Tomorrow the main event of the Spitzer Administration begins: the first state budget. State government provides relatively few public services and benefits directly, but through the state budget and related rules, it finances and controls the services and benefits provided by local government and by private entities such as the health care system. For those concerned with services and benefits, and the taxes required to pay for them, the state budget is the policy. And the first state budget will be Governor Spitzer’s best opportunity to change the longstanding fiscal priorities of the state, priorities that have provided increasing rewards to a shrinking number of organized interests while disadvantaging everyone else. For the losers, including the future and those who plan to be here during it, he’s the best hope we’ve got.
The Latest
40 Council Petition Challenges
|The NYC Board of Elections held their hearings on petition challenges for the Feb. 20 Special Elections today (Tuesday).
Of the 13 candidates, three were removed from the ballot.
Gerry Hopkins filed the required statement accepting the nomination of his Party one day past the dealine.
Ferdinand Zini submitted only 646 signatures, much less than the required number according to the BOE staff.
Mozell Ducton Albright's number of valid signatures is 960 according to the BOE, 42 less than required. So she is out, though she may go to Supreme Court and try to get back on.
Grapevines and Pumpkinvines (Part Two/2007)
|The grapevine has it that Councilmember Charles Barron and political operative Michael Roberts, almost came to blows at a recent event, at Africa House on Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn. It is said that Roberts (former editor at Carib News, who is deep in the camp of Una and Yvette Clarke/ some say deep up their respective asses too), took umbrage with Barron’s support of Gerry Hopkins in the special election for Yvette’s replacement on the NYC council. It is said that Roberts even threatened to run candidates in East New York (Barron’s turf), since he was pissed at Barron’s intrusion into the Caribbean-American political arena. Fact is however, Barron has been supporting candidates over on this side (Flatbush/ East Flatbush) for some time now. Three years ago, he supported Michelle Adolphe over Rhoda Jacobs, for the 42nd Assembly seat. He also supported Ed Roberts over Clarence Norman in the 43rd Assembly race. If you go back to 2002, you will find that he also supported Frances Purcell in the special election for the state senate.
Heath Care Finance: Please W. and Hillary Not That!
|Ever since the failure of the Clinton Administration's universal health care initiative in the early 1990s, health care legislation, and much else at the federal level, has been limited to a series of little special deals. A little more spending for you, a little tax break for you. Both the federal tax system, as the 1986 comprehensive reform is reversed, and the public health care finance system, have become increasingly complex, inequitable, and economically damaging. But little groups like their little handouts, which can provide more per beneficiary than anything provided to everyone, and the politically influential like complexity, because it disguises inequities that favor them. Thus, in the last few days, Senator Clinton and President Bush have proposed, as health care solutions, two things I absolutely do not want to see: a further expansion of Medicaid, as opposed to Medicare, and more tax breaks.
Mayor Against Democracy?
|Today (Friday’s) New York Law Journal (no link available) has a story about the possibility that Governor Spitzer, State Legislative leaders, the Brennan Center, Bar Associations and others may have reached an agreement on a replacement for judicial conventions.
The proposal is basically the one I described in an earlier post.
Each Party would have a convention in May or early June. Candidates for Supreme Court who receive 50%+1 of the vote of the delegates would automatically be placed on the ballot as the Party’s endorsed choice. Candidates who received 25% could also run and candidates who did not receive 25% or more could then petition to get on the ballot.
Whatever Happened to the Cedar Revolution?
|Foreign policy is not something most of us comment about on this blog but this morning while watching CNN report on the upcoming civil war in Lebanon; I couldn’t help but remember back to 2005 and fell the urge to comment on how reality has intruded on the dreams of some people. At that time things looked so much better in Lebanon and in the White House too. Here’s what the New York Sun Editorial Board said –
For those who have been invested for years in the long struggle to drive Syria out of Lebanon, the turn events have taken there since the Lebanese people have taken to the streets is extraordinarily encouraging. The left, the press, and even some skeptical Bush administration bureaucrats mocked the idea that the liberation of Iraq would inspire democratic revolutions elsewhere in the Middle East.
The Real Reasons Why Barack Hussein Obama Should Run For The US Presidency (Part one)
|To all my many fans in blogland, let me caution you to fasten your seatbelts on this one. Expect a few picket-signs and also few demonstrators, circling outside the Room8 headquarters, after this one goes up. But you know me: I call it as I see it, then I duck. So I am putting Gur and Ben on notice here: I am going to need a bullet–proof vest soon.
Before I even start this column let me do some prefacing. By now, most of you must know that I was born on the Caribbean island of Trinidad (Republic of Trinidad and Tobago). I have lived in the USA (only New York City) for the past thirty-three and a half years. Eleven years ago I became a naturalized US citizen. One of the first things I did was register to vote; you see, even though I have been politically-active all my life, I had never ever voted in an election before, in either New York or Trinidad. Since then, I have voted in three presidential election cycles, and I haven’t missed an election date bar one; and that was because I had to travel to Trinidad to bury my dad in November of 2005.
Opposition To the Mayor’s School Funding Plan: Total Incomprehension
|Mayor Bloomberg has proposed a simple formula that allocates funds to schools based on the number of students and their needs, replacing a complex formula that often provides higher funding to less needy students. I’ve been left with a double shock. First, I’m shocked that the city itself has a formula that does exactly what the state formula, the subject of a decade-plus long lawsuit, does: uses complexity to allocate school funding based on political pull and the number and pay level of employees in the place they choose to work, regardless of the number of needs of the children. Why did the Mayor wait five years to point this out? Second, I’m somewhat shocked, and certainly disappointed, that groups which purport to be concerned with the needs of the children, and in particular disadvantaged children, and the quality of education object to changing this. I’m more disappointed than shocked by the opposition of the Teacher’s Union. I’m surprised that an organization called the Educational Priorities Panel objects. But I can’t help but feel total incomprehension at the objections of Michael Rebell, the co-counsel for the Campaign for Fiscal Equity in its lawsuit against New York State.
Imported Oil: It’s The Price Stupid!
|President George W. Bush, who told Americans there would be no sacrifices in the War on Terror, in the federal budget, and for the environment, is now saying we have a problem with imported oil, and is promoting a laundry list of measures, presumably to be encouraged by tax breaks, subsidies, favors and regulations to solve it. Funny but until a few months ago, businesses and individual Americans were suddenly working to solve our energy problems themselves — conserving, changing where and how they wanted to live, and researching and investing in alternative energy sources — all without any screwed up measures from the federal government. Why? Because the price of oil was up! Unfortunately, the minute demand for oil goes down, so does the price — by accident or design. And as soon the price goes down, as it has, Americans take the profitable and easy way of going right back to using all the cheap oil they can get. Party on! Those who invest in alternative energy sources lose their investment. Businesses close. Those who conserve, and buy teeny little Hybrids instead of macho SUVs, are looked down on as weenies, eccentrics, losers and fools. Which is what President Bush and Vice President Cheney pretty much said they were during the first five years of their administration, all while we became more locked into a lifestyle that is ever environmentally damaging and more vulnerable to economic and political blackmail.
Standing Up For Clarence Norman (Who Would Have Thunk It)
|Nancie Katz from the New York Daily News called me a while aback just to chat. No big thing. She let slip that she was working on a big story about the sale of judgeships in Brooklyn. I smiled to myself as I wondered if she could dredge up something new from the sewer of Brooklyn’s “taken for granted” politics. After all, the sale of judgeships in Brooklyn wasn’t virgin territory. This call came around the time that Wayne Barrett broke another Clarence Norman/ Carl Andrews innuendo in the Village Voice. I say ‘innuendo” here because it seems like practically all these stories can’t seem to make it to an indictment, far less a criminal conviction. I wonder why; and not that I am vested or invested either way. If there is truth to half of these stories that most of us- who are deep into Brooklyn’s politics- have heard over the years, then why do statutes of limitations keep running out? I am no public-defender of Clarence Norman (although I like the guy on a personal level), but I am really starting to believe that Clarence is getting a raw deal here. I will get to that later.