Tom Cline needs to be brought back for District 5. Not only has he volunteered for years, but he has also been readily available to Gilroy residents since his election in 2022; if you text him, he will return your call.
In District 6, two grieving families in Gilroy still have not gotten closure. The homicides that occurred on the family property of Rebeca Armendariz on Oct. 30, 2021, have still not been solved.
Until those cases are closed out, Ms. Armendariz should not be allowed to hold public office. This is simply a matter of public safety.
In District 4, I agree with Fred Tovar that “District 4 deserves more…” And that more is Diana Sanchez Bentz, who has lived in District 4 for more than 30 years.
Michael E. Hingle, Esq.
Gilroy
Regardless of who is elected president or PM, Far Western governance is heavily steered and may therefore be weakened by domestic corporate/oligarchic interests, sometimes through the latter’s economic intimidation.
All political candidates thus parties are elected via the FPTP ballot system, which by way of its dynamics enables a covert rule by way of potently manipulative/persuasive corporate and big-monied lobbyists. While the FPTP system may technically qualify as being democratic within the democracy spectrum, it’s nonetheless democratically lacking.
It’s a system that enables big-money lobbyists to pull our (typically politically vulnerable) governments by the nose. High-level elected officials can become crippled by implicit/explicit corporate and/or oligarchic threats to transfer or eliminate jobs and/or capital investment, thus economic stability, if ‘requests’ by big-monied interests are not met.
The lobbyists can also write bills for governing representatives to pass and have implemented, supposedly to save the elected officials their own time writing them up. (The practice may have become so systematic that even mainstream news-media political writers don’t find reason to publicly discuss or write about it.)
Low-representation FPTP-elected governments are the easiest for lobbyists to manipulate or ‘buy’. Perhaps it’s why such powerful interests generally resist (albeit probably clandestinely) grassroots-supported attempts at changing from FPTP to more proportionally representative electoral systems of governance — the latter which dilutes the lobbyists’ self-serving, if not insidious, influence on government policy and decisions.
Meanwhile, the biggest of businesses (at least here in Canada) get unaccountably even bigger, defying the very spirit of government rules established to ensure healthy competition by limiting mass consolidation.
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“If voting changed anything [in favor of the weak/poor/disenfranchised] they’d have made it illegal.”
—‘Calamity’ Jane Bodine, in the film Our Brand Is Crisis