in Washington over reauthorization of TEA-21, which will see its last temporary extension expire this week, voters can expect to see the gang of tax-and-spendaholics continue the socialist-communist transit policy that our leaders have selected – AKA, the one-way trip to Hell.
Joe Thompson, Gilroy
Submitted Tuesday, June 29 to ed****@****ic.com
