Last Sunday, we marked the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that guarantees a woman’s right to choose. Reproductive freedom is at greater risk now than at any time since Roe was handed down in 1973, and family planning is under attack. Women can no longer afford to be silent.

Last year, Republicans passed an endless parade of legislation in the House regarding reproductive rights and family planning, and this year promises to be no better. Many of the Republican efforts go far beyond choice and would impact women’s access to birth control and basic health care, including cancer screenings. The number and variety of their attacks on reproductive care is more than simply breathtaking—it’s dangerous. Meanwhile, Republicans have offered zero substantive bills to create jobs, the No. 1 issue for the American people.

Early last year, Republicans zeroed out family planning funding in the 2011 omnibus government funding bill. This wasn’t funding for abortions—federal law already prohibits that—rather, it was aid for birth control, pre-natal care and other reproductive health services.

The bill also included the Pence Amendment, which specifically bars funding for Planned Parenthood. The vast majority of services provided by Planned Parenthood are family planning, cancer screening and other non-abortion-related care. This language would have impacted basic health care for millions of women. Fortunately, the Senate defeated it.
In May, the House voted to repeal health care reform and the Republicans approved an amendment that prohibited federal funding to train doctors to perform abortions, even if an abortion would save a woman’s life. The Senate has taken no action on this bill.

In October, the House considered the most dangerous bill of all, the so-called “Protect Life Act,” which many groups are calling the “Let Women Die Act” because it would let hospitals refuse to provide lifesaving care to women who need an abortion and allow them to refuse to transfer them to another institution that would provide care. It also denies women the right to buy insurance covering full reproductive care on the health care exchanges set up under health care reform. Fortunately, the Senate hasn’t taken it up either.

It has become a time-honored tradition to point out that Roe hangs by a thread in the Supreme Court; Whoever becomes president next year will likely determine whether the Constitution guarantees women the right to choose the timing and number of children they will bear. If any of the four Republicans remaining in the race win, they have promised to select Supreme Court candidates who will overturn Roe and have pledged to sign legislation that could restrict women’s access to basic health care.

If Roe falls, the issue will be turned back to the states. NARAL has identified 69 separate anti-choice measures adopted in the states in 2011, even with Roe. Five states have gone so far as to ban abortions entirely after 20 weeks, with no exception for rape or incest or to protect the health of the mother.

Fortunately, President Obama has made it clear that he supports choice and that he believes that reproductive health care needs to be protected and funded.

Last week, his administration reaffirmed that any organization that is not solely religious will have to comply with the preventive care provisions of the Affordable Care Act, including providing access to all FDA-approved birth control medication.

This year could prove pivotal in the fight to protect reproductive rights. For those of us who support Roe, silence is no longer a viable choice.

Carolyn Maloney represents the East Side of Manhattan and parts of Queens in the House of Representatives.

By Josh Rogers

Any green activist worth his weight in flowers has spent hours reading environmental impact statements (EIS). Even though the reports are typically prepared by agencies anxious to start work, they still have info that may derail or kill a project.

Some might even pity the applicant who leaves something out. Westway, the grand plan to develop the West Side on top of Hudson River landfill, was delayed fatally two decades ago because officials did not consider its effect on striped bass.
A traffic engineer I know who has prepared many environmental statements for the city and who has attacked others for neighborhood activists once told me that he could find holes in any EIS—including those he wrote.

The voluminous reports attempt to look at every possible effect of a project on the environment except one: What is the impact of printing environmental impact statements?

The final EIS for the Second Avenue Subway project is three volumes long and five and a half inches high when stacked up. Prior to the final report, there were draft versions, scoping documents and revisions to previous reports that were dutifully sent to community board offices, libraries, affected government agencies and others.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority sent out 400 copies of the final report and kept 100, said agency spokesperson Kevin Ortiz, who quite aptly calls it “one of the biggest public works project in the world.” He said putting reports online has lessened the demand for paper versions, which may mean that in the future, the MTA will take a softer line on printing so many hard copies.

Some of the previous reports are still in the Community Board 8 office, but the subway project is not even close to being the biggest one in terms of report size. That honor goes to the proposed East River waste transfer station near 91st Street. The bound volumes consume over 30 inches on one of the board’s bookcases.

“They haven’t sent anything for a year. I think they’re done,” said Latha Thompson, the board’s district manager, with hope in her voice.

The big environmental groups generally shy away from talking about the irony of killing trees as part of an effort to protect the environment.

Public policy analyst Charles Komanoff said the tree casualties are “pretty depressing” given that “gotcha moments” in environmental statements don’t come often. The original idea behind the creation of the EIS 40 years ago was to take the politics out of decisions, but the reports fail on that count, he said.

“It’s not a panacea,” said Komanoff, who works on reducing traffic. “At the end of the day, it’s only politics.”
The statements stay in the city archives long after boards and libraries get rid of them. Thompson said she has received conflicting information on how long she should hold onto an EIS, so she has settled on 10 years. That means she’ll be getting rid of the subway statements in 2014, long before the project is fully built—assuming, of course, that the day will in fact come.

Her West Side counterpart, Penny Ryan, does not have reports as long, so she’s not worried about storage space. But still, they do seem to take on lives of their own.

“You’re welcome to come visit them,” she offered.

Josh Rogers, a contributing editor at Manhattan media, is a lifelong New Yorker. Follow him on Twitter
@JoshRogersNYC.

The city adminstration is aware that nearly 800 public schools in all five boroughs contain lighting ballasts that leak polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which pose serious threats to the health and safety of our children, teachers and staff. Despite the magnitude of the threat and the simple solution available, however, the best response the city can muster is a 10-year plan focusing on meeting legally mandated energy efficiency upgrades, with the peripheral effect of gradually replacing these toxic lighting ballasts.

Under the city’s plan, a child entering kindergarten today would be continually exposed to toxic PCBs throughout the school day every year for 10 years. PCBs are chemicals that were manufactured in the United States from the late 1920s through the 1970s and were commonly used as electrical insulators in buildings because of their high tolerance to heat, low burn rate and nonexplosive properties. Many New York City school buildings built during that time range still have their original lighting ballasts.

Back then, the dangers of PCBs were not known. Today, however, the dangers of PCB exposure are well-documented. PCBs are known neurotoxins and have been linked to cancer, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder. Prenatal PCB exposure has been linked to lowered IQ scores, behavioral and thyroid disorders, growth deficits and reduced immune function. Even short-term exposure has been shown to be detrimental. Women of child-bearing age are at increased risk, as PCBs have been shown to be detrimental to reproductive and endocrine systems.

Recognizing these risks, Congress banned their manufacture in 1977, and the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) banned their use in 1979.

The city knows full well of these risks, yet still lacks the will to act to protect our kids. What gives?

At a hearing of the Assembly Education Committee about PCBs in New York City school buildings, I questioned representatives from the New York City Department of Education (DOE) regarding the reasons for the delay. While most of their answers were unsatisfactory, the answer to my question about the DOE’s timeline was downright unsettling. “Why can’t you do it faster?” I inquired. “Because we just can’t,” stammered the DOE’s representative.
The city’s failure to provide any grounds for this 10-year timeline should outrage each and every parent with a child in or about to enter school over the next 10 years.

While this is a time of extreme financial hardship, money should not be an obstacle when it comes to the health and safety of this city’s schoolchildren and those who teach them. Energy service companies and the New York Power Authority will cover the up-front remediation costs, taking payments from the future energy savings to be realized from installing new, energy efficient lighting. In addition, replacing the old energy-guzzling fixtures with newer, efficient models, which is required by the Green Building Codes, will pay for itself in as little as three years.

The city must make PCB removal the urgent priority that it is, which is why I have introduced legislation, A 5374, to require the DOE to replace 100 percent of the toxic lighting ballasts in school buildings constructed or substantially renovated between 1950 and 1978 over the course of two to three years.

I will also be introducing legislation to require the city to publish a list of the order in which each school will be remediated. Using the DOE’s arbitrary standards, students, their parents and teachers have no idea whether their school has been prioritized for remediation. The DOE currently prioritizes schools for cleanup if they have confirmed ballast leaks. Since the city refuses to test any school building for the presence of PCBs, the only way to confirm the presence of PCBs is to identify a visible leak, which is next to impossible given that leaking PCBs can be colorless and odorless.

If we were simply talking about creating an energy efficiency retrofit program, 10 years might seem like a short time. But we’re not. We’re talking about lighting ballasts that are leaking toxic substances into our schools and potentially making children, their teachers and other school staff sick. When you think about it that way, 10 years is a luxury these kids just don’t have.

I will continue to demand immediate action until the city responds with the appropriate level of urgency. But I need all of you to join me. If we speak with one voice, the city will have no choice but to act.

Linda Rosenthal is an assembly member for the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

In another whirlwind session in Albany, Gov. Andrew Cuomo pushed through a new tax plan that will generate $1.5 billion in much needed additional revenue for the state. I supported the plan because that revenue will make it easier to balance the budget without devastating cuts to education, health care and social services, and because it creates a more progressive tax structure than we would have if we did nothing. But there is also plenty to be critical of, both in terms of the minimal progressive reform to our tax structure and the record-breaking 26 minutes the Legislature and public had to review the contents of the package.

Liz Krueger

Most of the discussion of taxes in the last year or so has focused on extending some version of the high-income earner surcharge, or “Millionaires’ Tax,” which expires at the end of 2011. I supported extending this tax as necessary, recognizing that the hardship caused by our poor economic climate needs to be shared and that the burden is currently falling disproportionately on the poor and middle classes. But I have always believed there were better options, such as increasing the number of PIT tax brackets and indexing for inflation, which could generate revenue while creating a fairer tax structure.

While the package that was adopted last week uses the model of increasing the number of brackets as a means to promote progressivity, it does so in a particularly timid way and ends up being substantially less progressive than the expiring surcharge.

Under the new plan, while people making over $2 million will pay a rate of 8.82 percent, almost as large as the 8.97 percent they pay under the expiring millionaires’ tax, people making between $500,000 and $2 million will get a very substantial 1.14 percent decrease in their tax rate, which will revert to the previous top rate of 6.85 percent. At the same time, those making between $40,000 and $150,000 will see their tax rate decrease a mere .4 percent, to 6.45 percent. A truly progressive reform could have done a lot more for the middle class if it didn’t focus so much on protecting those making $500,000 or more.

Of course what we passed was better than the alternative of doing nothing. Then, when the millionaires’ tax expired, a single person making $20,000 or a couple making $40,000 would pay the same tax rate as people making 10, 20 or even 100 times more. Since the rich often have interest, dividend and capital gains income that is taxed at a lower rate, the actual tax rate paid by the very wealthy is often less than that paid by lower-income individuals.

Rushing through complex changes to tax policy at the request of the governor without allowing bills to age three days can make for bad policy, since things get done without the careful review of consequences, whether intended or unintended. I have long been critical of the use of messages of necessity to pass legislation—in fact, I sued the state over it a few years ago.

One issue that has already been raised is that the provisions in the same tax bill reducing payroll taxes dedicated for the MTA appear to have weakened “lockbox protections” for MTA funding passed into law earlier his year. While Governor Cuomo has stated he is committed to replacing the revenue the MTA will lose due to the reduction in the payroll tax, these changes may make it harder to enforce that commitment or even to know they have been violated.

While this package clearly doesn’t get everything right, it at least starts us down the road to fundamental reform of our tax system, something I have long advocated for. I also believe we need to go beyond simply looking at the income tax.

As chair of the Select Committee on Budget and Tax Reform for 2009-2010, I explored a variety of ideas about how to modernize personal income, sales and business taxes. While I believe that such changes can and should enhance state revenues, it is also clear that reforming our outdated tax structure could encourage economic development by creating a more transparent and equitable system that rewards models that increase living wage job creation and ends wasteful tax expenditures that create uneven playing fields for small and medium businesses while decreasing our tax base.

My goals for tax reform are two-fold. First, we need to ensure our tax structure is providing adequate revenue to support vital public services and that the burdens of taxes are equitably distributed. Second, we need to bring our tax structure into the 21st century and make sure that we use it to encourage economic development. This week, we took some steps toward these goals, but much remains to be done to created the modern, progressive tax system New York needs.

Liz Krueger is a state senator from the Upper East Side.

Mayor Bloomberg has been pushing to rebuild and reopen a shuttered marine garbage transfer station (MTS) in the Manhattan neighborhood of Yorkville since 2002. Many nearby residents vociferously oppose the plan because the old MTS worsened air quality and noise pollution and led to foul garbage smells in the area and they anticipate similar or worse problems with the new, larger MTS.

As an oceanographer and resident of Yorkville, I am writing with a dissenting viewpoint that’s sure to start some trash talking.

In 1999, the MTS was shuttered because of decreasing use after the Staten Island Fresh Kills landfill was closed. Since then, trash has typically been driven through less affluent communities and transferred to long-haul trucks for shipment to other states as far off as South Carolina.

If the MTS is rebuilt and reopened, garbage trucks from most of the eastern half of Manhattan will converge on 91st Street at East River, where garbage will be transferred inside a closed building to sealed shipping containers and placed on barges for long-distance transport. This would reduce citywide truck traffic and air pollution and (in the long run) save a lot of money. It would also address the injustice of trucking most of Manhattan’s trash through low-income communities.

The MTS opponents have been distributing printouts of a new letter around the community that can be signed and sent to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). This latest effort to stop the MTS collides with my area of expertise, oceanography—they are claiming that the “delicate ecosystem” of the East River will be badly harmed and that the project threatens striped bass.

The East River is not a delicate ecosystem, as the letter claims; it is a heavily urbanized waterway, with large boat wake waves and strong, dispersive tidal currents. Striped bass aren’t likely to be vulnerable to the proposed increase in activity nor to the development’s relatively small footprint.

Moreover, there is a much more compelling set of factors that should override the delicate ecosystem argument. Opening the new MTS will prevent substantial carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions that currently result from trucking garbage over long distances within and beyond NYC.

CO2 emissions are enhancing the greenhouse effect, causing global warming of the atmosphere and ocean. This ocean warming is pushing fish like striped bass poleward to find cooler waters and threatens to eliminate the world’s immobile ecosystems, such as coral reefs.

The heating of the ocean and melting of glaciers causes sea levels to rise, which should be a very serious concern for this low-lying neighborhood. Sea level around New York City is expected to rise between 1 and 4.5 feet by 2085, raising flood levels for coastal storms like Hurricane Irene higher and giving them much greater destructive potential.

Furthermore, CO2 is causing ocean acidification, with poorly understood but potentially profound implications. The world’s oceans are already 30 percent more acidic than in pre-industrial times and are projected to become a factor of 2 to 2.5 times more acidic in the next 100 years if we don’t dramatically reduce our emissions.

For those who care about delicate ecosystems, acidification makes seawater more corrosive for many of the microscopic organisms that form the base of the food chain.

New Yorkers can take pride that Mayor Bloomberg is the chair of a coalition of 58 major global cities taking action as the Cities Climate Leadership Group. Global warming is a major concern for Bloomberg, in part because we are a city of islands and sea level rise may eventually force the city to rebuild low-lying infrastructure like FDR Drive where it passes by Yorkville.

The MTS is an important part of PlaNYC 2030, which prepares the city for expected population growth, improves city air quality and helps reduce global warming, sea level rise and ocean acidification. Detailed information on the MTS and the broader Solid Waste Management Plan is available on the NYC Department of Sanitation website.

While we must be vigilant and hold the Department of Sanitation to their commitments to maintain a healthy and clean local environment, residents should support the MTS plan because it has concrete, long-term benefits for Yorkville, New York City and people and ecosystems around the globe.

Dr. Philip Orton is a postdoctoral research associate at the Stevens Institute of Technology.

For the third time in two years, New York City parents and educators in District 2 are facing a frustrating and futile ritual: The Department of Education is planning to rezone school boundary lines in an area stretching from Lower Manhattan to the Upper East Side. The chaos resulting from uncertainty over these plans should be no surprise—simply put, the city has done a dreadful job of anticipating and dealing with booming population growth in District 2, where schools are notoriously overcrowded.

The DOE’s plans to mitigate the problem have been piecemeal at best. They fail to offer long-term solutions and infuriate parents who do not know

Scott Stringer.

with any certainty which schools their children will attend or if neighborhood choices are even available.

This year, as in the past, confusion reigns over the DOE’s zoning changes. In Tribeca, parents have expressed concerns about children being sent to a school in the West Village; in the West Village, parents are angered by plans that would send their children to a school in Chelsea. On the Upper East Side, persistent overcrowding at P.S. 290 and P.S. 151 has led to plans for a new elementary school next year, which will potentially affect the zoning for those existing schools. All of the plans now under consideration, which have yet to be approved, amount to the largest rezoning this district has ever seen.

Rezonings are necessary in some cases, but increasingly they feel like the DOE’s default strategy for addressing school overcrowding. Overuse of this practice wreaks havoc on families—and if we don’t create more new schools, no amount of line-shifting will resolve the broader overcrowding problems plaguing our city.

My office has tracked this problem for years. In our “Crowded Out” report, we revealed that in four of Manhattan’s most overcrowded communities—Lower Manhattan, Greenwich Village, the Flatiron District and Upper East Side—the city had approved residential construction that would add 2,000 school-age children but only 143 new classroom seats for just one neighborhood; the others got none. A subsequent report, “Still Crowded Out,” showed that in the first eight months of 2008, the city issued permits for more than 6,500 new residential units. New York’s City’s own methodology estimated this would result in 1,100 new school-age children, including 900 in these four overcrowded neighborhoods.

The price of the DOE’s unwillingness to address long-term needs includes cuts to pre-kindergarten programs, the elimination of art and music classrooms and the relocation of middle schools out of their communities to meet increased elementary school seat demand. Squeezing more kindergarten classes into already overcrowded buildings has forced some schools to collapse their upper grade classes, worsening overcrowding.

This model is not sustainable. But there are clear steps we can take to reduce these problems. First, I have repeatedly recommended reforming the “Blue Book,” the DOE’s annual report on school capacity and enrollment, because it is based on flawed methodology. “Blue Book” formulas underlie the DOE’s distorted picture of space in schools; they rarely reflect the reality faced by educators, parents and students every day.

Second, we should bring the Department of City Planning (DCP) and city comptroller into the school space planning process. DCP staff could provide annual projections based on appropriate data. The comptroller could conduct school capacity needs analyses, estimating new school seats needed five and 10 years down the line, with the goal of providing enough rooms for art and music and reducing overcrowding.

It’s time to end this perennial crisis once and for all. I urge all of you who share my concerns to speak out at upcoming District 2 Community Education Council meetings and get involved in the long-term planning process. We have seen a number of instances in which parents have identified and successfully advocated for new schools. Parents know their communities best, and we need them to be a part in this process. The stakes have never been higher for our kids, our schools and our City’s future.

Scott Stringer is Manhattan borough president.

Downtown doesn’t really need a designated day devoted to dressing like Bob Dylan, Lady Gaga or Danny Zuko, but just because we don’t need it doesn’t mean we won’t embrace it. It’s human nature to dream of being someone else entirely. The popularity of Halloween isn’t the candy, the creepy or even the costumes. It’s the freedom we acquire from shedding the old and becoming the new.

One night, tired of looking at our white walls and inspired by Penélope Cruz’s infectiously bold performance in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, we interpreted Jackson Pollock through wide and talentless fingers and threw paint at our walls. The next morning, we wordlessly and collectively decided the only thing worth keeping from the night before was our memories.

At Home Depot, in the midst of choosing between eggshell and sand, a plucky associate checked our paint-stained hands and said, “Painters huh? Let me show you where we keep our good brushes.” We purchased an entire set. We knew, of course, that one painting does not a painter make, but something about having this stranger believe it made us believe it, if only for a moment. Halloween is like that moment 1,440 times in a row.

As many a good parent would say, the only thing that matters is what you think about you. However, as many a person living in the real world would say, what other people think about you matters a whole hell of a lot. Just ask the participants of the notorious Stanford Prison Experiment. The study made a roar in the ’70s when social psychologist Phillip Zimbardo selected 24 psychologically healthy males and randomly assigned half to play the role of “prisoner” and the other half to play the role of “guard” in a simulated prison.

Though there were no discernible differences between the two groups of participants before the study, once they were given labels and costumes and placed in a prison context, their fictitious entities soon became a frightening reality. The guards took their position to the extreme and showed a flagrant disregard for the rights of the prisoners with verbal assaults, public humiliation and a total lack of scruples. In concordance, the prisoners succumbed to their new roles as well. Each prisoner was stripped of his birth name and only given an ID number to be used throughout the study—prisoners became emotionally drained and riots ensued. The study was terminated after only six days.

Though the experiment raised eyebrows and ethical concerns everywhere, it brought forth a powerful notion: the theory of deindividuation. This theory is usually used to describe the feeling of anonymity and loss of self-identity that individuals take on when given a certain label or name in the context of a sizable group. When placed in a group setting, individuals are less accountable for their actions and have the opportunity to relish behaviors that they would not have ordinarily been able to commit.

On All Hallow’s Eve, deindividuation occurs the moment you put on a Native American headdress and do a synchronized dance next to a construction worker and policeman. With the right costume and attitude, anyone has the opportunity to become who they’ve always wanted to be, whether it’s a painter, prisoner, princess or president. Not only do you get to dress like a fantasy, but your behaviors, actions and emotions are predicated on that new idea of yourself. This new identity gives the identifier the courage and ammunition to behave the way the costume necessitates. Moreover, the more we are treated like a naughty secretary, Michele Bachmann or a WWE wrestler, the more we inhabit that persona.

In previous years, we’ve witnessed witches fly, cheerleaders shout affirmations and sailors open doors, but we can’t help but wonder if it’s not just the magic of Halloween but rather the magic of New York City. After all, there is no place better suited for maintaining your anonymity than the 917. Freedom comes from reinvention and the notion of possibility is paved into the sidewalks of this city. There’s no one to tell you that you can’t be who you want to be. Don’t wait for someone to give you a label.

We say, why not take a cue from Oct. 31, have the fortitude to be who you dream and let New York be your mask? Of course, our brushes have been long forgotten behind dust and dish detergent and we haven’t painted a thing since that fateful night, but we just may have thought of this year’s costume. Or better yet, a new career.

I am a Hungerford; yes, I wince when I volunteer that this is my middle name, but I feel I must to make a point. Only a Hungerford who lives on Park Avenue (qualifier: I took over the rent-controlled apartment from my mother and share it with a 52-year-old Sleepeezee mattress salesman) would have a complete (26 volumes) signed collection of Rudyard Kipling’s works (Bombay edition, leather bound) accumulating dust on a shelf.

I had only a vague notion of who Kipling was and it was mostly negative: an imperialist and racist famous for stating that educating third-world countries was “the white man’s burden.” So I certainly did not cherish the collection. In fact, I’ve always been slightly embarrassed by being a WASP (imperialism, elitism, George W. Bush to name a few), so when my mom told me I could sell the collection she had left behind, I jumped at the chance. The whole experience took only a day, but I can say now that selling books that you inherited is demoralizing, while impulsively selling them for one-tenth of their value is downright gut-wrenching.

The guy who showed up from WEBUYrareBookS4cash.com was good—real good. I instantly wanted him to like me, that’s how good he was. I knew I could probably get more money, but I wanted this cool, sleek chap to get the business. As he surveyed the rare books, punching relevant numbers and dates into his iPhone, I mused. Maybe we could become friends and he would invite me to literary events around town? Granted, I was also desperate for money. I needed to get my cell phone turned on again. So, in the end, I took $1,900 for the complete Kipling set. Cash can be so seductive.

As soon as the door shut behind the salesman, who, within two minutes of meeting me had the books bundled safely in bubble wrap, the storm clouds of regret started rolling in. What had I done? When my mother had suggested I sell the books, I thought only of quick cash! I had once picked up and read part of one volume, Tales From the Hills, and found it depressing. The story, as I recall, is about an imperialist Brit who never returned to India for his Indian bride as he had promised he would after she nursed him back to health. But now I longed for Kipling.

The sentimental value of the books had never registered, but with the haggler gone and the initial thrill of easy money dissipating, I was deflated and left with remorse. I had just sold a part of English history, possibly a priceless collection, to pay off a cell phone bill!

If I may mount a meager self-defense, I had done some due diligence before the salesman came over and undertaken a superficial Google search for the value of the collection. But I failed to include one critical word: “Bombay.” I saw what looked like a similar collection going for $4,000, signed, but the books were not as rare as the Bombay collection. I did come upon an auction house in Texas that had sold four of the books from the Bombay collection for $7,000. Using this as leverage with the salesman, I ultimately got more than he had planned to fork over, but for him my information was a mere bump in the road. “Yes, but they look like the 15-inch edition, the bindings look tighter, you never know what will happen at auction,” etc. (true).

The day before, I had also lugged three of the volumes, including the one signed by Kipling, to Bauman, the high-end rare book buyer on Madison Avenue, where I was told they had sold a similar collection for $8,000. They said my signed volume was in relatively bad shape and needed $500 worth of work on the binding. Either way, I would have to leave one book with them and come back and talk to the final decision-maker. Yes, a pleasant academic Brit added, they were indeed looking for a Bombay collection, their last had sold for $8,000, but of course, they could not pay that price.

Still, this was encouraging information. I figured I could get $3,500 from the good folks at Bauman. I was about to leave the book when I remembered I had an appointment with the WEBUYrarebooks4cash.com guy, so I told her I had to shop it around a bit.

The next day, as I was pushing the sales guy out the door after he had doubled his initial offer of $600, his parting words were, “Yes, you might get $2,000 but you know the big retailers will make you pay taxes on that money!” I did some quick figuring in my head and let him slither back through the door. The rest is history.

After I had counted the $1,900 and he had left, I did another search—this time with the word Bombay in it—and saw my exact collection going for $23,000! I literally felt like falling on a knife. Other collections were more modestly priced at $16,000 and $18,000. It was a small relief to see a similar set for $6,000 on eBay, but they were not leather bound.

In the following days and weeks, my depression worsened. I romanticized; I had a very clear image of browsing the wonderful Jungle Books (among Kipling’s most famous) with my grandchildren (at the moment I’m 46 and have no kids). I had a picture in my mind of the books prominently displayed in a big red room with mahogany shelves. Perhaps we would call it the “Kipling room,” tucked inside a wonderful. warm townhouse. We might have “Kipling nights” or “Kipling parties.”

For a spell I became obsessed with Kipling. I read everything I could about the man. He was an impressive writer, remarkably prolific—a literary titan—and he did capture an era. In a time when there was no video or TV, he brought India (then under colonial rule) to the British through books, not iPhones. Pathetically, I read one of his most famous novels, Kim, online next to the empty bookshelf that used to store his dust-covered collection.

Some advice: If you have rare books (and by the way, don’t mistake old for rare; most old books are just that—old) and need/want to sell them, that’s fine. But for Christ’s sake, they have been sitting there for years—take a month and have fun getting different offers and finding out what they are worth. If they are first editions from a distinguished author, you have the power; someone wants those books no matter how bad the recession is. Cherish this fact. First edition signed books do not depreciate.

Jeff Nichols’s memoir, TrainWreck, was made into a film. He can be reached at www.Jeff-nichols.com

The mayor’s recently announced plan to build a government-sponsored engineering and science campus in New York challenges us to deliver training and jobs to the many talented young men and women of color that our economy has left behind. It is an opportunity we cannot afford to miss.

Mayor Bloomberg is to be commended for launching the ambitious Applied Sciences NYC initiative, which seeks to partner with a top-tier engineering school.

The Bloomberg administration projects that the new institution will generate billions of dollars of economic activity and create nearly 30,000 jobs. This addition will only reach its full potential, however, if it directly addresses the glaring opportunity gap facing women, African-Americans and Latinos in science and engineering.

According to the National Science Foundation, just 6 percent of graduate engineering students are African-Americans or Latinos. Women hold just 24 percent of the jobs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics—a shameful statistic that has not budged in a decade.

It is encouraging that the mayor has included some conditions to support the involvement of women and underrepresented minorities. But the initiative as it is proposed presents a rare chance to level the playing field even more.

The institutions applying to build a science campus here should be measured on their track record with minorities and women in areas such as student recruitment; graduation rates and job-placement; their hiring and promotion of faculty and staff; and their success in turning academic breakthroughs into spin-off companies owned by minorities and women.

Schools should also provide detailed plans for outreach and partnership with underrepresented communities moving forward.

The city should consider appointing more underrepresented minorities, as well as more women, to the advisory committee for the Applied Sciences NYC initiative. Currently, the committee has nine members but no African-Americans or Latinos.

The advisory committee should hold public hearings, applicant submissions should be accessible to the public and scoring criteria should be publicized. The better informed and involved the public is in this process, the more successful it will be.

Aggressive support for the science, technology and engineering sectors is critical to diversifying the city’s economy, which has relied heavily on the volatile financial sector in the past few decades. But as a government-sponsored initiative, Applied Sciences NYC has a responsibility to provide all New Yorkers with greater opportunities to acquire new skills and find jobs in emerging industries. If we are not fully utilizing more than half the talent in our city, we are not going to get close to realizing our full potential.

Fairness, diversity and opportunity should be the values that drive our economic development and job creation programs. Bringing diversity to this project—and all of New York’s economic development—will keep our city on top for the 21st century and beyond.

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John C. Liu, the city’s comptroller, graduated from the Bronx High School of Science and SUNY Binghamton, where he studied mathematical physics.

“A kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh…” and a bald-faced, spit-in-your-face lie is still what it is. It is not raining and Republicans have been expectorating in our kissers for years about more than a few things, the latest of which are the “true” causes of our recession and what needs to be done about them.

When I say “our kissers” I refer to all of us, of course, the news-devouring or even news-nibbling public. But more to the point, into the faces of their “colleagues” across the aisles in Congress, as well as the gullible media, and most infuriatingly, the President and his Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (with that terminally frozen “Where the hell is the emergency exit?” expression), as well as anyone who dares to call him or herself, as I do, a Liberal, which I define as someone who believes that it is both a responsibility and an honor for the haves in our society, to extend themselves, and some of their fortunes, to the have-nots, and the just plain have-not-quite-enough-to-survives.

What are these lies and where are the voices of our representatives, including the press and the President of all the people, to call their hand and tell it loud and clear like it is?

Republican Lie Number One:  
It’s the needy, the poor and the sick who brought the United States to the brink of default by raiding the treasury for their well-earned (and paid for) Social Security and Medicare Benefits.

The Truth:
It was the bankers who, on the high tide of the real estate boom caused the so-called “mortgage crisis,” lending at seductive low rates to clients with little or no collateral and then, when the tide began to ebb, hiking their interest rates to levels the clients could no longer afford, causing them to default and lose their homes and leading to a nationwide crash of real estate prices to the point where homeowners were paying much more for their homes than they were now worth. The homeowners go homeless and broke, the banks get to keep the houses and the money, and the bankers get to keep their jobs.

The Grand Gonnifs such as Bernard Madoff and the nameless and faceless Wall Street insiders and hedge fund connivers who literally lost billions of other people’s dollars so that they could live like pharaohs. Madoff is the only one locked up for his crime, the others having been consigned to the hard labor of shoveling and raking in more cash and looking for ways to spend it or hide it.

The multi-billion-dollar war against Iraq, which was totally unjustified, cost the lives of more than 4,000 Americans and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens, in addition to the multi-billion-dollar war in Afghanistan, whose end and outcome remain unpredictable after 10 years of fighting.

Republican Lie Number Two:
Give more federal money and tax breaks to small businesses and startups, and the business “community” will create jobs to lower the unemployment rate.

The Truth:
There is no business “community.” This is dog-eat-dog competitive capitalism. Remember?
Small businesses. “Small businesses.” “Small.” Get it yet? Take out a pencil and paper and a dictionary. Small businesses do not, by definition, hire many workers. And when they do, they are likely to be non-union, with minimal benefits and at low starting salaries. There are more than 12 million “officially” unemployed in the country, not counting those who have exhausted their unemployment or themselves looking for work. It has been estimated that thousands of workers would have to be hired every week over the next five years to get us back to a reasonably low unemployment rate.

Republican Lie Number Three:
“No tax hikes for millionaires or billionaires,” as this would discourage them from using their fortunes to create jobs.

The Truth:
No one is proposing raising taxes on the rich, only taking back the infamous Bush Tax Cuts for Millionaires and Billionaires that have put the wealthiest in our country in the lowest tax rate category, while the rest of us pay full fare.

There are more than a million millionaires in the United States, and somewhere between 400 and 1,200 billionaires.  Where are the jobs they have allegedly created up to this time after years of paying minimal taxes on their fortunes? How can anyone assume their behavior will change if they continue to get away with cheap taxes?

President Obama, Harry Reid and all Democratic Senators and Representatives: Hold the line, and don’t buy the Republicans’. They lie like rugs and don’t look half as good.

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Daniel Meltzer is a playwright, an adjunct professor of journalism at New York University and former senior writer and editor for CBS News.