Coronavirus and the MTA
Dear Editor:
There are other financial solutions to Metropolitan Transportation Authority looking for a $4 billion bailout from Washington due to unanticipated costs incurred by the Corona Virus. Washington has already accumulated $23 trillion in long term debt. With a $4 trillion plus annual budget, this debt was anticipated to grow by $1 trillion annually for years to come prior to the Corona Virus. The federal government will fund a stimulus package of $850 million. It will be paid for with more borrowed funds increasing our national debt once again. This legislation will deal with the growing Corona Virus. Every village, town, county, city and state along with many private sector businesses will look toward Washington for additional financial assistance. Just who is going to bail out Uncle Sam to pay for this?
All levels of government and the private sector must also make difficult financial decisions on how to use existing resources. Americans prioritize their own family budgets. They make the difficult choices in how existing resources will be spent. What can wait till later will be postponed. Now the MTA is looking for $4 billion in additional aid from Washington. This is on top of the annual $1.4 billion in assistance provided by the Federal Transit Administration. The MTA has budgeted $4 billion of local funding within the $51 billion 2020–2024 Five Year Capital Plan to be used toward paying for the $6.9 billion Second Avenue Subway Phase Two. This project benefits a handful of the 5 million daily transit riders.
Why doesn’t the MTA make the difficult financial decisions everyone else does? Given the current financial crises faced by all levels of government, the MTA should postpone funding this project until the next 2025–2029 Five Year Capital Plan. Use these funds Currently available under the $51 billion 2020–2024 Five Year Capital Plan toward dealing with additional $4 billion costs incurred by the Corona Virus.
Sincerely,
Larry Penner
(Larry Penner is a transportation historian, writer and advocate who previously worked 31 years for the Federal Transit Administration Region 2 New York Office. This included the development, review, approval and oversight for billions in capital projects and programs for the MTA, NYC Transit bus and subway, Staten Island Rail Road, Long Island and Metro North Rail Roads, MTA Bus along with 30 other transit agencies in NY & NJ).
The Virus of Blaming the Jews
Dear Editor:
One would think this virus would give Jews and Israel a break from being blamed for the world’s woes but instead, we are witnessing the oldest virus in the world infecting and spreading its poison.
Social Media reeks with the stench of Jew hate, “Coronavirus was created by a cabal of Jews. Jews are using this virus as a means for profit. Jews manufactured it and are going to take advantage of the market collapse through insider trading.”
Abraham Cooper, Simon Wiesenthal Center, ‘An Ancient Virus Unleashes a New Pandemic of Hate’, “Odious conspiracy theories about Jews are alive and well in the 21st century. Consider as evidence a newly released study of attitudes towards Jews, in which 20 percent of European respondents believe that a secret Jewish cabal runs the world. This monstrous lie dates back 1,000 years to an English monk, Thomas of Monmouth, who falsely accused Jews of ritually murdering a Christian child, William of Norwich, on Easter. Every year, the monk charged that a council of Jews decided which country to target for the murder of another innocent child.
The devastating big lie, and 150 more like it over the next 900 years-plus, kept alive hate for generations of Christians and led to the murder of innocent Jews from England to Russia to Syria. Along the way came the publication of the Czarist Protocols of the Elders of Zion, with the conspiratorial spin that Jews are the source of all modern evil, plotting at secret meetings to control the world through economic manipulation and war.
In our time, Iranian websites and TV programs in the Muslim and Arab worlds have updated the big lie with catchy titles such as “Who are human history’s most bloodthirsty people?” to justify hatred for the Jewish people. In 1945, as the Allies liberated the Nazi death camps and the full barbarity of Nazi Germany was exposed to the world, no one would have predicted that Hitler’s legacy of hate would so quickly rise again from the ashes of the Holocaust. But it has — and with a vengeance, from Berlin to New York. “
It seems when it comes to Jew hate, nothing changes. Humans always need a victim to blame. If they sent all of us, all Jews to Mars, they’d still be blaming us for the world’s woes.
Sincerely
G. Claire Burstein
Did the Chinese Cover Up the Pandemic?
Dear Editor,
There are a few questions we our all asking ourselves. Did the Chinese government attempt to cover up the pandemic that they created or did they fabricate a deadly outbreak to panic the world? Have we been maliciously misled by the Chinese-controlled World Health Organization? Was it to cover the embarrassment or advance the fabrication? As the Chinese virus turns into an expensive exercise in tracking the progression of a common cold, the Chinese are grinning, and we are frowning–but will they smile for long?
Due to the President’s fair-trade policies, the Chinese economic model was already collapsing, and the companies and wealth they gained through trickery and deceit have been declining from poor management.
Apparently, the Chinese government released this virus on its own people to stop the Hong Kong protestors and crash the US economy. There is plenty of evidence to support this. For one you had to know that China wouldn`t take the trade war and sanctions lying down. Our Stock market was soaring, real estate was booming, unemployment reached historic low records, China’s economy was slowly crumbling and Pres. Trump was headed to a second term. The Left fearing prosecution for decades of criminality, and never returning back to power had to do something to stop this.
If this virus came about by people who consumed ill creatures, as some want you to believe – why would the Chinese regime conceal evidence?!?! what do they have to hide??? Why wouldn’t they share the medical information they have so to save the population of planet earth from this pandemic???? Why didn’t they notify us the second the breakout happened in Wuhan??? Don’t be fooled by stories of china men eating bats and rats. That is what the Chinese communist regime you to believe. It came from a lab that was making silent weapons of mass destruction.
The USA is waking up: China was a deal too good to be true, and we need to get out of it ASAP. Pres. Trump should turn around and start freezing assets to offset the cost of this virus. We need to get our industries to be self-sufficient from the Chinese and stop funding the Chinese Communist economy. We should strengthen our allies who believe in the principals of freedom and democracy such as the likes of India and Israel, by trading with them and not with China. We should severely restrict travel to and from China. Now is the time to act.
Best Regards,
Avraham Sharaby