NEW YORK AT THE ABYSS

NEW YORK AT THE ABYSS

The state is dying. True political leadership is absent. Scandal is the rule and not the exception. We the suffering citizenry, exist in a political desert at the edge of a political abyss. We are a one party commonwealth with no wealth left in common.

How did we come to this? How did we become the state of the Union that most resembles Venezuela?

Why did we allow one party to assume near total political hegemony and why did we allow that party to be co-opted by a virulent ideology that distains democratic capitalism, limited government, and individual rights over group entitlements?

How do we save our state and ourselves and where do we begin?

The answer is simple on it’s face and complex in it’s details. We must have true partisan competition! That means two or more parties that offer real choice to the voters and not just be pale reflections of one another. The voters in this state are not stupid despite how the elected elite and the chattering classes treat them. We are overtaxed and underserved.
We are treated with condescension by having elected and appointed officials determine what we can eat, drink, or smoke and how we are to transport ourselves to work, shop or eat, drink or smoke that what the nanny state allows. Elected official seem to believe that being our mothers is now part of their job description.

So how do we begin?

A good first step would be for each of the two major parties and the minor ones in addition, to present the voters with a “Compact with New York”. This would be the basic pledge to New Yorkers as to what each candidate and each party promises to accomplish if elected. The head of each ticket would secure the support of all the candidates running under him or her to sign on to this “Compact”. This would in fact be the first test of leadership they could demonstrate to the electorate. The success or failure of someone who wants to lead the state through these perilous times rests in the first instance on their capacity to lead through the art of persuasion, the act of consensus and the power of ideas.

This “Compact” should be inclusive, concise and detailed where necessary and appropriate. It should be as much a blueprint for governance as a strategy for problem solving. It should not mince words…we are too far down the rabbit hole for glibness and obfuscation! It should address the citizens with respect and candor and offer them practical solutions for getting us out of the mess we are in.

Where necessary it should identify both the problems we face and how we got to where we are. You cannot solve a problem in a vacuum. You can only deal with it in the historical context from which it arose and the present reality in which it festers.

New Yorkers deserve a real choice. They also deserve that this choice be in no small part be part of a local, state and national dialogue in which they participate. The ideas that grow into policy and programs must, like the problems they wish to solve, emanate from the real experience of real people. In other words we must once again become a government of the people, for the people and by the people.

If we do not allow the ultimate stakeholders, the people, to decide on not just conflicting
ideas, but also on conflicting philosophies, we run the very real risk of collapsing the house because we have not strengthened the foundation.

We are living in a new era. It is an era where complacency will wither and citizen involvement will become the new norm. There is simply too much at stake…too much to lose and that whistling sound you hear is the teapot boiling!
ERLANDSSON

INTO THE PERSIAN NIGHT

Iran has become the tipping point for not just the Middle East but for the entire world. They are the Djinn that cannot be put back into the lamp. History teaches us one vicious lesson over and over again...believe the maniacs when they tell you what they intend to do!

The world has that 1930's feel about it. It's the deja vu of having read "Mein Kampf" and dismissing it as the ravings of a delusional socialist with a Charlie Chaplin moustache.

It is becoming monotomously predictibile that the Obama administration with it's puerile inability to ever admit that their child like world view might be just a tad off center, would have no single coherent policy to deal with the coming storm. First we studiously ignor the demonstrations after the rigged election,, then we ignor the killings of innocents like Neda, then we ignor the jailings,the one minute show trials and same day executions. In return Obama sends conciliatory missives to Khameini who ignors him!

All of the above is not lost on Israel, Sau'di Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, the Emirates and Jordan who now have proof positive that the old tough America is gone and a new soft politically correct one has taken its' place. The Saudis and the Egyptians in particular want their own bomb. They are truly scared of a new Xerxes on the march in a region where western civilization began and God was first revealed.

Israel, fighting two proxy wars(three if you count the Syrians) while being increasingly demonized by the UN and parts of the EU, know that a Persia with nukes is an existential threat out of the Old Testament. The infamous "Goldstone Report" commissioned by the equally infamous and misnamed "UN Commission on Human Rights" is nothing more than a multinational permission to finish the "Shoah". Some where in Hell, Hitler is telling Satan "I told you so!"

All of this is a recipe for Armageddon. Modern American liberalism is incapable of recognizing the reality of the danger much less doing anything to prevent it. If you don't accept the reality of good and evil then you are blind to the threat before you. Moral relativism, the mother of "Political Correctness" simply does not allow a world view that involves a civilizational struggle over the nature of God and his rules for humankind, because it mocks the idea of God in the first place.

The Islamic world or the "Ummah" has far too many adherents who believe that faith and politics are synonomous. The separation of Mosque and state is to these mujahideen, nothing more than a quaint and sacrilegious notion taken from the "Dar el Harb", the world of war or the world of the "kufr". In other words, democracy is "Haraam' or forbidden and Muslims who adhere to it are "takfir" and should be punished by death since they can no longer be muslim.

Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual and spiritual mentor of the modern "Muslim Brotherhood" wrote in his book "Milestones" that Muslim society comes into existence when a person says "La ilaha illa Allah, Muhammadar Rasul Allah"..." There is no God but God and Muhammed is his Messenger". This is the whole of life. All else is a "Jahili" society be it Capitalist, Socialist, Communist or Fascist. Further for Qutb and the Salafists who follow his credo, Jihaad rises to the the level of a sixth Plllar of the Faith and is for the moment the most important. These view are shared by the Wahabist in Sau'di Arabia and the Shia "Twelvers" running Iran.

Qutb was executed by Nasser in 1966 but remains a seminal force in the struggle for a new "Califhate" for Sunni and Shia alike. It is a great mistake to think the great Sunni/Shia divide will stop those muslims who share the Salafist worldview from joining forces against the "Little Shaitan" or the "Great Shaitan". The followers of Amadinejad and his mentor the Ayatollah Yahzi believe in the return of the twelveth or "Hidden Imam" who will return with Jesus or Issa as his helper to enact Armageddon to cleanse the world in preparation for a new purified Islamic world.

Thus the worldview of the current regime needs a holacaust in order to proceed to the next level. When they people tell us "we embrace death and you embrace life" it is perhaps wise to take them at their word.

There is a famous end scene in the film "Three Days of the Condor" when the hired assassin played by Max von Sydow tells Robert Redford, the CIA analyst whose co-workers were killed by von Sydow in the beginning, his lament on modern life. Redford has tracked down the man who ordered the killings but finds him dead at the hand of von Sydow who has been offered more money by others to kill his former employer. von Sydow harkens back to WW II when things were black and white and you could tell the bad guys from the good guys. "I miss the clarity" he says.

How many of us are starting to miss the clarity of the "Cold War" which was at least comprehensible as a political battle? How many of us are trying to understand the current struggle in outdated cold war terms to our peril? The first and greatest rule of war is "know your enemies!"

ERLANDSSON

A NEW YORK STATE OF MIND

The media and press are awash with scandal. Politicians are at it again...draining the last vestige of faith in the "political process" from the hearts and minds of the public. Like vampires they seduce us with the promises of wonderful things that they never mean to keep. They then leave us cold and numb in a cemetary of lies, bereft of any faith in our fellow man, consigned to walk the earth until we die, not trusting anything or anyone.

Bad leadership is the great existential crisis of our time. How are we to be led into the future if true and good leadership, which by its nature imbues trust, has ceased to exist? We are not by nature anarchists. We cannot as a society or a civilization survive in a state of ethical chaos. The inmates, as they say, cannot be allowed to run the asylum.

New York State is now grappling with so many problems great and small, that one feels like the possessed girl in "The Exorcist" with ones' head spinning around. The MTA is broke and must make service cuts so drastic that the very economic life of the city and its suburbs are endangered. The solutions put forward are higher job killing taxes which as a cure may be worse than the disease. The people in charge don't seem to understand what being in charge means.

A long term NYC Councilman from the Bronx who has literally spent his entire adult life on the public fisc is indicted on thirteen counts of larceny by the US Attorney from the Southern District. One of the allegations is that he took a bill for a Bagel sandwich and a Coke for $7.00 and changed it to $177.00 for reinbursement purposes. This of course only serves to give one the flavor of the remaining charges. These contain what has become an almost formulaic involvement of a not-for-profit organization, set up by the accused for noble purposes that have apparently not come to fruition but has managed to give fairly lucrative jobs to wife, family and mistress.

A key leader in the State Senate and his colleague, a US congressman from Queens are up to their necks in a project to create a "Racino" at Aqueduct Racetrack sponsored by the State Government. This award worth at least $300,000,000, was won by a consortium that also included a former Congressman who is a very powerful Minister/Developer/politician . The bidding process seems to have been in the opinion of one of the losers akin to trying to hit a moving target since the rules seemed to change as the process moved along. The one thing that didn't move however was that the Governor needed the support of all three of the gentlemen for reelection which he apparently got a scant three days after the award was announced. Since then stories have appeared alleging that the slot machine operator chosen by this consortium does not operate in Las Vegas but instead is confined to smaller Nevada venue where their Casinos apparently are unclean and second rate. Oh yes...the the State Senator and the sitting Congressman also have several not-for-profits, one of which was set up for giving aid to victims of "Katrina". They apparently collected over $31,000 but only distributed a little over $1300. no one knows where the rest of the money went.

The Mayor or those close to him distributed $1,200,000 to the Independence Party, on whose line he ran, for pollwatching and other assorted Election Day tasks via an entity created under law a month after the Election was over. The head of the party claims not to know anything about it. The New York County DA wants to know everything about it!

For the last five days the NY Times, has dangled a juicy tale of sex, drugs and presumably Rock n' Roll before the public. Allegedly it involves the Governor and the Governors' mansion and women not his wife. The story has yet to run, so this is the "Empire State" version of "death by a thousand cuts". In other words the rumor of the story has now become the story. The governor, no stranger to strange women by his own prior admission, has denied all. After the prior Governors' daillance with $4500 "ladies of the town", the voters are frantically seeking a "castrato" to run for the office if only to eliminate one barrier to putting full and devoted energy into the "peoples" business.

Another State Senator who was a former Police Officer, beat and cut up his girl friend so badly that she required surgery and a post assault order of protection from the courts. The attacker was tried and convicted and is awaiting appeal. The State Senate convened a Commission to decide what to do with this thug and eventually they recommended he be expelled. Yesterday they voted to do that even though by so doing, the Democrats would lose temporary control of the Senate. This is actually positive so why am I including it in my list of misery? Well the Senator was a Latino and other Latinos are outraged by this punishment even though the woman victim was a Latina. Apparently ethnicity and a deranged sense of victimhood trumps justice and moral principles. This is not just sad ...it is disgusting!

All of the above has hit us within the last week. The 15 inches of snow we got yesterday was in some way a repreive from God that has nothing to do with climate change. It stopped the miscreants from doing damage for a 24 hour span of time. This is a good thing. God apparently reads the papers also. The fact that sucessive "snowmageddons" has shut down Washington for most of a week is also good. It is costing us $100,000,000 a day but when the Government is functioning it costs us billions and sometime trillions. Hmm... perhaps a way out of the deficit...ya think?

I have to laugh because if I don't I will scream. Where is the leadership that can help us thread our way out of this thicket of corruption and idiocy? It's not only my country, state and city at stake...it has become personal... it is my sanity at stake as well. I'm not looking for a savior...I'm just looking for integrity! Why does this appear so hard to find?

ERLANDSSON

OH CITY WHERE ART THOU?

(This is an old post)

"OH CITY, WHERE ART THOU?”

The chaos keeps coming like a tsunami poised to sweep away all vestiges of what is about to become, a lost civilization.

It is not enough that we are threatened by Washington with programs so stupid and taxes so confiscatory that some days all we want to do is stay in bed…take a mental health day from the maelstrom so to speak. It is not enough that we have to try and exist with a state government so dysfunctional that the entire country including Illinois, New Jersey, California and Louisiana take pride they are not us.

Now in the space of a single week two of the most irresponsible actions ever taken by bureaucrats and elected officials demonstrate we are closer to edge of the precipice then we were perhaps ever willing to believe. I speak of course about the second MTA “doomsday plan” in one year and the city Council’s decision to let 2200 jobs go down the toilet for purely ideological reasons.

First the MTA, who are the keepers of dual books and poster children for the lack of public accountability. It was only last spring that the long suffering public were threatened with draconian (a word used all too frequently with the MTA) service cuts or economy harmful fare hikes. Fares went up, the city was promised transit stability for a reasonable period of time and the suddenly after a disastrous and controversial wage arbitration, doomsday is once more upon us. This time public school children, elderly and disabled New Yorkers have been added to the array of victims along with the riders on 19 bus lines and 2 subway lines that will simply cease to exist. If that were not enough, weekend and/or overnight service on 45 other lines and deep service cuts to 16 other subway lines are scheduled as well. 4 express bus lines will also be impacted. 417, 243 public school students will lose their free full fare Metro Cards and 167, 912 other students will lose their half fare Metro Cards. This student subsidy program has been in place since 1948.

The city’s Access-A-Ride program provides 24 hour door to door service for around 65,000 disabled (half over the age of 75) New Yorkers a year and 26,500 rides a day. These trips mandated to a degree by Federal Law, average over $66 a trip with an annual budget of over $450,000 a year. For most of the riders they are an economic and psychological lifeline. Next year the 2010 MTA budget proposes to begin limiting the trips from home to the nearest accessible train and bus, which of course just got harder because of the cutbacks for those very services. Has anyone wondered how these New Yorkers will get to their final destination or for that matter back home again? Oh those pesky details!

What was the reaction of the Governor and the Mayor who was out of town in Green Copenhagen saving mankind from itself due to the fact we breathe? (Can you believe it? Politicians have finally perfected their art by actually coming up with a way to tax us for the use of air!) If you guessed tolls on bridges you win the big prize! Yes their solution is to make it even harder to travel in this city by putting the screws to drivers to make them pay for the rapacious wage demands of a workforce who have it so good they don’t even have to pay a co-pay for their medical coverage and the almost criminal ineptitude of management who can’t seem to ever get a budget to balance.

Hey Mayor …Hey Governor how about a wage freeze during the most serious economic downturn since the 1930s? Why do public service union members not have to sacrifice when small businesses are failing and total unemployment is heading toward 17%? I for one, like former Assemblyman Steve Kaufman’s idea of declaring a city or region wide emergency and issuing emergency franchises to provide as much private sector service as possible to cover the cut backs. For the record I am a friend of Kaufman but I have never failed to disagree with him on a host of issues. On this one he has nailed it!

City residents cannot continue to live with the ongoing uncertainty that they may not be able to get to their job or school or Doctor, or supermarket because of no transportation or unaffordable transportation. With all the daily indignities New Yorkers have to put up with such as tickets, rude public workers, sky high prices and ever rising housing and energy costs (yeah Mayor Mike don’t give me windmills …give me Nuclear or gas from the Marcellus Shale), it is way past the time that the taxpayers demand a new way of providing affordable and reliable public transit services for this city. Kaufman points the way.

The second atrocity inflicted on the suffering public this week is the politically engineered destruction of more than 2200 jobs at the proposed redevelopment of the Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx. The City Council and the Bronx Borough President tag teamed to scuttle a $300 million economic development project that Mayors have been trying to get through since the Armory went vacant in 1993, costing the city $1 million a year just to maintain it.

The Bloomberg administration and the NYCEDC skillfully guided the project through all the environmental, land use and community sand traps and mine fields only to have an alleged “community alliance” called the Kingsbridge Armory Redevelopment Alliance or KARA enter the fray just prior to the selection of a developer to demand a “Community Benefit Agreement” (CBA) that demanded among other things that all retail jobs within the mall to be developed would pay a “living wage” of at least $10 an hour with benefits or $11.50 an hour without benefits. Related Cos. the selected developer promised Union prevailing wages with health and pension benefits for the building trades’ workers who would rebuild the armory into a shopping mall as well as union wages for all regular mall employees. The mall was to have a full scale 60,000 square foot supermarket, Movie Theater, community space, among other amenities. At Kara’s request there was even to be something called a “World Peace Atrium” which Related agreed to.

But Related could not nor should it have agreed to try and bring in a variety of businesses with mandated “living wages” as a prerequisite. The Bronx is the poorest county in the nation. Unemployment in the Bronx is at 13.4%. 10% of all “Bronxites” or 128,000 persons are on public assistance. 29% are on food stamps. Other projects such as the redevelopment around Yankee Stadium did not have to go forward under the kind of blackmail that this project was subjected to.

The Bronx Borough President disapproved the plan for specious parking and traffic reasons even though the state and city and the City Planning Commission examined these “issues” and approved them . The City Council allegedly directed by the Working Families Party acting in behest of retail workers decided ‘to hell” with their brothers and sisters in the Building and Construction Trades Council and got the City Council to defeat the plan 45 to 1 for the same spurious reasons the Borough President had conjured up. In short they simply let 2200 jobs disappear probably never to be seen again. Then in an orgy of pompous self congratulations they publicly celebrated this almost unbelievable act of self indulgent, stupid and arrogant incompetence by boisterously patting themselves on the back.

One is left wondering what in hell is the world view of elected officials who would take away jobs from people who desperately need them and then “crow” about it as if they did something good!

One can also only hope that these same elected officials will spend the rest of their terms in office explaining to construction workers, students needing jobs and people looking for their first job or for a much needed second job why those jobs are not there and why that is so damned good!

Where is the city of my youth? Where is the lusty, brawling metropolis of big dreams, big ideas and big achievements where you could live your life in the midst of giants who would turn their visions into reality and that reality into magic? New York was like no other place on earth then because the leadership in both the city and state was second to none and there was a shared consensus that capitalism was good and hard work was the only sure path to success.

Now we are becoming second rate because those shared values no longer have the same resonance that they did for former generations. There is a new game in town. It is played by the ideological children of Saul Alinsky and they mean to shove their nasty little beliefs down our throats despite all our protests and all our struggles. Somehow we have to summon the spirit and strength of yesterday to defeat today and preserve tomorrow for all of those yet to come. Oh New York…oh my city…where art thou?
ERLANDSSON