Letters: Environmental concern | Community action | Bad for workers | Trump unqualified | Don’t discount fraud

East Bay Times Letters to the Editor for April 5, 2024

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Airport expansion bad
for Oakland environment

Re: “Name change plan doesn’t fly with SFO” (Page B1, April 2).

Oakland Airport is working on an update that will not only change its name but also modernize and expand its facility. Up to 16 new gates are included in the plan.

Providing more convenient, potentially cheaper air travel will certainly increase the number of flights through Oakland, and what could be the downside of that? It turns out that such a development would also increase local cancers, respiratory disease and horrendous noise, and (not insignificantly) accelerate global warming.

Electric rail is far more efficient, clean, sustainable and, for short hops, convenient than air travel. Practically every other industrialized country knows this. Developing rail instead of air travel is the low-hanging fruit to meeting our climate goals and offering some hope to the next generations.

But in America, it just seems like toxic, short-term, monied interests flood and drown long-term health and prosperity every time. We need to change that.

Jeffrey Beeman
El Sobrante

Community must halt
growth at airport

Re: “Name change plan doesn’t fly with SFO” (Page B1, April 2).

The plan to change the name of the Oakland airport to “San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport” is a desperate attempt by the Port of Oakland to justify an ill-fated plan to expand by adding a new terminal and 16 additional gates, exposing the fallacy in its claim that traffic will grow by 50% by 2038 with or without expansion.

The expansion plan has been met with overwhelming opposition from a coalition of 75 environmental justice, youth climate, labor, religious, scientific, medical and community organizations. Expanding traffic at the Oakland airport would add more air pollution, increasing the rates of childhood asthma, heart disease and cancer already suffered by the low-income Black and Brown communities in East Oakland under the flight paths.

David Foecke
Oakland

Technology in general
is bad for workers

Re: “AI a job killer? In California, it’s complicated” (Page C7, April 1).

Your article about AI and jobs in Silicon Valley misses the much broader and already catastrophic loss of jobs for “ordinary” workers caused by technology’s replacing them. Isn’t that what technology’s all about — efficiency in the name of eliminating those “costly” jobs that previously required humans?

Together with the state’s economic policy favoring big business and such things as the $20-an-hour minimum wage, technological “progress” is making it viable for businesses with the economic power to do so to replace people with robots, while at the same time putting small- and medium-sized workplaces out of business. And the government is doing the same thing. Is there any sign that tolltakers on the Bay Bridge are coming back to work?

Maybe you could write a story about how AI and technology generally have adversely impacted the job market for most of California’s potential workers.

Kristian Whitten
Kensington

Bad vocabulary shows
Trump is unqualified

First, it was “crooked” Hillary. Now it’s “crooked” Joe Biden.

This repetition underscores an analysis concluding that Donald Trump’s is on a third-grade level, and four-star Marine Gen. Jim Mattis remarking that Trump had “the understanding of a fifth- or sixth-grader.”

There are dozens of synonyms for crooked, but “The Donald” can’t manage any of them. Someone with so limited a lexicon, and the lack of intellectual curiosity to accrue an adult vocabulary has no business in the White House.

The world brims with demanding and nuanced intricacies. We need experience, a cool head, not some coddled bubble boy whose first act in 2017 was insulting Australia’s prime minister, and two weeks ago maligning Australia’s ambassador to the United States, Kevin Rudd.

Mike Scott
Walnut Creek

Trump’s fraud should
not be discounted

Re: “The fraud behind accusing Donald Trump of fraud” (Page A6, March 28).

It is disappointing to see poor editorial decisions in trusted local newspapers. I wonder how someone like Jay Ambrose who is so ignorant of basic business and accounting practices found prominence on your editorial page. Surely someone on your editorial staff knows the importance of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles in the marketplace.

Ambrose calls the New York case against Trump abuse. He claims Trump’s dishonest dealings had no victims. This is far from the truth. We should all be thankful the state of New York is trying to hold Trump accountable for his fraudulent business practices because it undermines investor confidence in the marketplace.

In his rambling article, Ambrose builds upon his faulty conclusions and spouts off his various unrelated political judgments and false equivalencies.

Lenora Mathias
Oakland