Tag: government

politics

Over The Edge

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Yesterday’s New Jersey Transit train derailment at Penn Station, coupled with the Tea Party and Media manufactured debt crisis, finally has sent me over “the edge.” Of what edge do I speak you ask? The edge of the societal cliff where on one side you have secrecy, where you are keeping your head down and out of trouble, and the other where you are exposed, where you’ve stuck your neck out and where it might get cut off.
While I have always tried to have a say in both the way the world around me affects me and the issues that I care about and believe in, I have not taken as active of stance as I could have. I freely admit this and there are many reasons as to why this has happened but but mostly they have been driven by fear.
I have feared how what I say or do could be used against me in the future – the old law of unintended consequences as nothing is now unknown – technology chronicles all.
I have feared how what I say or do could negatively affect my current or future employment opportunities – what would have been unknown would instead be easily findable for those who want to put in the effort.
I have feared how hackers who disapprove of what I say or do could negatively affect the way I live (see the harassment that Anonymous have conducted against Wykcoff resident Parry Aftab, a well-known lawyer and television commentator who is considered an expert in Internet security who runs WiredSafety.org, for example) and the way that family lives.
Lastly, and understandably ranking highest on the paranoia scale, I have feared how various government alphabet agencies, such as the FBI, CIA and NSA, could use this information that I voluntarily give to develop a profile, case file and to track me. In the post 9/11 world we live in, people can disappear down a rabbit hole very quickly and I have been loathe to provide any information that could lead to me falling down one of these holes.
All of this fear negates the positives that could be gained and frankly considering I’m already worried about the grilling my children are going to give me about “what type of a world have I left for them?” I believe now is the time to act.
So, I vowed yesterday to stop living in fear and to move from simply being a critic and a point and click activist (i.e. donating money and/or signing petitions based on emails I’ve received) to more of an active activist.
My friend Brian, someone with which I email frequently about the political issues that we as individuals as well as a nation face, said a few weeks back that,

We do need to organize, become active and make our voices heard. Part of the problem is us. We are silent writing back and forth without making any change. We must become more active.

He now knows how much I took to heart his words. I took them as a call to action and acted. My first act was a simple one: I wrote my own letter, and not a form letter that some special interest group had prepared for me where all I needed to do is “virtually” sign my name to it, about the transit issues that New Jerseyites faced yesterday when a train derailment knocked out one of the two train tunnels that run under the Hudson River, and sent it to Governor Christie. The letter is posted below:

Dear Governor Christie,
Today there was yet another train derailment that occurred in New York’s Penn Station. Since I moved to New Jersey’s Bergen County last year, train derailments at Penn have been happening frequently – basically once a month.
These derailments negatively affect my family as both my wife and I commute into New York City in order to earn our living – we are consistently late to work and/or missing important meetings due to these transit issues.
This is not just our issue; this is an issue that affects the entire state of New Jersey. My family’s income, which is taxed by the State of New Jersey and which New Jersey relies on to fund its many different obligations, is generated in New York City. As these consistent commuting issues are affecting my career and my wife’s career, they are therefore by proxy affecting New Jersey’s tax revenue.
Reliable on-time access to New York City is vital to New Jersey’s bottom line and I therefore strongly suggest that you revisit and restart the ARC Tunnel project which you cancelled. Additional tunnels into and out of Penn Station will alleviate future derailment issues.
Here are two news articles which are related to today’s issues:
1. NJ Transit Derailment Snarls Train Service
2. Evening Delays Expected After Penn Station Train Snarls Morning Rush
Thank you very much for your time and attention to this matter.
Sincerely,
Jeff Lipson

I plan to write Governor Christie every single time there is a train issue in the future that the cancelled ARC project would have (eventually when it was completed in 2014) resolved.
However, this is just the start of things for me. I also plan to work on codifying a manifesto which might eventually lead to a platform for a new political party. Maybe I’ll even run for a major political office one day using the process that Americans Elect is starting or even better and probably more effective, I’ll effectively form a think tank like Grover Norquist. His “no tax” pledge is the driving force in pushing the Republican Party toward an ever-more rigid position of opposing any tax increase, of any kind, at any time which has completely altered the way the business of politics is conducted. Considering I want to do the same, which is to “completely alter the way the business of politics is conducted,” he is as good of a role model as any. I’ve put this little nugget at the end of the post as a reward for reading all the way through. Raise your hand and post a comment if you want to be intimately along for the ride.
I’ll close with a Teddy Roosevelt quote which another friend of mine (who is involved with politics but from the “inside” as a Democratic party) has as his email signature:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”
~ Teddy Roosevelt from his “Citizenship in a Republic” speech at the Sorbonne, Paris from April 23, 1910

politics

Change I Cannot Believe

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Obama’s campaign slogan of “Change You Can Believe In” has become “Change I Cannot Believe.” The conclusion of the debt ceiling debate is an utter debacle and the way it has gone down has utterly shocked me – while Democrats control the Presidency and the Senate somehow, they could not use any of this power and basically just rolled over and played dead (or bent over and got screwed like an inmate to be more crass) to the Republican extremists in the House of Representatives.
As Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone wrote,

The general consensus is that for the second time in three years, a gang of financial terrorists has successfully extorted the congress and the White House, threatening to blow up the planet if they didn’t get what they wanted.

What a deal! It will provide more millions for millionaires, more billions for billionaires and more pain for the majority of this country’s citizens. The deal will hurt our “recovery” (which now features at a fake 9% or “real” 16% unemployment rate) where the only thing that has really recovered are the bank accounts of high net worth individuals. I feel like our country’s reputation as a “stable and safe investment option” to the rest of the world has truly jumped the shark and everyone will start to look for a new reserve currency. If you were a foreign national or government, would you trust the US now? I thought so…
What could Obama have done differently? He didn’t need to force a bad deal, period. As Joe Nocera in the NYT points out,

My own view is that Obama should have played the 14th Amendment card, using its language about “the validity of the public debt” to unilaterally raise the debt ceiling. Yes, he would have infuriated the Republicans, but so what? They already view him as the Antichrist. Legal scholars believe that Congress would not have been able to sue to overturn his decision. Inexplicably, he chose instead a course of action that maximized the leverage of the Republican extremists.

It is sad that the Tea Party and the hedge fund managers out there do not realize how badly they are undermining America’s power in the world in the name of the almighty dollar. In a generation we’ll be England. Lovely.

health

By A Healthy Margin of 7 Votes Reform Passes

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Much has been written and said about the recently passed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act which now provides and/or mandates health care for 95% of all Americans. I’ve waited to listen to as many viewpoints as possible throughout the entire process before weighing in which is different from the way I’ve operated in the past. When looking back at previous years and causes, I would sometimes post many times in a single week about a given political topic, especially when it involved something idiotic Bush the Second or the Republican party (more on them in a bit) did or said. So, considering that health care reform is something that I care deeply about, my absence of comments on this issue up until now has been nothing less than the the model of restraint.
Part of my hesitancy to voice my opinion was due to my overall disgust of the public sausage making that passes for our government these days. Its an embarrassment and I feel like I’m being led by a nation of children.
The other part of it was that my relationship with the health care sector of this country has been so ridiculously involved in relation to the amount of medical issues I ave either known about or had to tangentially deal with that I am quite emotional about the issue. If I started to post on it, there would be no going back, this blog might have simply turned into a “health care reform all the time” blog. Over my lifetime, I’ve had constant access to and interaction with our country’s medical establishment: doctors and nurses, waiting rooms and offices, procedures and exams, infirmaries and hospitals, operations both out-patient and in-patient – you name it, I’ve experienced it, and most from an early age. At most points I was a care giver and observer. At others I was the patient. At most times I managed the bills and fought to ensure that I maximized my coverage options and benefits. Its a tricky business and you need to be quick on your feet – not easy to do any day and especially not when injured – but I’ve developed a specialty for it. I’ve known my entire life that our system needed to be improved. After Clinton tried and failed, and as our country descended into nonsense land (see both terms that Bush was in office and mostly everything that our nation’s government did during that time), I just put on the back burner of my hopeful mind that anything good would ever happen. But unbelievably and almost improbably, especially after Ted Kennedy’s seat was won by a Republican, it happened.
In the end, the final vote was 219 – 212; 7 votes separated the biggest piece of social net legislation in a generation from success or defeat. 7. That’s it. Razor thin but still wide enough.
For over a year now this legislation has been proposed, debated, revised, debated, rinse and repeat ad naseum. In the end, an unorthodox randomly used but legal procedural move was needed in order to get this legislation passed, again by the slimmest of margins. What did we pass? Something that will cost about a trillion dollars over 10 years – supposedly that is a good thing. I have yet to talk to my doctor cousin and friends about what it means to them and what they think. Its helpful to understand what a leader of a university hospital and two Harvard MDs think of this whole shebang because I haven’t been able to read the 2,000 pages of the act. Right now, I just feel that the high level provisions that the bill enforces, such as banning a company’s ability to drop coverage based on pre-existing conditions and keeping minors covered longer to name just two, are simply morally correct.
There are plenty of drawbacks and loopholes that still need to be closed and many of the provisions do not kick in for four long years, during which plenty of healthy people will get sick and sick people will getter sicker and/or die, so it is flawed and no by no means perfect. That being said, what the act does provide is far and away better than anything that is currently in place. It provides a foundation to build upon for further and future reforms.
Those that oppose this bill – mostly rapid Republicans and Tea Party folk – have been raucous in their dismissal and hatred towards it. “It reeks of Big Government, its socialist, its too costly, its dangerous” they cry. They support tacitly those that debase decorum and attempt to spit (literally) on the civil rights of black war veterans. Not a single Republican voted for the bill and thirty or so Democrats voted against it which boggles my mind, because again I feel that it is morally right and if they [the right wing nutters that so strongly opposed the bill] are so Christian, isn’t healing the sick something Jesus would do? As Bob Herbert has written in his piece “An Absence of Class”, he correctly points out that “For decades the G.O.P. has been the party of fear, ignorance and divisiveness” and that it “is the party that genuflects at the altar of right-wing talk radio, with its insane, nauseating, nonstop commitment to hatred and bigotry.” I think this health care reform vote will go down in history as the day that America went both crazy and sane and then sadly crazy, crazy because not a single Republican went on record to support this obviously overall decently good bill and sane because it got passed but sadly crazy because the side of good needed the loopiest of ways to pass the darn bill.
Kudos POTUS, Pelosi and the others that strong armed this bill to the finish line.

ramblings

Timely Mail

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I’m working from home today due to the storm related transit problems. I finally tried to head into the office and found that the 4/5 line stopped at 86th St and that while the 6 was running sporadically, there were hundreds of people waiting. So, in order to make a 2 pm call, I went home and on the way to my virtual office, I got my mail and saw that I received from the New York City Office of Emergency Management the piece below:

hurricane_mail.jpg

You can’t make this stuff up.

politics

Support The Contractors Too

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Up to 126,000 Americans, Iraqis and other foreigners are working for the United States government in Iraq as contractors yet the toll the war’s toll on them has largely been hidden. About 1,000 have died since the conflict began, and nearly 13,000 have been injured. Although some are well paid, many more actually collect only modest wages. It is these people who provide support services vital to the military, not the military itself anymore.
As their reward, they are facing the same issues that the military is facing yet they receive zero of the support that the military receives (okay, after reading about Walter Reed, it doesn’t seem that everything is rosy over there either). Their injuries and problems are not really addressed and their health insurance is surprisingly not helpful (shocker!).
For instance, 24% of the Dyncorp police trainers showed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder after their deployment and those findings parallel an Army study earlier this year that about 17% of personnel in Army combat units in Iraq showed symptoms of P.T.S.D. one year after their deployment, said Dr. Charles W. Hoge, chief of psychiatry at the Army’s Walter Reed Institute for Research.
The numbers actually are worse than that though because if marital problems, alcohol abuse and other adjustment problems are counted, the number rises to 30% to 35%, said Col. Elspeth C. Ritchie, a psychiatric consultant to the Army surgeon general.
Doesn’t this sort of info just warm your heart? To me, it’s yet another reason why we need to end this stupid war already.

politics

The Start of the End of America As We Know It

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It figures that it would take an egregious federal move to knock me off my footie soapbox. This bit of news happened sort of silently yesterday so here is the scoop: the U.S. Supreme Court made a landmark decision saying that police officers no longer must “knock and announce” themselves before entering a private home. Not surprisingly, such a charged issue featured a close vote – the court voted 5-4 – and also unsurprisingly, W’s two new appointees, Roberts and Alito, voted to do away with a “principle that traces back to 13th-century Britain, and a legal doctrine that dates to 1914, to let the government invade people’s homes.”
As the NY Times said, “This decision should offend anyone, liberal or conservative, who worries about the privacy rights of ordinary Americans.” I myself am deeply offended and am worried about the future America that my children will grow up in. After the jump feel free to read the editorial from the Times and be prepared for your blood to boil.
The Don’t-Bother-to-Knock Rule
Published: June 16, 2006
The Supreme Court yesterday substantially diminished Americans’ right to privacy in their own homes. The rule that police officers must “knock and announce” themselves before entering a private home is a venerable one, and a well-established part of Fourth Amendment law. But President Bush’s two recent Supreme Court appointments have now provided the votes for a 5-4 decision eviscerating this rule.
This decision should offend anyone, liberal or conservative, who worries about the privacy rights of ordinary Americans.
The case arose out of the search of Booker T. Hudson’s home in Detroit in 1998. The police announced themselves but did not knock, and after waiting a few seconds, entered his home and seized drugs and a gun. There is no dispute that the search violated the knock-and-announce rule.
The question in the case was what to do about it. Mr. Hudson wanted the evidence excluded at his trial. That is precisely what should have happened. Since 1914, the Supreme Court has held that, except in rare circumstances, evidence seized in violation of the Constitution cannot be used. The exclusionary rule has sometimes been criticized for allowing criminals to go free just because of police error. But as the court itself recognized in that 1914 case, if this type of evidence were admissible, the Fourth Amendment “might as well be stricken.”
The court ruled yesterday that the evidence could be used against Mr. Hudson. Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, argued that even if police officers did not have to fear losing a case if they disobeyed the knock-and-announce rule, the subjects of improper searches could still bring civil lawsuits to challenge them. But as the dissenters rightly pointed out, there is little chance that such suits would keep the police in line. Justice Scalia was also far too dismissive of the important privacy rights at stake, which he essentially reduced to “the right not to be intruded upon in one’s nightclothes.” Justice Stephen Breyer noted in dissent that even a century ago the court recognized that when the police barge into a house unannounced, it is an assault on “the sanctity of a man’s home and the privacies of life.”
If Justice Sandra Day O’Connor had stayed on the court, this case might well have come out the other way. For those who worry that Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito will take the court in a radically conservative direction, it is sobering how easily the majority tossed aside a principle that traces back to 13th-century Britain, and a legal doctrine that dates to 1914, to let the government invade people’s homes.

politics

Confirmed: We Pay More In Taxes to Get Less from the Gov’t

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From the NY Times today:

Region Gets Less Federal Money for Taxes Paid, a Study Finds

By Ronald Smothers

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. Oct. 28 – If the tristate region seceded and established itself as a separate country, it would replace the United States as the second-wealthiest nation in the world behind Luxembourg in terms of per capita income, according to a new study by Rutgers University.

Given their wealth and the nation’s progressive tax system, taxpayers in Connecticut, New York and New Jersey pay a disproportionately high share of the nation’s federal income and employment taxes, the study found. Those states rank 49th, 40th and 50th, respectively, in the amount of federal aid they receive per tax dollar, according to the study.

With 10.8 percent of the nation’s population, the tristate region had 13.1 percent of the nation’s personal income in 2003, and was responsible for 15.8 percent of the income and employment taxes collected by the federal government.

In New Jersey, the gap between what was sent to Washington in tax dollars and what came back to the state in federal assistance was $26 billion, an amount greater than the state’s 2003-2004 budget. New Mexico, on the other hand, got $2.08 in aid for every dollar of federal income tax its residents paid.

James Hughes, dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy and principal author of the study, said the figures underscore the responsibility that comes with affluence in a system of progressive taxation.

“To the degree that the money is going for valid public policy purposes, it is fine,” he said. “But if it goes for subsidies and unfair tax breaks for cowboy capitalists in other states, then it is not fair.”

The study,”Tri-State Affluence: Losing by Winning,” was the first, Mr. Hughes said, to view the three states as a group in analyzing the return they get for federal tax dollars. Similar studies for New York were done in the 1970’s as the city grappled with a fiscal crisis and sought a rationale for increased federal aid.

Joseph Seneca, a faculty member at the school and a co-author of the study, said the region has been the nation’s richest since the 19th century, and had “reinvented itself” as manufacturing declined to become a hub for service and financial businesses, which boomed in the 1990’s.

In the study, Connecticut ranked first in per capita income in 2003 at $43,173, New Jersey second at $40,427 and New York fifth at $36,574. The national average is $31,632.

In terms of median household income, New Jersey led the nation with $58,588 annually, 34 percent above the national average. Connecticut ranked third with $56,803, while New York was 17th with $46,195.

The study found that those higher incomes were not consistently spread throughout each state, but concentrated in a “wealth belt” made up of eight counties, including Manhattan, whose greater concentration of wealthy individuals outpaced all of the other counties in the nation in per capita income at $84,591.

The higher incomes were concentrated in Fairfield County in Connecticut; Somerset, Hunterdon, Morris and Bergen Counties in New Jersey; and Manhattan and Nassau and Westchester Counties in New York.

The wealthier areas of all three states were disproportionately dependent on the high salaries of the financial sector, said Mr. Hughes, and consequently were more sensitive to the volatile boom and bust cycles in the stock market. One consequence, he said, was that soaring tax receipts in the 1990’s during the economic boom financed an expansion of government functions that became “embedded” in state spending.

With the downturn in the economy and the stock market in particular between 2000 and 2003, this level of spending became harder to sustain.

politics

What is the EPA doing these days?

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Quote of the week:

“It is a sad day in America when a coalition of states must go to federal court to defend the Clean Air Act against the misguided actions of the federal agency created to protect the environment,” the New York attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, said. “But in this matter, the E.P.A. is standing with polluters instead of with the people it is supposed to protect, and the states have no choice but to take this action.”

The United States Environmental Protection Agency, thanks to the Bush Administration, has:

* announced that it was closing pending investigations into more than 100 power plants and factories for violating the Clean Air Act

* dropping 13 cases in which it had already made a determination that the law had been violated.
Got to love that environmental PROTECTION agency!