East Bay Times Letters to the Editor for July 2, 2024
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Re: “Mayor’s home part of startling FBI raids” (Page A1, June 21).
The search of Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao’s Oakland residence is a lightning bolt electrifying the city’s government and politics.
Some of the responses are deplorable. Those seeking Thao’s recall are screaming for her to resign, this despite the fact that they know nothing of the search warrant’s content.
They assume Thao is under criminal investigation. That’s a risky assumption. Law enforcement officers can obtain a warrant when a judge finds probable cause to believe that evidence relating to a crime may exist at the location to be searched. But the person who lives in the place to be searched need not be a target of the criminal investigation.
Mayor Thao has no warrant facts either. Yet she shouts that she represents the poor and her situation is caused by “billionaires and millionaires” who want to destroy her. Lots of luck with that.
Restraint is badly needed.
Gary Sirbu
Oakland
California boasts the nation’s most comprehensive rodeo law, Penal Code 596.7. The law was amended in 2007 to include the Mexican charreadas common throughout California.
Current law requires either an on-site or on-call veterinarian at every rodeo and charreada, and bans the use of electric prods in the holding chutes. The law further requires that animal injury reports be submitted to the State Veterinary Medical Board. These reports are public record.
Incredibly, no charreada injury reports have been submitted to the vet board since 2007, and injuries are routine. Three of the charreada‘s nine scored events involve roping the legs of running horses. In the “steer tailing” event, tails are routinely stripped to the bone (“degloved”), broken, even torn off.
It appears that the charro community is unaware of state law and its penalties. Please spread the word to help remedy this unacceptable situation.
Eric Mills
Oakland
Re: “We should start holding homeless accountable” (Page A6, June 7).
How lucky you and I are to not have experienced the misfortune of an unhoused person.
If only this topic were as “simple” as taking advantage of “free stuff.” Each person’s trajectory toward becoming homeless is, in fact, complicated. They may suffer from mental illness or a drug dependency. They may have been gainfully employed until an unexpected medical or other emergency depleted their funds.
Try engaging in a conversation with an unhoused person. You may be surprised by what you learn. I guarantee it won’t be, “I’m here because of the freebies.”
Sharon Brown
Walnut Creek
More than 2,800 acres of ancestral land in northwestern California will be returning to the Shasta Indian Nation.
The transfer will include land that was buried at the bottom of the reservoirs created by the Klamath River dams, which is an ongoing project of removal. Historically, the Shasta Indians have inhabited the land in both the northwestern part of California and the southwestern part of Oregon located next to the Klamath, Scott and Shasta rivers. However, in the 1910s the Siskiyou Electric Power and Light Co., now known as the California-Oregon Power Co., used eminent domain to build the Copco Dam which blocks the water from flowing free.
The return of the acres of ancestral lands is poetic justice to the Shasta Indians.
Billy Trice Jr.
Oakland
Axios on June 25 has two stories highly critical of Donald Trump’s economic “plans.”
Sixteen Nobel laureate economists agreed in a letter that President Biden’s economic plan is vastly superior to Trump’s, which contains tax breaks for the rich and corporations, plus tariffs on imported goods, especially from China.
Meanwhile, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, CEO of the Chief Executive Leadership Institute, announced that no Fortune 100 CEOs are backing Trump. “The Trump economic package frightens them. It’s extremely inflationary. The tariffs, 10% across the board, on all imports? That’s just crazy and will lead to a 3% increase in inflation for sure and a plunge in the GDP.”
If Trump’s economic plan is nuts to these learned professionals, I hope the low-information voters out there are paying attention.
Bob Benson
Lafayette
