- Mistaken Identity
- Deeply Unfair
- Never Too Late
- Keep Nurses Safe
- The Rich Will Abandon Us
- Defend Voting Rights
- Solar Pays
MISTAKEN IDENTITY
Good morning, AVA.
In a recent Mendocino County Today (AVA website), somebody posted, in pertinent part, the following paragraph:
“AS PREDICTED, DARCIE ANTLE, on the usual 5-0 vote, has been named Interim County CEO for a term not to exceed 12 months. Antle’s qualifications? She and outgoing CEO Carmel Angelo met at Ms. Antle’s Ukiah wine bar where, incidentally, they were often joined by DA Dave Eyster for jolly booze threesomes.”
I am 100% certain that you have me mistaken for somebody else. I have NEVER scheduled a meeting or had an adult beverage with Ms. Antle at the Church Street wine bar (or anywhere else for that matter.) I think the last time I was at Enoteca was in 2012 or 2013 with former Asst. DA Sequeira.
Likewise, any meeting I have had with CEO Angelo has always been held either at her office at the County admin center or at my office in the courthouse sans adult beverages, the latter location being the same place where I have had meetings (again sans adult beverages) with you, Mr. Editor Bruce.
Thank you for allowing this correction of fact. Enjoy the sunny weather but please pray for rain!!
DA Dave Eyster
Ukiah
Ed reply: Hmmm. Taking another, closer look at the film, I'll concede it probably isn't you in that jumble of large ladies in jungle print sun dresses and empty wine bottles.
DEEPLY UNFAIR
Editor:
America has a “deep state.” That a small minority exerts excessive control over our economy is not ideology; it’s a fact. After World War II, for 40 years, the benefits of America’s increased productivity was shared by all. Greed became normalized. Corporate and individual wealth targeted government successfully, ending, for the bottom 90%, our economy’s sharing of its productivity.
Since 1980, improvement in incomes and government assistance for the bottom 90% almost stopped. Hatred of government took root. Taxes on corporations and the wealthy supporting our government were cut in half.
The benefits of U.S. productivity trickled up. The rich got much richer.
In 2020, the CEOs of the biggest U.S. companies received 351 times as much as their average employees — a ninefold increase since 1970. The combined wealth of a few now exceeds half our population’s. America has achieved the greatest income inequality of any developed nation, as class mobility, the “American dream,” has fallen behind most.
Capitalism provides for freedom in a democracy for all, except the poor. Distribution of wealth has become problematic. Inequality, when unfair, destabilizes a society. Aristotle said that 2,500 years ago. Freedom and democracy can be improved, by taxing the rich. Government can “make America great again.” Build Back Better will help.
Robert D. McFarland
Petaluma
NEVER TOO LATE
Editor:
I read with interest the front-page article about a Fort Bragg citizens’ committee convening to consider whether the city should shed the name of Braxton Bragg, a Southern slaveholder and Confederate general. I urge people to read about John C. Fremont, Kit Carson and Andrew Kelsey, just to name a few other individuals who have towns named in their honor despite their known mistreatment and massacre of Native Americans. People who are known to have taken part in despicable acts should not be honored. I was taught that it’s never too late to right a wrong, if it can be done.
Tom Holtzen
Geyserville
KEEP NURSES SAFE
To the Editor:
Nurses want to spread care, not COVID.
The California Department of Public Health (CDPH) recently announced dangerous guidance allowing asymptomatic health care workers who test positive for COVID-19 or who have been exposed to the virus and are asymptomatic to return to work immediately without isolation or testing.
The pandemic is not over. We are in the midst of a record-breaking surge of Covid-19 driven by the Omicron variant. California is running out of hospital beds, and nurses and other health care workers are already reporting extreme levels of moral distress and injury. It is unconscionable that CDPH allow infected asymptomatic workers back to work. I guess they want to accelerate the pandemic into the endemic status.
Any healthcare worker who tests positive for COVID-19 must isolate for at least 5 days, whether symptomatic or not, or until their tests are negative. Eliminating the isolation time and sending, infected health care workers to work will guarantee the transmission of more infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. We have already had 111 deaths here in Mendocino County since the pandemic began.
Hospitals and clinics must provide daily screening for those exposed and recovering from COVID and provide protections like optimal PPE and notification to other health care workers of known exposures.
CDPH must rescind this new guidance in order to protect patients, and keep nursing colleagues healthy and safe on the front lines.
Robin Sunbeam, RN, MSN, PHN
Ukiah
THE RICH WILL ABANDON US
To the Editor:
The ultra-rich and their corporations have destroyed the viability of the planet in order to maintain their way of life. Be sure the one percent are developing escape plans to leave our toxic, destroyed planet for cleaner ones they can pollute anew.
A burning hot planet, collapse of planetary ecosystems. Their insidious power and influence is responsible for misleading “the masses” into accepting the destruction of the planet they depend on.
Science, which these people have always ignored because it doesn’t benefit them, says a “planetary boundary,” the point at which human-made changes to the Earth begin to destroy the stable environment of the last 10,000 years, has been breached. “The toxic chemical planetary boundary is the fifth of nine that scientists say have been crossed; the others are the destruction of wild habitats, loss of biodiversity, and excessive nitrogen and phosphorus pollution.” This doesn’t even take into account greenhouse gasses. With a 50-fold increase in the manufacture of 350,000 toxic chemicals since 1950, the weight of Earth’s man-made toxic chemicals now surpasses that of all Earth’s mammals combined.
This is the legacy of death that planetary control by the ultra-rich from the last 100 years have left us. I hope their fancy rocket ships explode in the vast emptiness of space and they float, breathless, through eternity.
Lynn Gulyash
Potter Valley
DEFEND VOTING RIGHTS
To the Editor:
The recent Ukiah Daily Journal column by Byron York is loaded with so many fallacies it’s hard to know where to start.
So just to tackle one of them…. If a person thinks we do not need the Voting Rights Act, please read up on how polling places are hard to come by in certain areas of the country, how you can use an NRA ID card to vote, but you can’t use a student ID, and on and on. There are many small seemingly innocuous rules in place in some states that are directed at specifically making it harder to vote for certain populations.
The original Voting Rights Act eliminated poll taxes, and tests that were aimed at specific populations hence unevenly enforced. People were beat up, intimidated and yes, sometimes murdered for trying to vote. Read history. It’s all there. Facts count.
Voting needs to be easy, and accessible for all. This is a non-partisan sentiment, keeping in mind that many who are now against the VRA, at one time fully supported it. The only thing that has changed in the meantime is the division, flow of false information, and deteriorating access to voting that our country is experiencing.
Wendy DeWitt
Ukiah
SOLAR PAYS
Editor:
The “solar users don’t pay their fair share of delivery costs” meme has been expressed by several people. This is false on the face of it. We installed solar power, which reduces the amount of electricity that we buy from PG&E. We pay delivery charges on the power that PG&E does provide. If we don’t buy enough from PG&E in a given month, we pay a minimum use fee. To say that we are not paying our fair share of delivery costs makes no more sense than saying the same thing of people who reduce their PG&E bill by upgrading the insulation in their house or buying energy-efficient appliances.
L. Robert Hill
Santa Rosa
lynn gulyash…so well said. excellent.