Nov 6, 2007

Letters

City Hall's plaza

Dear Editor: The recent Palo Alto City Council decision to rename City Hall Plaza in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King indicates that Palo Alto's council has surged into the lead over Menlo Park's council for the Peninsula's most clueless governing body. The real question is why Palo Alto continues to elect single-issue individuals such as LaDoris Cordell and Peter Drekmeier to the council. Given all the talented and bright citizens, people with fewer axes to grind would be assets to this body. My choice would have been to rename the plaza in honor of David Packard or Bill Hewlett, who were local heroes and philanthropists.

Leon G. Campbell,

Palo Alto



City housing allocation

Dear Editor: A letter Friday criticized the Sierra Club's support for the regional housing allocation assigned to Palo Alto.

As a leading environmental organization, the Sierra Club indeed supports these housing allocations - not only for Palo Alto, but all the 110 cities and counties in the nine-county Bay Area.

Palo Alto, with its high jobs-to-housing imbalance ratio, must rely disproportionately on other communities to provide homes for its work force. The 3,500-housing-unit allocation assigned to Palo Alto partly reflects that imbalance.

The Sierra Club letter to the council, found on the home page of our sustainable land use committee, lomaprieta. sierraclub.org/slu/, acknowledges that the region's housing allocations were based on a regional planning project conducted by the Association of Bay Area Governments in 2002, known as the Smart Growth Strategy/Regional Livability Footprint.

Consequently, the policy behind the housing allocations was to shift growth from the region's agricultural areas and undeveloped, open spaces to those areas where development has already taken place. This policy is generally known as "infill," as opposed to "green field" development. The goal is not only to preserve farmland and open space but also to reduce global warming emissions from the largest sector in the region, transportation, by lessening commute distances.

We urge all Palo Altans to understand not only the regional aspect of the housing allocations, but the global implications as well.

Irvin Dawid,

Sierra Club-Loma Prieta chapter,

Palo Alto



Park Theater

Dear Editor: It is a shame that Menlo Park's most endangered historic building and cultural venue, the Park Theater, has become politicized. The point is to save the Park Theater and the city council should disregard the misinformation feeding the controversy.

It is not unusual for a town to give financial support directly or indirectly to a private business. Years ago, Mountain View decided to give Printers Inc. Bookstore a low-interest loan to locate a store on Castro Street, knowing the great benefit to the public, city coffers and other businesses that it would generate. The vibrancy of Castro Street today reflects the success of Mountain View's support for private businesses to the public benefit.

The city and public would benefit mightily from a downtown theater. Under Andy Duncan's proposal, in as few as 10 years the city could own and control a fully restored theater, saving about $2 million in restoration costs. If the city buys the theater and restores it itself, it gets a theater quickly. If the city works with the Duncan proposal and the economics are sound, it gets a restored theater in a few years.

I fail to see what all the drama is about. Five years passed with no serious proposals but Duncan's. It is time to move ahead to save the Park Theater.

Winter Dellenbach,

Palo Alto



The war in Iraq

Dear Editor: What goes around comes around. When you drop a rock in a pond, the ripples travel across the whole pond. Even though innocent people do suffer, there is a system of justice, cause and effect or karma at work in the universe.

In Iraq, nearly a million Iraqis have died as result of our bombing, invasion and occupation. There are millions of refugees and millions of people who have been displaced from their homes. With the best of intentions, we have created a disaster with incredible human suffering. We have divided the world into good guys and bad guys. The bad guys have no rights, they can be held indefinitely, and they can be abused or tortured. In pursuit of security, if hundreds of thousands of innocent people happen to die, we are sorry but that is a regrettable consequence of war. The bad guys have a similar attitude.

Where are the peacemakers communicating loudly and forcibly that we are all children of the same God? Where are the peacemakers communicating that whenever one human life is taken, we are defeated as human beings? Where are the peacemakers communicating that the future must be a world without nuclear weapons and without war? Where are the peacemakers communicating that by ending war, the earth will become a paradise where all the children of world will have enough to eat and will have housing, education and health care? Everyone is different. God loves everyone the same.

Are the fires in Southern California a consequence of the conflagration of suffering we unwittingly caused in Iraq and our failure to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world and our failure to be good peacemakers? I don't know. But I wouldn't rule it out.

Patrick Noonan,

Woodside



The meaning of Fed talk

Dear Editor: It is sad to hear Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke talking about an increased risk of inflation. Our whole society is in the grips of a breakneck race caused by galloping inflation. Consider the value of the dollar, that of many commodities, the real size of our national debt (including the unfunded Social Security) and the proportion of assets ownership between the rich and the middle and poor classes and you will find all the glaring effects of systemic inflation.

The so-called subprime crisis is the last attempt by the middle and the poor classes to participate in and keep up with a society based on galloping inflation. These two classes are left further behind the rich, who now control an ever-increasing portion of ballooning assets. This is what inflation does: It crushes the middle and poor classes, which cannot afford to grab assets of real value (businesses, real estate, gold, foreign currency, oil futures and bank credit) and still have to rely on the diminishing value of one unit of labor and on savings. The subprime crisis (like the health care-cost crisis) is the nonlinear collapse that follows a long period of linear increase in inflationary pressure. The value of labor bears no socially acceptable relation to prices any longer. Next, expect the collapse of the dollar. One cannot mismanage an economy and a society for too long before such collapses occur. The political lie behind the "fed talk" is becoming apparent.

Virgil Stevens,

San Carlos