In politics, there is an old saying: “First you have to win.” A corollary is “Winning is everything.” Another companion idiom in American politics is “There are no co-winners.”

I was speaking with someone the other day who said that in the American presidency, Democrats get the chance to be either Jimmy Carter, a man with integrity who lost, or Bill Clinton, who was all about winning. With that in mind, let’s take a look at President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address and just a few of its implications for New York State and its voters.

A lot of people voted for Obama when he said, “Yes we can!” They thought he meant, “Yes we can [fill in the blank].” Many of them were disappointed when he showed that he’d rather be a Clinton winner than a Carter loser; he had the center left, and they weren’t going anywhere. He needed to win the folks in the middle and those who held the purse strings in the skewed economic system in which we live.

You need money to win. You can call these people the 1 Percenters. If you are not taking from their pot, they might actually let you live. There were many folks who wanted to punish the bankers whose antics left so many people with homes that were underwater, but many of those in key economic positions around Obama were way too close to the bad guys in the great American economic disaster.

If you examine the State of the Union message, you can see two Obamas.

One is the progressive president. He tells the college-aged that he is with them when it comes to how much their education is costing them and their families. This is the group of people who helped put Obama over the top in the last election and he needs them back. He needs their passion. By telling young people that the federal government will punish states and colleges that raise tuition, he re-energizes those kids to get out and vote and work for him.

On the other hand, in New York, State University Chancellor Nancy Zimpher, a ball of fire, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo came together with the Legislature in an agreement to save SUNY in this very tough economic climate. In order to do that, the University, which has always been a relative bargain, is raising tuition.

My bet is that the folks who fashioned that deal cannot be happy with what they heard from the president. To some degree, I imagine they thought they were being punched in the solar plexus.

They weren’t the only ones. There was the proposal by Obama that we move ahead with hydrofracking, a drilling process that employs dangerous chemicals to extract natural gas from shale. Here in New York, there has been so much passion appropriately raised about hydrofracking that Cuomo, thought by some to have been in favor of it, seems to have cooled on the idea. No matter how much politicians want the revenue and energy that hydrofracking might provide, they can’t seem to convince the people to accept a process that threatens to poison our drinking water.

So here we have just two of the many things that the president spoke about that may be good for his politics but not necessarily good for the people of New York State. Let’s face it: The president knows what he has to do to win. Under no circumstances will he lose New York State. He will get these electoral votes, so he doesn’t have to worry about New York the way he might about Florida or Ohio. It’s sort of like a wife who will always be there as opposed to a fickle mistress. Get the analogy?

Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.

By Alan S. Chartock

If I were these people, I would make the following resolutions:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo: I resolve to clean up the Democratic conference in the State Senate by backing good, progressive, honest Democratic candidates rather than collaborating with the Republicans. I vow to remember that in 2016 I will be running for president of the United States, and some Democrats will have long memories and accuse me of being a bad Democrat. I will keep my distance from Rupert Murdoch—people are beginning to talk. Speaking of talking, before my run for president, I really have to get some coaching about my regional dialect.
Democratic Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver: I resolve to keep on keeping on. Even under the worst kind of fire, I have kept my progressive principles and supported the things that brought me to the Legislature in the first place: helping people with education, health care and the environment. Speaking of the environment, I resolve to put a stop to the hydrofracking nonsense. Finally, I have to give way on the redistricting mess. It really isn’t right for me to draw lines that maximize my chances to control the Assembly, and I know it. After all, there are so many Democrats in the state that we can’t lose. The Republicans, on the other hand, really do have something to worry about.

Republican Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos: I resolve to play fair. People are getting tired of my flip-flopping on things like a fair reapportionment plan. I realize that it is probably the only way I can preserve my majority, but do I really want to be known forever as “The Man Who Perverted Democracy”? There’s also a cynical notion going around that I’d buy off some dissident Democrats in order to stay in power. Pretty soon, voters will have a really bad taste in their mouths. On the one hand, I keep telling people that this is coalition government at its best; on the other, I make sure that the Democrats in the Senate are not allowed to participate in the process.

New York State Democratic Minority Leader John Sampson: I resolve to stand tall and share power with people of all persuasions in my conference, not hog power for a select few of my colleagues. I will throw out any clown in my Senate Democratic conference who even sounds corrupt. I resolve to never, ever be pushed around by thugs like Pedro Espada, Hiram Monserrate or Carl Kruger. I realize now that once the stink gets on you, it can never be washed off.

Sen. Chuck Schumer: I resolve to never, ever give the appearance that I would use my clout to get my brother-in-law a federal judgeship.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand: I resolve to raise more money in a shorter time than anyone else in the Senate. Hey, if that’s the way this game is played, that’s what I have to do. I didn’t write the rules. I resolve not to give the suckers back undue influence for what I have raised.

Hillary Clinton: I resolve to be the most admired woman in the United States, again.

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.: No matter what it takes, I resolve to keep the world’s best newspaper, the New York Times, afloat.

President Barack Obama: I will read Jean Edward Smith’s superb biography, FDR. I will study every page carefully. I will emulate FDR’s love of the game and his guts. I will defend our Social Security program to the end—ditto Medicare. I will take my message to the people. I will recapture the spirit of the last presidential campaign and this time I will do what I promised.

The Occupy movement: We will stick with our agenda and bring the message about financial and political corruption to the people. It will be our mission to tell people what they ought to know about our banks and financial institutions.

Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.

By Alan Chartock

As belts tighten in New York state government, the question of whether to continue New York’s charter schools becomes even more controversial. Those who favor charter schools argue that too often, in the state’s inner cities, children receive inferior educations. A lot of people, including many of the state’s conservative thinkers, have embraced charter schools as a way out of the cycle of substandard, regimented education.

Many middle-class parents have traditionally avoided New York City’s public high schools for their kids, targeting special schools like Stuyvesant, LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts, Brooklyn Tech and Bronx High School of Science, to name a few. These were the alternatives for the middle class—among those who have the least, a few got into the special schools, but for many reasons too few were admitted.

When pro-charter George Pataki was governor, he controlled the SUNY Board of Trustees. He appointed its members, who were mostly in favor of charter schools. Pataki made a deal with the Legislature stipulating that there would be not one but two main authorizers of charter schools in the state. Since he controlled the SUNY Trustees, he gave that group the right to approve new charter school applications.

(In the spirit of disclosure, my son Jonas was once one of the executive directors of that organization. It was not surprising that the SUNY Charter Schools Institute was at the forefront of opening these schools—that was what Pataki wanted and that was what he got.)

As Democratic governors were elected, they slowly changed the composition of the SUNY board, but David Paterson, Eliot Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo all had a pro-charter orientation. This is one of the few times that traditional New York politics has been laid aside, as Democratic governors continued to support the concept of charters despite the fact that the powerful teachers unions were not happy about them for a list of reasons too long to go into here. It was also thought that the other major authorizing group, the New York State Department of Education, was not nearly as aggressive as the SUNY board in authorizing charters. Some suggested that the Regents were “in bed” with the teachers unions.

The remarkable and generally wonderful outgoing chair of the SUNY Board of Trustees, Carl Hayden, was a charter school advocate who believed that as long as traditional public schools were not being hurt, charters were a good idea. At the end of Hayden’s term, Carl McCall, the former U.N. ambassador, state senator and New York State comptroller, was appointed SUNY chair.

A lot of people had the impression that McCall was not a fan of charters. The outgoing chair, Hayden, said so in a frank interview with The Legislative Gazette, but McCall claimed it wasn’t so. He gave good reasons for supporting charters, including their innovation that would find its way into other, more traditional public schools. This argument put him in line with Cuomo, the man who appointed him. In SUNY board meetings, McCall went on record questioning whether it should be SUNY’s role to authorize charters in the first place.

The big issue now is whether the state will supply charters with space. In this tough economic time, will New York build charter school buildings or give them existent space?

Pro-charter advocates argue that without the state providing the space, charters will be at a disadvantage as they try to turn things around. Those on the other side say we can’t afford it. Some also argue that the wealthy people who have been giving huge amounts of money to set up and run charters will stop doing so if the state takes over.

It can’t be denied that charters have made innovations that are being copied by traditional public schools and that badly run charters that don’t make their required “numbers” have been closed, as they should be.

So far, so good.

Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, one of the world’s richest men, recently warned about the possibility of demonstrations and riots in the United States. In fact, this country has made it known that it would not countenance interference with peaceful protests occurring in places like Libya, Egypt and Syria. We supported the demonstrators in those countries and read with horror the Twitter and Facebook reports of police beatings and shootings of young protestors who said they’d had enough; they were willing to demonstrate and die for their principles and the opportunity to make democratic change.

Bloomberg’s prediction that such things might happen here needs some discussion. Like Franklin Delano Roosevelt before him, Bloomberg must know that when government permits repression and wide-scale wrongdoing, the capitalistic structure is endangered. Progressive capitalists understand full well that when kids can’t get jobs and programs like Social Security and Medicare are threatened, the whole system is put at risk. Once you deprive the middle class and the poor of their homes and their jobs, you really do risk bringing down the system. That’s one of the main reasons why FDR, another progressive capitalist, created Social Security.

Like many in this country, you may believe that some of the major banks and corporate giants have gone unpunished for their misdeeds and wrongdoing. You may believe that the richest among us are undertaxed. As I write this, congressional laws that have been enacted (Dodd-Frank) to stop the more egregious of these excesses are under attack by Republicans in Congress. They are yelling that any efforts to stop wrongdoing are “job killers.”

To put it mildly, a lot of young people who can’t find jobs have had it. They are beginning to take to the streets. The same thing is happening in Israel, where young people in the same middle-class demographic are protesting. You almost never see these protests in the United States—when you do, they are either ignored or minimized by the major news organizations that are owned by our modern press barons.

In recent times, we have witnessed a burgeoning new journalism. Now, anyone with an iPhone can be as significant a journalist as one working for a traditional newspaper or broadcaster. Naturally, some of the old-style journalists insist that they alone are the journalists—that a protestor with an iPhone who posts on Twitter or Facebook is something else. That’s nonsense.

The concept of who a journalist is has changed completely because of emerging technology. The idea that you are only a journalist if you work for Rupert Murdoch and his handpicked right wing reportorial staff, toeing the company line, is absurd. I recently saw a piece in the New York Times (another group of progressive capitalists) that referenced some video taken by young protestors at a Wall Street rally. To put it mildly, the stuff was chilling. A kid asks an officer a question and is thrown on the ground. Other kids are left bleeding, constrained by handcuffs so tight that one young protestor’s hand changes color.

Under the old rules of journalism, a newspaper might say, “There were several arrests made.” When you see kids beaten and crying, you get a very different impression. That is not to say there won’t be some who see it and say, “Good, they deserve it.” Most will not. And no matter what, it is very different than reading about it in the morning papers.

The paper becomes a prism, while YouTube lets you see it all in real time. The smart papers are referencing the videos. If Bloomberg turns out to be right, we’ll be seeing some serious disturbances and a lot more new citizen journalism.

The events of 9/11 proved that New York really is the center of the universe. The miserable thugs who were behind the attack knew that. They didn’t choose Chicago, San Francisco or Los Angeles for their despicable attack. They chose New York because they wanted to inspire as much fear and terror as possible. They hijacked another plane and sent it to Washington, the seat of government, to make a different kind of point. They succeeded in creating the kind of reaction that the Japanese inspired among the American people after Pearl Harbor. They brought Americans and, for a brief time, the rest of the world together.

We can argue about what came later—Iraq, waterboarding, torture and a Patriot Act that should make Americans shiver. But there can be no denying that if their intention was to depress and demoralize the American people, they did not succeed. The death and destruction caused by 9/11 was so terrible, so hateful, that they could only do themselves harm. Admiral Yamamoto was said to have worried that the attack on Pearl Harbor would awaken the sleeping giant. It did.

When the American people woke up after Pearl Harbor, they did some things that history has recorded as being both unfair and stupid. Assuming that all Japanese people were so fanatical in their obsequiousness to the emperor that they placed entire families in internment camps. Of course, in the case of Japan, we were at war with a nation, and in the 9/11 case, we were not. We were at war with some organized thugs who had a lot of people in the Muslim world believing in their cause. It turns out that many Americans have little patience for the Muslim community because the folks who are still trying to do us harm are Muslims.

The case of what has been called “the Ground Zero Mosque” demonstrates this.

With some regularity, we hear stories about racial profiling of Muslims in America by police and intelligence authorities. While these allegations are met with denial, there can be no doubt that intelligence is being collected in the more radical segments of the Muslim community. This is the way it has always been done. On several occasions, other attacks have been thwarted—sometimes because of our intelligence, sometimes because of just plain dumb luck, sometimes because of incompetence on the part of terrorists or would-be terrorists.

One thing is certain: New York has always been the target and will continue to be so. Remember, the Twin Towers were attacked not once, but twice. The first time, when Mario Cuomo was governor, the explosion failed to do the kind of damage we saw on 9/11. The second time—we know what happened.

I think most Americans are smart enough to know that this is going to be a difficult balancing act. We know that intelligence agencies can be used for partisan political purposes. Nixon wanted the Jews and arts people investigated. J. Edgar Hoover went after Martin Luther King Jr. in the most despicable of ways. The problem is that when you set up intelligence agencies with nobody looking over their shoulders, you can lose control. Years later, we are still looking at people’s files with horror.

Bill Clinton stood next to George W. Bush the other day and thanked him for keeping America safe. If you were innocent of any crime and had been “rendered” to Guantanamo, you might not have been as appreciative. If you were the parent of a kid who was killed in the name of democracy, fighting in a war that, it turns out, was based on false information, you might tend to look at things differently.

There are no easy answers here, just balancing—but every American ought to be thinking about what’s at stake.

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Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.

By Alan S. Chartock

I’ve met an awful lot of people who say that they smoke marijuana. They laugh when I tell them that I never have. Nevertheless, a lot of people smoke or have tried it and have created an underground economy, sort of a prohibition do-over, that has helped criminals in our country maintain their elevated style of life.

With these illegal distribution networks come a loss of taxes on the product as well as guns, gang fights and public corruption of one kind or another. In fact, you can’t have corrupt cops and public officials without drugs like marijuana. As Willy Sutton once put it, “That’s where the money is.”

We all know it—you’d have to be in la-la land not to get the way it works. Of course there are those who appropriately point out that marijuana use will get people high, impair their driving and cause accidents. That’s true. But in a society where a far worse drug, alcohol, does far more damage, we allow the sale and subsequent taxation of the more dangerous one and send people to jail for the other.

There are people who will tell you that their pain and suffering from illness, sometimes terminal, is alleviated by smoking marijuana. There are studies suggesting this is a fact and so in some parts of the country, like California, it is legal to use marijuana like other any medicine to help those who need it.

Naturally, there are some entrepreneurial Americans who extend the concept of medical marijuana to its pure recreational use—again, like alcohol. These folks have an expansive view of who needs medical marijuana, and are not averse to making a buck by selling the stuff. Obviously, there will be a lot of doctors shopping to find willing prescribers, just the same as folks who seek out more dangerous narcotic drugs that are manufactured by drug companies.

Into all of this comes the dynamic young governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, who is very, very good and pragmatic at judging what the public wants. On this one, however, he has a problem. He has positioned himself, as has the president, to the right of center to pick up centrist swing voters. But the polls are changing. Americans are becoming much more tolerant of the use of medical marijuana. It’s hard for most folks to imagine making a criminal out of a dying cancer patient who experiences some relief from the drug.

Of course, most right-wing libertarians are all for marijuana legalization under the mantle of keeping government off their backs. Nevertheless, our history in this country has been to promote the concept of “reefer madness.” Marijuana, we are told, is a gateway drug: First you smoke weed, then you graduate to other drugs. In some cases that is accurate—but it can be the same with the use of alcohol. By allowing the use of marijuana, we can spot those with problems and refer them to experts who might be able to help them.

For his part, Cuomo has announced he is opposed to medical marijuana, and his words made more than a few ripples when he said he was reconsidering his position. That’s good; he should. His risk, and he knows it, is that people running for the presidency will eventually be asked whether they’ve ever smoked pot. God forbid! If they are for the fair-minded use of marijuana, they will be portrayed as permissive nuts, cartoons will show them smoking weed and hallucinating.

Cuomo has shown guts on things like marriage equality. He has appropriately led, not followed. If he senses a sea change in public reaction to marijuana, he’ll be tempted to get out in front. That’s why he sent up smoke signals to the public when he said he was reconsidering his opinion on medical marijuana but was still opposed. This is called “running it up the flag pole and seeing who salutes.”

Hey, we’re going to get medical marijuana. The only question is whether this governor will have the cojones to do what is right.
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Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.

By Alan S. Chartock

There has been a spate of articles recently about alleged wrongdoing in specific charter schools in New York. These instances mirror the inevitable wrongdoing that we hear about in our old-style public schools. In both cases, it is almost inevitable that some rotten apples will spoil a good idea. Public education, be it in charter schools or in the old-style schools, is our best hope. The charter schools model was established as one way to challenge our earlier model public schools to do better; in some cases, this is already happening.

We know that our future is tied to the well-being of our kids. If our kids are not well educated, they will be unable to compete in the world economy. If the kids in India and China can do advanced mathematics and our kids can’t, the United States and the state of New York will be on their way to becoming second rate.

Let’s face it: Rich people can spend a lot of money on exclusive private schools for their kids. Some of these places cost around $40,000 a year. The success of these schools is just another example of the rich getting richer, like at the end of the Monopoly game. For really smart kids in New York, there is the option of merit-based public schools like Bronx Science, Stuyvesant and the LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts.

We all know what the problem is: too many of our kids are left to try to learn in impossible conditions. We have watched the governor and the Legislature strip our schools of needed resources and seen conditions only worsen. There are those who think our teachers unions are keeping us from achieving educational reform. They are not. They are no more than an amalgam of teachers who fight for their rights. Of course, things have gotten out of hand. The indefensible is commonplace. The main problem is that, no matter what the union and some fuzzy-headed education professors say, it is harder to fire a bad teacher than it is to get to the moon. If the unions can be faulted for anything, it is for letting things get to a place where the inevitable reforms have to be forced on them. But, as Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been known to intone, “It is what it is.” As we used to sing on the camp bus, “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.”

We should have learned that, human nature being what it is, some will inevitably take advantage simply because they can. We read of a few corrupt charter school administrators who are so anxious to show good results among their students that they break the rules. They make sure that only those who are likely to succeed are admitted to their schools, when the admissions process should be run by lottery if there are more applications than available spaces. Others are accused of just plain stealing and hiring by nepotism. The truth is that if we do not have people really holding educators—any educators—to standards, any system can be corrupted.

Let’s face it: Some public schools are better than others because they are run by people who care—and so are some charter schools. All of the evidence is not in yet. It is common practice in some charter schools to have teachers put in longer hours and adhere to a longer work year. We can begin to see that all of this will shake out. The unions will have to examine their role in making schools better—not only for teachers but also for the students, the parents and the communities. The charter school movement will have to maintain rigorous standards and those charters and the old public schools that are not doing their jobs will have to be closed. It takes guts to do that, especially when a hundred people are screaming at you because they have been turned into an organized mob by a few self-serving charter-crats. For their part, the governor and the Legislature will have to find the money to fund our most essential need: the education of our kids.

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Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.

By Alan S. Chartock

Around the first of every year, I write my annual predications. Inevitably, I predict a sure thing: that a member of the New York State Legislature will be indicted. I have not yet been wrong. Now that everyone from the governor to the FBI is working hard to clean up the cesspool known as Albany, I should up the ante and predict that several legislators will be indicted. I have good reason to suspect that there are a lot of nervous people around Albany, who are painfully aware that the FBI was listening in on their telephone conversations with State Senator Carl Kruger and lobbyist Richard J. Lipsky.

How can people risk everything they have, knowing others have been convicted and sentenced for doing the same thing? My interest is now piqued by two players in the latest travesty. The big fish is faux-Democrat Kruger, who I’ve long referred to as “the bad Kruger” in order to differentiate him from another Senator, Liz Krueger, or “the good Krueger.” Carl Kruger has always been a shady character, while Liz Krueger has always been the shining light of those in the Legislature pushing for reform and for the rights of the disenfranchised.

Now that Carl Kruger has been arrested by the feds for selling his office on a rather spectacular basis, all kinds of people are running around saying things like, “We all knew he was dirty for years.” Incredible—you put your office up for sale, people know about it and it continues until the FBI gets interested. Wow! We are told that this was only the first shoe to drop and that there’s more to come. I imagine that those people who worked the system without ever going over the line are going to be very angry at Kruger and Lipsky for ruining the game.

The second character of interest is Richard J. Lipsky. Years ago, I knew a good government type who made headlines by suggesting lobbyists were the handmaidens of legislators. People in and around the legislature were so offended by this assertion that the guy was ridden out of town. Richard Lipsky was a lobbyist/publicist alleged to be the funnel that brought the money into Bad Kruger’s operation. It’s alleged that people came to Lipsky to get money to Kruger, who used his clout to make things happen.

I guess if it takes 10 years for the feds to catch up with you (God forbid the state authorities should actually do something), you might get the idea that you can operate with impunity. On the other hand, why in the world would anyone do anything wrong when you know that sooner or later, the pendulum will swing and some prosecutor, looking to clean things up or even just for headlines, will come after you with guns blazing?

Lots of people are losing sleep over this, examining every move they have made on behalf of their clients. We all know how it works. The lobbyists direct money into the campaigns of legislators who give them “access” or direct service in return. Explicit promises aren’t necessarily made, because if the legislator is heard talking to the lobbyist and agreeing to a quid pro quo they are both toast. The smart ones know better. There is always an understanding about these things. But every once in a while, some of these characters throw caution to the wind and they are the ones who end up in jail. In this climate, I guarantee you that the judges will throw the book at those found guilty. We can only hope that the legislature, hounded by the FBI, will try to turn the heat down by agreeing to a really strong ethics bill. I bet they don’t. They just don’t get it. Get ready for more revelations. Anyone they catch and convict will go away for a long time. Put another way, I wouldn’t want to be them.

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Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.

By Alan S. Chartock

As state and federal governments continue drowning in a sea of red ink, we are reminded of Johnny Carson’s old edict, “Buy the premise, buy the bit.” There is no doubt that from Wisconsin to New York to Massachusetts, the premise is that we are broke. The narrative continues that we have spent too much on our schools, our hospitals and our bureaucrats. As a result, things are getting uglier. We are beginning to see scenes reminiscent of Egypt, with civil servants gathering in large numbers in peaceful protest.

When our children are assigned to classes of 50 kids, there will be hell to pay among parents, especially in the case of a child who needs extra help. When people start dying because of understaffed emergency rooms, there will be hell to pay. People will realize what they are being cheated out of.

Back to Johnny Carson. The premise is that services must be cut but taxes cannot be raised. We can’t ask people to pay more in taxes, the narrative continues, because in doing that we are cutting down on jobs. Wherever he is, Ronald Reagan must be proud. The former president and one-time organized-labor leader is given a lot of credit for his “trickle-down economics” theory. Reagan contended that if the rich are allowed to go unfettered by taxes and regulation, they will spend enough money getting richer that the population will benefit indirectly. No lesser person than his one-time vice president and successor, George H. W. Bush, called this “voodoo economics.”

We know this won’t work because the people who control so much of the country’s resources will take their money and put it in their pocket or invest it in multi-notional corporations. Places like India and China will get the jobs because they pay their workers so little. In the meantime, Barack Obama, seeking to preserve his political life, has bought into the Carson-like premise-bit by preaching the doctrine of “jobs” around the country. Meanwhile, the country is waking up. We can’t have 50 kids in a classroom. The hospitals will soon begin doing the same thing. We can’t have people dying in emergency rooms.

That leaves the civil servants who were caught unaware but who now understand that they are about to be devoured. Their excesses have become fodder for right-wing tabloids. A grotesque labor leader treating colleagues to a huge meal to the tune of thousands of dollars becomes legend. In some little towns, elected officials get health care for themselves and their spouses for life. Pensions are unfunded in many states and towns. The civil servants and the elected folks who have been negotiating bigger and bigger packages for themselves see themselves as scapegoats. To some degree they are. Look at Wisconsin, which wants to take negotiating rights away from them. In labor heavy New York, politicians are clamoring to throw out the “Triborough Amendment” to the Taylor Law, which says that old labor agreements continue in force until new ones are agreed to. This is a tremendous bargaining chip for unions.

Up to now, the unions had so much political power that no self-respecting politician would mess with them, but those days appear to be behind us. Andrew Cuomo in New York sees red ink on the wall and has traded his usual union allies for the likes of Rupert Murdoch. So far, this has proven a brilliant strategy. Everyone seems to be buying the bit, but there is another possibility—that those who own almost all of America pay a little bit more in taxes. The few who have suggested this have been hooted down as dopes, fools and clowns. But sooner or later, when the schools are in crisis and the emergency rooms and hospitals are crumbling, someone will emerge a great hero for insisting that those who make a million bucks a year pony up a little more. The unions will pull back and fast. We’ll just go back to the future and America will wake up from the nightmare.

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Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.

By Alan S. Chartock

The New York State Bar Association recently delivered a report on governmental ethics in New York. Before anyone makes unfair jokes about lawyers and sharks or lawyers and ethics as an oxymoron, one should read this good but imperfect report.

Among the suggestions are some ideas that I’ve been writing about in this column for years. It’s nice to finally see the Bar Association almost onboard. In fact, most of the recommendations by this prestigious group are nothing more than common sense. New Yorkers would support most, but certainly not all, in a New York minute if they were allowed to vote on them in a fair referendum. Of course, these ideas would be fought by lawyer legislators who don’t want to see their outside interests and sources of income curtailed.

One committee idea would create a single ethics commission that would keep an eye on everyone at the same time. That should always have been the case, with one commission watching legislators and the officials of the executive branch. “Oh no, you can’t do that,” say the legislators. “That would violate the separation of powers in state government.” What a bunch of malarkey. In the past, the legislature has appointed its own watchdog group and, of course, these so-called legislative ethics commissions have done almost nothing to keep these people honest. In fact, there have been times that they have done precisely the reverse. Legislators have come to them asking pre-approval of something that might not pass the smell test. Who in the world do they think they are kidding? One commission with an eye on everyone is the way to go.

The Bar Association also calls for giving the state inspector general a fixed term. He or she would be appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Senate, and would report directly to the governor and not his chief of staff (secretary to the governor.) The good part of this is, the inspector general could not easily be fired for doing his or her job, due to the fixed term.

Sensibly, the Bar committee said that if public officials were found to have violated ethics laws, they could be suspended or even dismissed from office. Who but the members of the legislature themselves would be opposed to that?

Since the United States Supreme Court recently gutted the “Theft of Honest Services” federal law, the Bar Association would also tighten grounds for being found guilty. For example, if you were found guilty of accepting gifts above a certain amount, you’d be charged with a felony. You’ll remember that former Republican Majority Leader Joe Bruno was found guilty under the federal law, now under question, for selling an allegedly worthless nag to a man who testified that he bought the horse to pay Bruno back for other favors. Among other good ideas, elected officials would be required to disclose if they do business with a lobbyist.

But of course, lawyers will be lawyers and the report fails miserably when it requires disclosure of income above a $10,000 threshold. That doesn’t go far enough. Plus, there would be a barn door big enough to drive a truck through when the group says that lawyer legislators would have to disclose their clients “…except when disclosure of an attorney’s clients would harm the client to be detrimental to representation.” What did I tell you about sharks?

Come on, lawyers in the legislature and everyone else should have to tell us who was hiring them at any price. We need to know the names of the clients so we can see if the legislators are in the pockets of these people. Legislators should have to decide whether they want to be legislators or lawyers. The Bar Association committee failed miserably on this one and should be ashamed of themselves. Period.

Let’s face it, folks, this should be the year that a good ethics bill finally passes. By protecting their fellow lawyers in the legislature, the Bar Association brings disgrace upon itself. A junior high school kid can see through it and so can the voters of New York. One of these days, someone is going to wake up to the fact that it is a new day in the state and we expect our representatives to represent us and not themselves.
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Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.