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Marina Advances

Mayor Bruce Delgado, in a ceremony at City Hall, signed the Urban Environmental Accords and the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement. Signing on to these agreements officially and publicly proclaims Marina’s willingness to be an active participant in the process leading to decreased global warming pollution, reduced dependence on imported fossil fuels, increased savings of tax dollars and improved economic opportunities.

All interested citizens are invited to contribute their help by participating on the Go Greener Marina, a committee recently established by the city, and Citizens for a Sustainable Marina, a newly formed organization dedicated to helping the community meet the challenges posed by climate change and Peak Oil.

Denyse Frischmuth, Citizens for a Sustainable Monterey County | Pacific Grove

MILLIONS FOR DEFENSE…

So David R. Henderson thinks “There’s nothing government does that couldn’t and shouldn’t be cut by a large percentage.”

Really? How about defense? How about the Naval Postgraduate School, which is run by the Department of Defense? They could start with the NPS economics department.

David L. Book | Monterey

REAGONOMICS AMOK

David Henderson’s op-ed on the budget crisis would benefit from some context.In 1980Ronald Reaganwon the presidency preachingthe “New Federalism.” Posing as a Jeffersonian, he proposed to shift the responsibility of government from the big, bad federal bureaucracy to the states. What has followed has been 30 years of cuts in federal spending on housing, public health services, transportation, education, parks and other civic necessities.At the same time, federal spending has kept growing in the areas – global military expansion, corporate welfare, andthe ever-ramifyingbranches of the security state – that favor the concentration of private power. Meanwhile, the burden of governing in the people’s interest has shifted, California first among them.The growth in size, age and diversity of California’s population has been the multiplication of complexity, requiring structural and strategic adaptation.This costs money.And California has had to do this while the right aggressively pushes the tax structure at every level of governmentin a regressive direction, even as private wealth accumulates that staggers the imagination. It’s clear that the “conservatives” will not rest until public-interestedgovernmentdies the same agonizing death in the statesas it has in the nation.

Daniel Green | Carmel