Dear Editor,
Conscience
All good men of conscience
Must remain silent no more
When our leaders keep starting
All of those crazy foreign wars
Invading other countries
Just to show who is boss
Is really criminal and dangerous
And does nothing but create a great loss
Our troops and the military
Are really there to defend
Not to invade other countries
To solve a financial end
The loss of human life
Is too horrendous to justify
And the dying on both sides
Starts with one too many lives
The next time we have a leader
Who wants to show his machis-mo
He can have hand to hand combat
Against his own personal foe
Tom Engebretson, Gilroy
Council should open high-speed train meeting to the public
Dear Editor,
The Gilroy City Council should understand that the state Attorney General’s opinion about metropolitan planning organizations and joint power authorities like the Valley Transportation Authority in Santa Clara County and the Council of Governments in San Benito County complying with the Brown Act also applies to the people’s business being conducted with the California High Speed Rail Authority.
Why the secrecy?
If you’re planning on blowing billions of our taxes, and our children’s and grandchildren’s, and you’re planning to do it with the biggest boondoggle in state history, then it ought to be out-in-the-open with Sunshine Act protection for the people that you expect to pay for it. A long line of California higher court decisions stand for the proposition that the people’s business ought to be conducted in the open.
Secret backroom deals to spend generations of taxpayers’ money on a Soviet-style horizontal elevator are beneath contempt. We could have purchased all of the outstanding common stock of Pacific Southwest Airlines for less than the Prop. 1A bond principal.
If GE, Siemens, Bechtel, etc., want to build a bullet train with their shareholders’ money, then let them. As I’ve told the High Speed Rail Commission, and later its successor, CAHSRA, if you put enough Fedex, UPS, and Postal Service tonnage on the bullet train then you would not need to ask taxpayers for a dime. But those Commissioners, and then the Bullet Train Directors, wouldn’t hear of it. I said it in front of TV cameras in Fresno about 10 years ago when Congressman Costa was still in the state Assembly and was present for that meeting, when I excoriated the commissioners for not cross-examining the French HSR officials who were there testifying.
Wells & Fargo, SPRR, UPRR, etc., etc., all showed us the way to make passenger service feasible, with profitable freight revenue to offset losing passenger fares. Doing it the Soviet way in any mode of transport is an idea conceived in insolvency condemned to bankruptcy upon birth. Tell the CAHSRA and Bullet Train advocates that America knows better than the French, Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese, etc.
Joseph P. Thompson, Gilroy
‘Show me your papers’ intolerable, but being groped by the TSA fine?
Dear Editor,
When Arizona asked to have citizens produce valid identification; there was an outcry about this becoming a police state. This practice was considered a violation of privacy. Their battle cry was “show me your papers” implying Nazi Germany.
The very same people believe that being groped and sexually assaulted by Transportation Safety Administration personnel is just fine. When we discover that terrorists are inserting explosives in body cavities will we be subjected to colonoscopies and vaginal searches?
Are these people still going to defend this practice? To me this is more invasive than “show me your papers,” but what do I know.
Keith C. De Filippis, San Jose
Council vote on HSRA – hooray!
Dear Editor,
Hooray for Gilroy in opposing this state and federal high-speed train boondoggle.
What a waste of money!
Marvin Madsen, Gilroy
