Bee letters (the unpublished ones)

12/8/16 Re: Private Investment can break state's infrastructure logjam

Ed Ring’s column contends privatizing infrastructure “breaks a logjam” and is more profitable for investors like pensions. But privatizing infrastructure turns an economy's competitive advantage into toll booths that feed the financial class, turning the 99% into debt peons.

Financing is nearly half of infrastructure's cost, and historically public financing paid for most infrastructure. The  Federal Reconstruction Finance Corporation paid for the Tennessee Valley Authority and the first Bay Bridge. Goldman Sachs provided the money for the Bay Bridge rebuild. The first case recycled the interest paid into public goods and a booming economy. In the second, the money went to Wall Street.

The public/private partnership baloney tells us public is always second rate--please ignore that North Dakota's publicly owned state bank is even more profitable than Goldman Sachs. A privatized infrastructure replete with toll booths makes America less competitive. It is a liability, not an asset.

re: 11/6/2016 Marcos Breton's "California's not ready for legal recreational marijuana" (included because the Bee's edits toned things down considerably)

Marcos Breton is apparently tired of telling the kids to stay off his lawn, now he's telling California to stay off the weed. Sure, he may be correct in saying adversity may accompany that newly available high, but he leaves out so much.

For example, if prohibition and criminalizing drugs is such a good way to go, why has it failed so miserably? If the U.S. were just an *average* country, four out of five of those it incarcerates would not be in prison. As conservative former Senator Jim Webb observes: "Either we are home to the most evil people on earth or we're doing something vastly counterproductive."

Gateway drugs? Tobacco and alcohol are far better predictors of later hard drug use, and far more toxic. Most U.S. drug policy is not founded on facts or science. Bigotry, prejudice, superstition and ignorance are its foundations...like Breton's columns.