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County leaders to
blame for jail deaths
Re: “Sheriff oversight proposals too weak” (Page A6, April 24).
We just read this incredible and on-point letter to the editor by Bob Britton. This is one of the most passionate and honest letters that we’ve read.
We feel your pain and we feel your anger, Bob. I don’t know what the solution is, but this definitely is not it. We believe that everyone needs to channel their disgust and begin a lobbying campaign for Aisha Wahab, Toni Atkins, Nancy Skinner and other interested legislators to conduct a full-court press on Santa Rita Jail and the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office. As long as Donna Ziegler is the county attorney, we will never get any accountability, transparency or meaningful oversight of the sheriff’s office.
Donna Ziegler and the Alameda County Board of Supervisors seem to be trying to minimize the exposure of the sheriff’s office, at a high cost to the taxpayers of Alameda County. The supervisors don’t care … it’s not their loved ones dying.
Malik and Gale Washington
Colorado Springs, Colo.
Demand state end
live frog, turtle imports
The East Bay Times ran an article in December on California’s live animal food markets. Again, the Fish & Game Commission is recommending a ban on the live import permits for the market frogs, but not the market turtles, inexplicably. The Commission has posed such bans in the past, consistently ignored by the Department of Fish and Wildlife. There’s little reason to expect anything different this time around.
The department continues to issue import permits for 2 million non-native bullfrogs and 300,000 freshwater turtles for human consumption. All are diseased and/or parasitized, though it is illegal to import or sell such products.
The majority of the bullfrogs carry a deadly chytrid fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), responsible for the extinction of more than 100 amphibian species worldwide in recent years.
An easy partial fix: No live imports; frozen frog and turtle parts only, as Oregon has done.
Eric Mills
Coordinator, Action for Animals
Oakland
Bring accountability
to public spending
Re: “San Jose unable to track its homeless spending” (Page A1, April 13).
The financial ineptness of our elected officials is amazing. To spend hundreds of millions on homelessness without a plan, accountability or reporting results is unacceptable. Any competent manager knows you need to understand these basic accounting functions.
Our officials sell half of the Coliseum for a song to the A’s without a commitment to stay in Oakland. We still owe $25 million for the Oakland Raiders stadium enlargement, as their staying in Oakland was not part of the deal.
The California Legislature has doubled spending during the last five years and is now crying over the tremendous deficit. They are working on many tax increases to make up for their incompetence.
Instead of doing his job, Newsom campaigns for president and panders to unions and any organization wanting funds that will support him.
Our Legislature needs mandatory lessons in basic math, accounting practices and contract negotiations.
Chris Wood
Pleasanton
U.S. must not back
Israel’s misdeeds
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Those who think that protests against Israel can be suppressed by arrests, firings and student expulsions are in for a surprise. Most Americans see the evidence of U.S. government involvement in genocide; see it’s not about Israel’s self-defense, antisemitism, free speech here or anything other than what it is: suppression of a people’s right to live and participate in their homeland.
Those same truths got out with Vietnam. Americans won’t stand for participation in mass murder again to bolster a terrorist state that bombs, slaughters and starves children, women, families, aid workers, doctors and journalists, then augers for a wider war. Backing Israeli terror by handing $26 billion to our military-industrial complex here to supply the program there throws gas on a raging blaze. It will backfire.
Gaza reveals that the problem was never Hamas to begin with. Israel will not integrate so long as the United States backs its apartheid regime.
Marc Sapir
Berkeley