Letters: Utility tax | Hiding truth | Code of conduct

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Pressure Legislature
to repeal utility tax

Re: “PG&E seeking rate hike — again” (Page A1, Dec 13).

California legislators gave us an early Christmas present that they didn’t wrap. Most of them were unaware that they were sending us a gift, but they still voted for it.

I’m referring to AB 205, which was approved last year.

Starting in the summer of 2024, the California Public Utility Commission will vote to unwrap this new gift: a utility tax charging most ratepayers between $30 and $70 per month.

According to the Public Advocates Office’s February report, residential electricity rates in California have already risen between 77% and 105% since 2014. Analysts say AB 205 will increase utility bills for people like me who live in apartments, condos, and smaller homes that don’t use much energy. It also discourages energy conservation, efficiency and solar panels.

Please call your state Assembly member and senator to repeal the utility tax. Let’s return this gift before we have to unwrap it.

Sandy White
Fremont

GOP hiding truth
about Hunter Biden

Re: “Biden subpoena brings out Dems’ hypocrisy” (Page A12, Dec. 17).

Hunter Biden did not flatly refuse to testify to Congress; he refused to testify behind closed doors. Biden is smart enough to offer to testify in a public hearing, not in private, in order to avoid being misquoted and misrepresented by the Republican propaganda machine.

That offer just wasn’t good enough for Republicans who fear transparency. The GOP goal is to obfuscate his truthful testimony, which they won’t be able to do if it is a matter of public record. Here is Biden’s explanation of his offer to testify in an open hearing: “I’m here today to make sure that the House committees’ illegitimate investigations of my family do not proceed on distortions, manipulated evidence and lies.”

Republican congressmen fear the truth.

Marilyn Weissberg
Brentwood

Code-of-conduct query
worsens anti-Semitism

Re: “Code of conduct a volatile subject” (Page A1, Dec. 15).

I am disappointed that the East Bay Times followed the lead of headline-grabbing politicians and asked universities a worse-than-hypothetical question: how they would handle calls for the genocide of Jews. Hypothetical because that has not happened anywhere.

The question put to the universities is worse than hypothetical because it suggests that such calls for the genocide of Jews are happening. This plays into the hands of Zionist organizations’ campaigns to distract us from Israel’s ethnic cleansing with alarmist exaggeration of the rise of antisemitism.

Moreover, by equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, they actually contribute to what increases there are in antisemitism. For their contention rests on the premise that to be Jewish is to support the Zionist project, including its unspeakably harsh repression of those it has dispossessed, as it faces the inevitable waves of resistance to that dispossession.

Michael Goldstein
Oakland