In letters: Economic ‘blackout’ planned for Friday targets major corporations | Opinion

Economic blackout

Fair or not, corporations make a decision by valuing profit over people. Groceries, housing, transportation and healthcare are necessities for people’s survival in modern life. Most people are customers whose incomes do not keep up with rising costs. The corporations’ shareholders do not care about these rough realities, as the lust for profit supersedes all else.

There is an opportunity for all of us to protest this inflation. The Feb. 28 boycott/ blackout is a national movement supporting people’s interests over corporations, geared toward big business monopolies, not small businesses. The goal is to not spend unnecessarily that day. Please join us.

Lori Slater

Cambria

What motivates DA Dan Dow?

District Attorney Dan Dow smeared an esteemed sitting judge of the San Luis Obispo County bench for the actions of a defense attorney. The defense attorney got his client’s case on the calendar so that she could surrender without having to go through a perp walk.

DA Dow acted as if the procedure the experienced attorney chose was unusual. Wrong!

The job of the District Attorney is to do justice and be impartial in the process without bringing the criminal justice system and its parties into disrepute. This is something DA Dow overlooked in his impetuous posting on his personal Facebook page where he attacked the lawyer, the defendant and the Superior Court judge, former DA Barry LaBarbera.

DA Dan Dow has, once again, engaged in unethical conduct demonstrating his lack of temperament when frustrated by legal procedures he doesn’t agree with. Remind you of someone? One has to ask what motivates him to violate state bar ethics rules?

Michael Armstrong

Cambria

Schools lose PG&E property taxes

Thank you to Tribune reporter Sadie Dittenbar for spelling out the expected consequences of PG&E’s plan to end its tax support of local schools after 2025, “SLO County school district plans drastic cuts to fix budget woes.”

PG&E, as part of the joint proposal approved by the California Public Utilities Commission in 2018, agreed to set up a $75 million Essential Services Mitigation Fund, largely to support the San Luis Coastal Unified School District, with some monies to support county programs. The purpose of these payments was to ease the transition to the dates of closure of the Diablo Canyon plant to which PG&E had committed – August of 2024 for Unit 1, and November of 2025 for Unit 2.

But wait! PG&E reneged on its pledge to close the plant in 2024/2025 and to withdraw its application to the NRC for an additional 20 years of operation, until the years 2044/ 2045 for the two units. And now we have the county and the state urging PG&E to run the nuclear reactors until 2030, while PG&E has gotten permission from the NRC to keep running the plant before it completes the safety requirements for the 20-year license renewal it has applied for.

Meanwhile, customers of all three California utilities (not just PG&E) are paying PG&E an additional $722.6 million to keep Diablo running, and taxpayers throughout the nation have already gifted $1.2 billion to the corporation. And what reward do PG&E customers get for bailing out PG&E?

We get to pay some of the highest electricity rates in the nation while taking the risks inherent in two reactors surrounded by earthquake faults.

Jill Stegman

Grover Beach

Protect Nipomo Mesa Lupine

The buffer surrounding the site of the closed Phillips 66 oil refinery needs protection. Tell our county supervisors to please protect a local federally listed endangered plant, the Nipomo Mesa Lupine (Lupinus nipomensis).

It has a California Native Plant Society rare plant designation 1B.1, meaning it has declined significantly over the past century. There are only three known populations in the central coast dune scrub habitat, although one population is presumed extirpated.

Through efforts that began in the 1980s, the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes National Wildlife Refuge was established in 2000 to attempt to protect some of the dunes complex. Several parcels to the north of the current 2,553-acre refuge were part of a biological survey so they could later be added to the refuge; 118 special status animals exist there. (Details are available on the refuge website.)

Included in the survey was the Tosco (now Phillips 66) Refinery Buffer and the Oso Flaco Lake Natural Area. On Jan. 29, 1999, the SLO Telegram-Tribune reported on an agreement with Tosco to save the 630-acre buffer. Supervisor Katcho Achadjian was at the ceremony. Reporter David Sneed wrote that the Nipomo Mesa Lupine is found nowhere else. “This place is incredibly important,” Kara Smith, project director for the Nature Conservancy, was quoted as saying. “If this place was ever developed, we would see the extinction of at least one species.”

Leif Behrmann

Oceano

How about cutting the tax cut?

So, Congress is preparing a budget. According to an article in the Feb. 12 Tribune, Congress has to cut, at a minimum, $1.5 trillion dollars or more, in order to renew the 2020 $4.5 trillion tax cut. The newly created DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) headed by Elon Musk is making sweeping cuts to meet the goal of $1.5 trillion in order to pass the tax cut just mentioned.

Has anyone else wondered why DOGE is cutting middle-class federal jobs while sparing the wealthy amongst us? I have wondered and have some ideas on what to cut that will not impact the majority of us. For instance, how about not passing the proposed tax cut? There’s a $4.5 trillion savings right off the bat. What about cutting subsidies to oil, gas and pharmaceutical companies? Probably several billions more in savings. Or how about raising the taxes on our multimillionaires or billionaires by a meager 1%? At least another bundle of billions in savings.

Are the DOGE budget cuts what MAGA really wants for our country’s future?

From my vantage point it seems to mean, to name just a few: increased ignorance, intolerance, racism, misogyny, violence and a total lack of civility. I guess this is what people actually voted for.

Fred Raleigh

Templeton

The age of unenlightenment

Is this the nation our Founders envisioned?

Did the majority of those who voted for the current occupant of the White House want to destroy our constitutional democracy, gut our system of checks and balances as well as the rule of law, and dismantle the protections and services that only government agencies can provide for all of us…like Social Security, consumer protection, and healthcare that is there for patients and not stockholders?

And all of this to pad billionaires’ pockets at the expense of everyone else. This has been a nonstop “bait and switch” blitz from the beginning. POTUS promises one thing and does the opposite, then places the blame elsewhere. To understand our Constitution, the Preamble, and the values on which the Founders based its principles, you must understand 18th-century Enlightenment. Just Google “The Age of Enlightenment” online and consider if the United States’ current values align with it today. It’s pretty straightforward.

Is this state of chaos, irrationality, and oligarchy the nation our Founders envisioned?

Donald Archer

Cambria

This story was originally published February 23, 2025 at 2:59 PM.