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Neighborhoods suffer
under outdated lines
Silicon Valley is a global innovation hub, yet Moreland West’s infrastructure feels stuck in the past. On Christmas Day, our neighborhood near Moreland Middle School suffered its 12th outage of 2025. After several “10-second” faults — and inaccurate PG&E notifications claiming, “Power is on” — we were plunged into a sustained blackout.
We cannot compete globally while navigating a vulnerable, 1970s-era overhead grid. Reliability is a shared responsibility; as neighbors, we are committed to trimming private trees and providing maintenance access. However, we need a matching commitment to modernization. We plead for PG&E and the city to invoke Rule 20A credits to underground our lines. Moving the grid beneath the surface is a public safety necessity for our families and students. It is time to bring our physical infrastructure into the 21st century.
Cyrus Shahriari
San Jose
Lives overseas are
worth 7 cents a day
Many Americans have supported ending USAID, saying that America can’t afford to provide food and medicine for the world. But this stopped medications for AIDS and other communicable diseases, ended shipments of excess farm products to areas where they are needed and ended vaccination programs so that many diseases have returned where they had been reduced or eradicated. Agencies that track worldwide statistics say that already up to 700,000 people in former recipient countries have died because of this.
How much did USAID cost? Roughly $24 per American, per year (translating to $2 a month, or less than seven cents per day). If you got seven cents back today, what would you do with it? Perhaps add it to that of others to save 700,000 lives?
It’s a moot question, anyway, because you didn’t get your seven cents back; it was “needed” to help cover the tax cuts given to the very wealthiest Americans.
Theresa Rieve
San Jose
Trump’s foreign policy
turns allies against us
Is anyone concerned about Donald Trump’s foreign policy? He killed foreign aid, removing our reputation as a giving, caring nation. Silencing transmissions of the Voice of America hurts the image of our nation.
Bullying trading partners into accepting high tariffs causes resentment and the search for other markets of lower cost, like soybeans from Brazil. All these countries search for other markets. While the Chinese continue expanding trade in Asia and Africa, America is now bombing Nigeria, angering the Middle East, while ignoring Israeli transgressions in Gaza and the West Bank.
Trump will allow China to buy Nvidia chips for AI competition. If a new factory is built here, would the state-of-the-art factory have a high percentage of robotics? Would the needed manpower be limited?
Withdrawing support of Ukraine alarms Europe, forcing them to step up, realize America cannot be trusted, all while Trump worries Venezuela, Greenland and Canada.
David Eisbach
San Jose
Unchecked Trump is
a failure of leadership
Let’s stop referring to the unleashed Trump presidency as a “constitutional crisis.” There is nothing wrong with the checks and balances established by the Founding Fathers. A reasonable House and Senate are capable of self-policing and successfully following the defined steps for impeachment. What the founders hadn’t anticipated was that a majority of elected leaders would selfishly toss the rights of others to the gutter because, so far, constitutional violations have no direct impact on themselves.
To be clear, President Trump could be impeached immediately with current evidence, but until Congress sees “what is happening to thee is now affecting me,” that will not happen. The writers of the Constitution expected elected leaders to accept the stewardship of freedom, collectively making decisions that move the country forward for We the People, not a subset based on religion, race or wealth.
David Wilkins
San Jose
U.S. citizens can smooth
relations with Canada
Donald Trump keeps repeating that Canada should become the 51st state of America. He says it is the only thing that makes sense.
Well, it’s insulting, it doesn’t make sense to me, not to 40 million Canadians, and probably not to the millions of Americans who miss their Canadian visitors.
If, as Americans, we would like our Canadian visitors to come back, we need to speak up and say so.
Linda Mattis
Sunnyvale
Trump’s rants shouldn’t
be normalized by media
Re: “Trump says Ukraine and Russia ‘closer than ever’ to peace after meeting with Zelenskyy” (Page A4, Dec. 29).
The Mercury News editors must inform readers of the credibility of any public statement a person makes. Consider your headline.
For a person with his pathology of lying, readers need to know if it is from a credible person. Donald Trump is not credible. He lies as often as he breathes.
The Mercury could inform readers better by substituting “says” with “claims” or “alleges” in almost every statement he makes. Failure to do so renders the president as “normal,” which he is not.
Using normal language for such an abnormal president destroys our public values.
Allen Price
Half Moon Bay
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