Category: News and Opinion

As strong as was my condemnation of the manner in which the recent Senate squall was resolved, I’m not about the take the step of naming heroes and villains, or to assert that any other possible resolution, however superior, was easily evolved, or even possible. Despite my earlier and relentless condemnation in their various incarnations of "The Four Horsemen of the Preposterous," "The Three Amigos," the "Aztec Two-Step," or "The Majority of One," I’m not even to prepared to condemn those Democrats (most prominently John Sampson and Marty Dilan) who negotiated with and through them to achieve the final settlement.

I’m not even sure how much I can really condemn the Republican Leader (as of today), Dean “The Dog” Skelos.

Last year Governor Paterson and the state legislature covered up the state's fiscal problems until after the election, by passing a budget that was a fraud. This year, Mayor Bloomberg and the City Council have done the same. It happens over and over, and yet Paterson and Bloomberg are different. In each case, they are barely hiding from anyone who bothers to read the newspaper the fact that their budgets failed to address the facts they are thus hiding. "Make no mistake about it, we're going to have to start right now economizing if we're going to get through 2011," the Daily News reported.

As I wrote previously, there is a dispute among Generation Greed as to how to diminish the quality of life and standard of living of younger generations, and the future of the state, to pay for rich and long retirements they have promised themselves. Some want cut the pay and benefits of new workers relative to those who came before, while presumably allowing all public employees, including those with sweeter deals, to do a less good job in exchange. Others want to defer the cost of all those special pension deals and favors to the future, forcing future taxpayers to pay for them, preferably at a time when Generation Greed is drawing retirement income, which is exempt from state and local income taxes in New York. Simply not paying the cost of the pensions until later is the choice advanced by Comptroller DiNapoli, and it was evidently passed by the New York State Assembly without any public debate about its fairness some time ago. But yesterday there was a surprise.

http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=818312&category=STATE

SD 33: Spare yourself the worry about who’s under indictment; if Pedro Espada is currently free from such worries, it is only a matter of time before he faces them again. It can be argued, in fact, that the legal process is the only option which may improve the quality of this district’s representation. Meanwhile, it is clear that, while incumbent Efrain Gonzalez sometimes rents himself to Republicans, his opponent, Former Senator Espada, is capable of selling himself to them outright; he‘s done so before…Hold your nose and vote for Gonzalez. — Gatemouth (9/8/08)

After the recent elections in Iran, we were subjected to thousands of words written & spoken by scores of politicians and pundits about the fairness or unfairness of those elections. The number of the commentators who had any expertise in Iranian election procedures could probably be counted on one hand. But none of them could admit they don’t really know much about the political preference of the residents of Mashhad (that’s the 2^nd biggest City in Iran. I just looked it up)

Gov. Paterson yesterday put New York on a course to become a banana republic, with an unelected governor (himself), an unelected lieutenant governor (Richard Ravitch) and an unelected state comptroller (Tom DiNapoli), who, under pressure from Paterson, has refused to give elected senators their pay.

Beginning his service on December 19, 1974, Rockefeller was the second person appointed Vice President under the 25th Amendment – the first being Ford himself.

When Senators Pedro Espada & Hiram Monserrate turned on their fellow Democrats and took part in the coup in Albany, many speculated on the reason why they did it.

Back in 1989, disgusted with Ed Koch’s divisive administration, I sought an alternative.

Michael Kharfen, later to be Director of David Dinkins’ Community Assistance Unit (and my boss therein) told me, “If you don’t vote for David Dinkins, there will be racial discord, riots in the street and the days to day operations of City government in the hands of people like Norman Steisel.”

Damned if he wasn’t correct—I didn’t vote for David Dinkins, and all those things did happen.

The man I voted for had brought the MTA into the 20^th Century and just last year endeavored to bring it into the 21st; his name was and is Richard Ravitch.

From today’s New York Times: “According to the analysis, pension contribution rates for civilian employees in local governments will soar to 30.3 percent by 2015, from 7.4 percent of payroll this year. Contributions to police and fire department retirement plans are expected to increase to 41.1 percent in 2015 from 15.1 percent this year…If there is any silver lining, the trends appear to have somewhat curbed Albany’s appetite for extending pension enhancements to public employees to placate labor unions, which wield enormous clout and lobbying dollars in the capital. ‘I’m alarmed,’ said Assemblyman Peter J. Abbate Jr., a Brooklyn Democrat and the chairman of the Assembly’s Labor Committee, who is one of the capital’s more reliable union allies. ‘Bluntly,’ he said, ‘I’ve spoken to a lot of the union leaders and their lobbyists and said I don’t want to see bills that will cost the counties and the state millions of dollars.’”

Public services are doomed. This discussion doesn’t even include other retiree benefits such as health insurance, or all the debts people like Abbate have foisted on the next generation, future revenues that have been encumbered, costs that have deferred, infrastructure that has not been maintained. This is exactly the combination that produced the 1970s disaster for NYC, but now it will be the 1970s in the whole state. Alarmed? He and his backers, fellow members of Generation Greed, should be celebrating if their goal is to destroy the state. And I don’t want to hear about the “shared sacrifice” of slashing the pay and benefits of future public employees to pay for this, in exchange for having all workers – including those current – do a less good job. I’m not fooled by this. “Bluntly,” in taking and taking and not caring about the resulting harm to others, you any those like have done and are evil. PUT BANKRUPTCY ON THE TABLE.