Friday, May 22, 2015

Steve Glazer, Democrats, the BART strike, high-speed rail

From today's letters to the editor in the Chronicle:

Steve Glazer's win

I read "Glazer records easy victory in state Senate race" (May 20). In regards to what Josh Pulliam said "Everything we see tonight is a victory for the Republican Party. Republican voters turned out, and they voted for Glazer."

I'm a Democrat and I voted for Steve Glazer. He inspired me and leads me to believe he was the correct choice to be my representative in the state senate. I was very turned off by the BART strike and the harm it caused innocent people that were trying to get to work and earn a decent living.

It seemed that the BART unions and workers didn't care how their striking affected the people that use the system and are ultimately providing money for their salaries and benefits. I believe that our local transit workers should not be able to strike and cause the disruption they did. And Steve Glazer believes the same thing. Unfortunately, Assemblywoman Susan Bonilla doesn't. Labor unions are very strong and Glazer was willing to buck them and Bonilla wasn't.

Al Salazar
Concord

Rob's comment:

Glazer is my kind of Democrat too, since he opposed both the BART strike and the high-speed rail boondoggle. A Chronicle story a few days ago mentions high-speed rail but not his opposition to the BART strike, which is why the opposing campaign included $2 million from labor unions. 

Randy Shaw at Beyond Chron does some hand-wringing about the system that makes the top two vote getters in the primary face each other instead of the winner of the opposing party. Shaw's concerns would worry me too if I thought "labor" could be counted on to represent sensible policy ideas, but they can't on either the destructive BART strike or high-speed rail

All the unions care about: jobs for their membership.

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