Dutchess Democracy

stop sabre-rattling re: war with Iran-- de-escalate now for peace (and sanity!)...

2012-02-02T13:30:00.000-08:00

[hope you all were able to tune in to WAMC http://www.WAMC.org 90.9 FM this morning folks-- Trita Parsi, author of "A Single Roll of the Dice - Obama's Diplomacy with Iran" ( http://www.TritaParsi.com ) was a guest on the morning show from about 10 am on; also-- see below-- two new spot-on new ones just posted online yesterday-- "Divining the Truth about Iran" by Ray McGovern and "Focus on Iran and China Could Hasten American Decline" by William Pfaff....finally-- and most importantly-- pls come out to join us for rally on this Sat.!...Joel (845-444-0599)]

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From http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=637261858&ref=ts#!/events/333764903321430/

Albany says, "No War with Iran"

Public Event · By Joe Lombardo

When: Saturday, February 4, 2012

Time: 12:00 pm until 2:00 pm

Where: Wolf Rd and Central Ave, Colonie

Description: Join Occupy Albany and the Capital District antiwar movement to protest the threat of war with Iran. NO WAR, NO Sanctions, No Assassinations. This is part of a national day of action.

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http://www.Independent.co.uk last month (Jan. 7th)...

Trita Parsi: Reckless talk of war with Iran makes confrontation a probability

TRITA PARSI
SATURDAY 07 JANUARY 2012

The temperature between the West and Iran has increased dramatically. Escalation by both sides coupled with a reckless discourse that has normalized the idea of war have created an environment where military confrontation is a rising probability. The next escalatory step pondered by Europe - in the midst of its own economic crisis - is a total embargo on Iranian oil. An idea that a few months ago was considered a non-starter now has an air of inevitability.

Sanctions are rarely effective. But right before their imposition - at the moment where they remain a withdrawable threat - their effectiveness is at their height. The challenge with multilateral sanctions, however, is that the diplomatic resources required to create concensus around sanctions are so great that once the sanctions threat gains momentum, the commitment of the sanctioning countries to this path tends to become irreversible. Rather than utilising the threat of sanctions to compel a change in policy, they tend to confuse the means with the goal. Backing down from the threat becomes too costly so sanctions become unstoppable - and ineffective.

This is what happened in May 2010 when the Obama administration and the EU opted for a new round of UN Security Council sanctions on Iran even though Tehran at the last moment succumbed to Western demands on a fuel swap offer.

The Obama administration's limited diplomacy with Iran in October 2009 was centered on a fuel swap aimed at getting 1,200kg of Low Enriched Uranium (LEU) out of Iran in return for fuel pads for a medical research reactor and by that create greater political space for continued talks. But political infighting in Iran and Iranian demands for mechanisms that would guarantee that the fuel would be delivered caused the diplomacy to fall short.

Though the West recognized that the deal had fallen victim to internal politics in Iran, the US and the EU abandoned diplomacy and returned to the sanctions track by November 2009. But resistance from Russia and China was stiff and a new resolution could not be adopted early Spring 2010 as they had hoped. Far greater diplomatic resources and time had to be invested to win China and Russia's buy-in.

Moscow and Beijing were not the only obstacles. Turkey and Brazil, who also served on the UN Security Council at the time, believed that diplomacy could still be resurrected. With Washington's half-hearted blessing, the two states embarked on their own mediation effort in order to get Iran to yes.
With a letter in hand from Obama declaring Washington's desire to see 1,200kg of Iranian Low Enriched Uranium put in escrow in Turkey, the Brazilians and Turks headed to Tehran for an 18-hour marathon negotiation. The West did not expect them to be successful, after all, the Iranians were not interested in a deal, White House officials believed. Still, Turkey and Brazil needed to experience failure on their own in order for them to come onboard with sanctions.

After two days of talks, Brazil and Turkey shocked the West - they had an agreement. These two up and coming states had succeeded where the US and the EU powers had failed for years. Though some facts had changed on the ground, the deal - the Tehran Declaration - followed the benchmarks of the US proposal from only six months earlier and the guidelines listed in Obama's letter to the leaders of Turkey and Brazil.

But rather than viewing this as the diplomatic breakthrough the West had sought in October 2009, it was viewed as a deceptive Iranian trick. Unbeknownst to Turkey and Brazil, Obama had secured Russia and China's approval for sanctions only a day before the talks in Tehran began. Almost without reflection, Sectary of State Hillary Clinton gave the agreement the death knell, declaring in the US Senate that Washington's response was to adopt a sanctions resolution at the UN, while adding that this diplomatic efforts had made "the world more dangerous."

The British viewed the agreement as a "distraction." Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon told me that it was a "blatant ploy" by Iran and that Turkey and Brazil had been taken for a ride. Connecting the agreement with the UN vote in a negative way, a senior EU official told me that "If you look at the timing of the Tehran Declaration, it was done at the eve of the vote. Is that a very credible sign? ... The P5 didn't want any monkey business at that time."

The sanctions momentum had become too great - the lure of the sanctions trumped the diplomatic breakthrough it ostensibly was supposed to bring about. Once concencus on sanctions among the five permanent members of the UN Security Council had been reached, it was deemed more valuable than a nuclear opening.

Now the EU is about to repeat this mistake. One the one hand, the EU is aggressively moving forward with an oil embargo - a step that a senior EU official explained to me as the last step short of war. On the other hand, a new round of talks is in the making.

Sceptics will argue that the Iranians are only coming to the table due to the sanctions pressure and that their aim is to undo the sanctions momentum. This is an astonishing statement. After all, the official objective of the sanctions are to get Iran back to the table.

If a new round of talks take place, there should be little doubt that negotiations will be tough. The divide between the two sides has grown as a result of the mutual escalation. And political space for the kind of sustained diplomacy needed to produce a breakthrough is in short supply in the US, Iran and the EU.

Rather than a negotiation, we are likely to see yet another exchange of ultimatums. But if the EU repeats the mistake of 2010 and lets its mistrust overtake its judgement and imposes an oil embargo prior to the next meeting, then diplomacy will likely be dead on arrival.

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From http://www.CommonDreams.org ...

Published on Wednesday, February 1, 2012 by Common Dreams
Divining the Truth about Iran

by Ray McGovern

Watching top U.S. intelligence officials present the annual "Worldwide Threat Assessment" before the Senate Intelligence Committee, I found myself wondering if they would depart from the key (if politically delicate) consensus judgment that Iran is NOT working on a nuclear weapon.

In last year's briefing, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had stood firm on this key point, despite severe pressure to paint Iran in more pernicious terms. On Tuesday, I was relieved to see in Clapper's testimony a reiteration of the conclusions of a formal National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of November 2007, issued unanimously by all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, including judgments like this:
"We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program; Tehran's decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005."

Sadly, this judgment still comes as news to many of those Americans who are malnourished on the low-protein gruel of the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) - even though the NIE was immediately declassified in 2007 and has been in the public domain for more than four years.

Granted, former President George W. Bush did not like it - not one bit. In an unusually revealing comment in his memoir Decision Points, Bush complained bitterly that "the NIE tied my hands on the military side," preventing him from attacking Iran. That was the course strongly favored by hawkish Vice President Dick Cheney with his PhD summa cum laude in Preventive War.

And, America's FCM consistently ignores the official NIE when writing news stories hyping Iran's nuclear threat. However, if you read the articles very closely you may see references to Iran supposedly working toward the "capacity to build" nuclear weapons, not that Iran is actually working on building a nuclear bomb.

The distinction is important, but it is so subtle as to be misleading. Most casual readers would simply assume that Iran is building a nuclear bomb.

The FCM's rhetorical shift from accusing Iran of "building" nukes to seeking a "capacity to build" them is reminiscent of Bush's sleight of hand when he went from talking about Iraq's supposed WMD "stockpiles" to its WMD "programs" - after it turned out there were no WMD stockpiles.

Oddly, even when Israeli sources concur with this key point that Iran has NOT decided to build a nuclear bomb - as the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and Defense Minister Ehud Barak indicated recently - the FCM in the United States continues to leave the impression among Americans that Iran is on the verge of having nukes. [See Consortiumnews.com's "US/Israel: Iran NOT Building Nukes."]

You will almost never see in a major U.S. newspaper the assessment - backed by the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies - that Iran is NOT building nuclear weapons. At most, you'll see a boilerplate phrase about Iran denying that it is. You're also not likely to see references to the fact that Israel has a sophisticated nuclear arsenal of its own.

'Tell-It-Like-It-Is' Intelligence

Still, it's encouraging to see U.S. intelligence officials resist bending with the prevailing political winds the way the malleable CIA director, George Tenet, and his deputy John McLaughlin did when they orchestrated the fraudulent October 2002 NIE on Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction."

After they left in disgrace (having contributed to the bloody war in Iraq), fresh institutional blood was brought in to manage intelligence estimates. In a professional sense, the two were not a hard act to follow. But courage can still be a rare commodity in the careerist world of Official Washington.

What happened is that the new managers launched a bottom-up assessment of all the evidence on Iran's nuclear development program. They reached conclusions based on what they found, not on what was politically expedient; they spoke truth to power, and, in the process, helped prevent yet another disastrous war.

This year, though, there was good reason to worry that the current intelligence managers might succumb to pressure for a more "politically correct" course. One factor has been the rising crescendo in the FCM, echoing the Israeli government's hyperbolic fears regarding a "nuclear threat" from Iran.
The FCM, for example, gave unconscionably inflammatory coverage to a highly misleading November 2011 report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Iran. The FCM ignored available evidence from WikiLeaks documents showing that the new IAEA management was collaborating behind-the-scenes with U.S. and Israeli officials on the Iran issue.

And there was growing concern that National Intelligence Director Clapper might be outmaneuvered by the new CIA Director David Petraeus, the retired four-star general who is always the darling of Congress.

The ambitious Petraeus's own words have shown him groveling before the Israel Lobby - to the point of backing away from his own congressional testimony of March 2010, a small segment of which was implicitly critical of Israeli intransigence on the issue of Palestine.

E-mails revealed Petraeus begging neocon pundit Max Boot to help him withstand criticism from neocon circles over the rare burst of honesty that had slipped into Petraeus's prepared testimony. Petraeus then mistakenly shared the e-mail train with blogger James Morris, who made them public.
On Tuesday, Petraeus was pandering again in his gratuitous repetition of the neocons' characterizations of the IAEA report. Petraeus said: "The IAEA report was a very accurate reflection of reality, of the situation on the ground. I think that is the authoritative document when it comes to informing the public of all the countries of the world of the situation there."

This is a remarkable statement coming from the head of the CIA, an agency that was one of the principal drafters of the NIE in 2007, which stands at variance with the politically tinged IAEA report, which labored to make the case that Iran was gaining expertise needed to build a nuclear bomb.

However, there were, in fact, significant overlaps in the IAEA's description of Iran's nuclear program and the key judgments of the NIE, but you would hardly know that from reporting in the FCM. The IAEA report contains no smoking gun regarding Iran's intentions about building nuclear weapons, but notes that much of Iran's progress occurred prior to fall 2003 - when the NIE reported that Iran abandoned its weapons program.

Still, many pundits and politicians walked away with two misleading messages from the IAEA report: that it refuted the NIE and that Iran is now making a break for the bomb. Both representations are false, yet the assertions have been repeated often enough to give them traction with the public and Congress, which was evident in Petraeus's remarks.

As Petraeus knows better than most, the National Intelligence Estimate is the genre of intelligence assessment that the U.S. government considers "authoritative." I found it shameful, but not surprising, that he would identify himself with the IAEA rather than with the U.S. intelligence community. Shameful pandering, which Clapper - to his credit - would have none of.

The way the wind seems to be blowing from the White House and Capitol Hill, however, I think it a good bet that, before many months go by, Petraeus will be taking over the job of his current nominal boss, and Clapper will be set out to pasture for special services not rendered.
The Media on the Briefing

True to form, the FCM offered little truth in its reports on the Tuesday briefing - and quite a lot of distortion. Very little mention was made of Clapper's key assertion that Iran is not building nuclear weapons, just as the FCM discreetly averted its eyes and ears from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's definitive statement to that effect on Jan. 8.

The Washington Post initially ran an article by Greg Miller titled, "Iran, perceiving threat from West, willing to attack on U.S. soil, U.S. intelligence report finds." That title was then squished to fit at the top of page one, right next to a smiling photo of Mr. and Mrs. Romney, and reads "U.S. spy agencies see new Iran risk: Tehran more willing to launch attacks on American soil, they say."

For his story, Miller selects the two short paragraphs in which Clapper claims that some Iranian officials - probably including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei - "are now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States in response to real or perceived U.S. actions that threaten the regime." (I can readily imagine the word-smithing by senior officials that yielded that profound observation.)

In an instant commentary, Salon blogger Glen Greenwald described Miller's article - correctly - as a "monument to mindless stenographic journalism" and asks if anyone is still "doubting that there is a concerted media-aided fear-mongering campaign aimed at Iran."

For the record, the New York Times' Eric Schmitt led off his report in a similar vein: "Some senior Iranian leaders are now more willing to carry out attacks inside the U.S. in response to perceived American threats against their country," citing senior intelligence officials.

It is not at all picayune to note that the Times dropped the "real or" from Clapper's "in response to real or perceived U.S. actions that threaten the regime," thus removing the point that Iran might actually encounter "real" threats from the United States. All that high-priced word-smithing for nothing!
As if further proof were needed about the bias of the FCM, blogger Michael Rozeff took the Boston Globe to task for piecing together two unconnected parts of Clapper's testimony to leave the impression that Iran is making enriched uranium in order to conduct an attack on the U.S.

Who Will Tell the Truth?

As a former analyst of Soviet affairs, I became familiar with how to dissect controlled media. And as a liaison officer to Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty during the late Sixties, I learned ways to penetrate denied areas with radio waves and other means.

It was those two radio stations, plus VOA and the BBC, that played such a key role in informing Russians and East Europeans about what was possible in the outside world. So, how to break through the blanket of the Fawning Corporate Media to give Americans a shot at knowing what is going on?
It seems a kind of delicious irony that - how to say this - the Russians Are Coming to help those of us hoping to break through the FCM and make our reporting and analysis available to our fellow citizens. As senators were clapping for Clapper, RT (for Russia Today) asked to interview me for their evening news program.

Knowing that my old friend Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has already spoken approvingly of RT, I did not think I needed to ask permission. Here's what I said; I can only hope some folks watched it.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed the President's Daily Brief and chaired National Intelligence Estimates. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

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From http://www.TruthDig.com ...

Published on Wednesday, February 1, 2012 by Truthdig.com
Focus on Iran and China Could Hasten American Decline

by William Pfaff

The framework in which most Americans, including the foreign policy specialists, see the world has totally changed in a decade. In February 2002, the United States and Afghanistan's Northern Alliance had just won their blitzkrieg, unseating the Taliban government of Afghanistan, and a new client government was being set in place. The Economist was to say of it a year later that optimists believed Afghanistan to be "more stable than at any time in the past 24 years." Another war, against Iraq, was confidently being prepared to avenge the trade towers and Pentagon attacks (to which, it was to turn out, Iraq had no connection), and to create a "New Middle East."

Americans in 2002 believed themselves on top of the world, capable of anything. They took progress for granted. A leading neo-conservative of the time said, "We have something called the Agency for International Development, in the hope that someday Somalia might look like Norway." That's what the New Middle East was all about.

One decade, more than a trillion American dollars and uncounted thousands of lives later, the Afghan War continues, and the Iraq War, nominally over, but with 6,000 American officials and their bodyguards left in the country, is not really over at all. A third American war against a Muslim society, Iran, is seriously likely.

The same time Washington conducts and enlarges this military involvement in the non-Western world, the American public, and again, many of its foreign policy experts and political leaders, have decided that the United States is in decline, its social coherence, its sense of unity and purpose lost, divided as never before by economic class and a newly felt and newly expressed hatred between the one percent monopolizing its wealth and the excluded 99 percent. The American and Western economies are badly weakened by a global recession and potential depression, wrought by Wall Street.

This is no illusion, nor is the widespread conviction that the American government and its electoral system suffer a crisis of function, accountability, competence and venomous political conflict.
Today a leading figure in the policy community, Zbigniew Brzezinski, writes in his new book that America "is in serious decline for domestic and/or external reasons" and that its loss of international authority risks stalling international efforts to deal with "issues of central importance to social well-being and ultimately to human survival."

The framework in which Americans now see international society is usually one of Chinese ascendance to take America's place.

This is a mistake based on China's economic development and financial power, widely misunderstood (see below), and on the intimidating size of China's population, 1.3 billion people. This ignores the fact that large numbers of people do not readily translate into economic prosperity and influence (as India is also finding out), nor into military power, as the Pentagon seems to think-inaugurating bases and new American deployments in East Asia, so that if a new war breaks out there, the United States can automatically be at the center of it (which some might think a less than good idea).

While China has a very large gross domestic product, it has a very low GDP per capita (ranking 91 on an International Monetary Fund listing of 184 countries; it is lower than six African countries and has only a tenth of American GDP/capita.). In living standards (purchasing power comparisons), China is lower yet in world rankings, just above Albania.

It also is necessary to ask what China's ambitions are. It has never in the past shown much interest in international domination, other than in its own immediate area, considering itself the natural center of civilization, superior to everyone else. Its current global program of investments is never political-attempting to exercise political or strategic influence-but economic, concerned with sourcing resources needed for China's development. Its economic assistance to countries in Africa or elsewhere in Asia is usually payment to secure access to foreign mineral resources and energy.

A recent letter from a friend who lives in Beijing included the following observation: "A senior lawyer in Beijing told me a few months ago that much of his firm's business is winding up German-Chinese joint ventures, in order for the German partner to leave. The Germans are finding themselves competing in other countries against Chinese technology that's been copied from German companies, reengineered to lower costs." He adds that he feels "[China] is in the beginning phases again of an historical rejection of foreign influences ... [that will make it] impossible for China to develop the broad culture of innovation that exists in the West." My friend is an engineer himself.

Americans might do better to give up their China obsession and go back to their traditional vision of a European threat. If the Europeans can get their indebtedness problem solved (imported from the United States; thank you, Wall Street), Americans will find that the European Union states collectively have a larger GDP, a higher GDP/capita (depending on variable currency exchange values), and on average better standards of living and education than the United States, and even have some capable engineers and managers, as Boeing has found out. They also are tired of fighting foreign wars just to advance American projects and policies.

© 2012 TruthDig

William Pfaff is a globally respected political commentator and author on international relations, contemporary history and U.S. policy. He is the author of eight books, most recently Fear, Anger and Failure: A Chronicle of the Bush Administration's War Against Terror from the Attacks of September 11, 2001 to Defeat in Baghdad. Visit William Pfaff's Web site at www.williampfaff.com.

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[recall below sent out last Thurs. to this list]

re: Iran, Caddyshack, Jon Stewart tonight...(anyone see Daily Show just now on this?)...

[Jon Stewart at beginning of tonight's "Daily Show" justifiably mocked Obama's continued sabre-rattling re: Iran-- asking when a new war in a Middle Eastern country become the equivalent of Rodney Dangerfield's exuberant exhortation from the end of "Caddyshack"...lol...more background-- recall my blog post: http://dutchessdemocracy.blogspot.com/2011/12/stop-next-us-war-with-iran-call-obama.html ]

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[new must-read just posted online yesterday from Ray McGovern-- "US/Israel: Iran NOT Building Nukes"
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/01/25-5 ]

[also see-- Rabbi Lerner: http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/mj-rosenberg-on-israels-possible-strike-at-iran ]

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From http://www.Progressive.org ...(note fifth paragraph below in particular!):

Published on Wednesday, January 25, 2012 by The Progressive
In Obama's State of the Union, Troublesome Passages for Progressives

by Matthew Rothschild

Excuse me for not yelling myself hoarse for Obama's warmed over State of the Union address.
While I agree with his call for economic fairness, there was not much in his speech that was new or all that promising. And there were several troublesome passages for progressives.

First, mentioning John Boehner, Obama said he was still open to a grand compromise on Social Security and Medicare, which would make Americans have to work longer and get less benefits from Medicare and Medicaid. We don't need a Democrat to hack away at these crucial social programs.

Second, he took a gratuitous swipe at universal single-payer health care. Sounding like Ronald Reagan, he said, "I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believed: That Government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more." As an illustration, he said, "That's why our health care law relies on a reformed private market, not a Government program." Huh?

He used to say he was for single-payer universal health care. Then, when he was running for President the first time, he said, "If I were starting from scratch," I'd be for single-payer universal health care. Now he disparages it to score cheap political points.

Third, he was belligerent on Iran, saying (to raucous applause) that he would take "no options off the table," which is easily decipherable code for saying he'd threaten to blow Iran off the map if it got one nuclear weapon, even though the United States has thousands and Israel has hundreds.
Fourth, he said that America is a "Pacific power," reiterating the theme of his new strategic doctrine, which is aimed recklessly at China.

And finally, sounding like a mix of Madeleine Albright and George W. Bush, he boasted that the United States is the "one indispensable nation in world affairs-and as long as I'm President, I intend to keep it that way."

This was cheap jingoism that the American people, already suffering from a superiority complex, really could have lived without.

© 2012 The Progessive

Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine.

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From http://www.democracynow.org/2012/1/25/he_says_one_thing_and_does ...

January 25, 2012

"He Says One Thing and Does Another":

Ralph Nader Responds to Obama's State of the Union Address

AMY GOODMAN: We are joined right now by Ralph Nader to talk more about President Obama's State of the Union address, longtime consumer advocate, former presidential candidate. His latest book is Getting Steamed to Overcome Corporatism: Build It Together to Win."
Ralph Nader, your response to the State of the Union address? It could be President Obama's last. It could be the beginning of a new President Obama for a second term. What do you think?

RALPH NADER: Well, I think his lawless militarism, that started the speech and ended the speech, was truly astonishing. I mean, he was very committed to projecting the American empire, in Obama terms, force projection in the Pacific, and distorting the whole process of how he explains Iraq and Afghanistan. He talks about Libya and Syria, and then went into the military alliance with Israel and didn't talk about the peace process or the plight of the Palestinians, who are being so repressed. Leaving Iraq as if it was a victory? Iraq has been destroyed: massive refugees, over a million Iraqis dead, contaminated environment, collapsing infrastructure, sectarian warfare. He should be ashamed of himself that he tries to drape our soldiers, who were sent on lawless military missions to kill and die in those countries, unconstitutional wars that violate Geneva conventions and international law and federal statutes, and drape them as if they've come back from Iwo Jima or Normandy. So I think it was very, very poor taste to start and end with this kind of massive militarism and the Obama empire....

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Recall-- from http://consortiumnews.com/2012/01/12/herding-americans-to-war-with-iran/ ...

Herding Americans to War with Iran
January 12, 2012

By Robert Parry

In spring 2010, a promising effort - led by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Brazil's then-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva - got Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to agree to relinquish Iranian control of nearly half the country's supply of low-enriched uranium in exchange for isotopes for medical research. The Turkish-Brazilian initiative revived a plan first advanced by Obama in 2009 - and the effort had the President's private encouragement. But after Ahmadinejad accepted the deal, Secretary Clinton and other U.S. hardliners switched into overdrive to kill the swap and insist instead on imposing harsher sanctions against Iran.

At the time, Clinton's position was endorsed by editors at the Washington Post and the New York Times, who mocked Erdogan and Lula da Silva as inept understudies on the international stage. If anything, the Post and Times argued, the United States should take an even more belligerent approach toward Iran, i.e. seeking "regime change." [See Consortiumnews.com's "WPost, NYT Show Tough-Guy Swagger."] As Clinton undercut the uranium swap and pushed instead for a new round of United Nations' sanctions, Lula da Silva released a private letter from Obama who had urged the Brazilians to press forward with the swap arrangement. However, with Washington's political momentum favoring another confrontation with a Muslim adversary, Obama retreated and lined up behind the sanctions.

Over the next nearly two years, the sanctions have failed to stop Iran's work on enriched uranium which it claims is needed for medical research. Israel, the neocons and other American hardliners have responded by demanding still more draconian sanctions, while promoting anti-Iran propaganda inside the United States and winking at the murder of Iranian scientists inside Iran.
In this U.S. election year, Israel and the neocons may understand that their political leverage on Obama is at its apex.

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From http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/01/25-5 ...

Published on Wednesday, January 25, 2012 by Common Dreams
US/Israel: Iran NOT Building Nukes

by Ray McGovern

Has Iran decided to build a nuclear bomb? That would seem to be the central question in the current bellicose debate over whether the world should simply cripple Iran's economy and inflict severe pain on its civilian population or launch a preemptive war to destroy its nuclear capability while possibly achieving "regime change."

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak meeting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2007

And if you've been reading the New York Times or following the rest of the Fawning Corporate Media, you'd likely assume that everyone who matters agrees that the answer to the question is yes, although the FCM adds the caveat that Iran insists its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only. The line is included with an almost perceptible wink and an "oh, yeah."

However, a consensus seems to be emerging among the intelligence and military agencies of the United States - and Israel - that Iran has NOT made a decision to build a nuclear weapon. In recent days, that judgment has been expressed by high-profile figures in the defense establishments of the two countries - U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Israel's Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

You might think that you would have heard more about that, wouldn't you? U.S. and Israel agree that Iran is NOT building a nuclear bomb. However, this joint assessment that Iran has NOT decided to build a nuclear bomb apparently represented too big a change in the accepted narrative.

Yet, on Jan. 18, the day before U.S. Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey arrived for talks in Israel, Israeli Defense Minister Barak gave an interview to Israeli Army radio in which he addressed with striking candor how he assesses Iran's nuclear program. It was not the normal pabulum.

Question: Is it Israel's judgment that Iran has not yet decided to turn its nuclear potential into weapons of mass destruction?

Barak: confusion stems from the fact that people ask whether Iran is determined to break out from the control [inspection] regime right now in an attempt to obtain nuclear weapons or an operable installation as quickly as possible. Apparently that is not the case.

Question: How long will it take from the moment Iran decides to turn it into effective weapons until it has nuclear warheads?

Barak: I don't know; one has to estimate. Some say a year, others say 18 months. It doesn't really matter. To do that, Iran would have to announce it is leaving the [UN International Atomic Energy Agency] inspection regime and stop responding to IAEA's criticism, etc.

Why haven't they [the Iranians] done that? Because they realize that when it became clear to everyone that Iran was trying to acquire nuclear weapons, this would constitute definite proof that time is actually running out. This could generate either harsher sanctions or other action against them. They do not want that.

Question: Has the United States asked or demanded that the government inform the Americans in advance, should it decide on military action?

Barak: I don't want to get into that. We have not made a decision to opt for that, we have not decided on a decision-making date. The whole thing is very far off.

Question: You said the whole thing is "very far off." Do you mean weeks, months, years?

Barak: I wouldn't want to provide any estimates. It's certainly not urgent. I don't want to relate to it as though tomorrow it will happen.

As noted in my Jan. 19 article, "Israel Tamps Down Iran War Threats," which was based mostly on reports from the Israeli press before I had access to the complete transcript of the interview, I noted that Barak appeared to be identifying himself with the consistent assessment of U.S. intelligence community since late 2007 that Iran has not made a decision to go forward with a nuclear bomb.

A Momentous NIE

A formal National Intelligence Estimate of November 2007 - a consensus of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies - contradicted the encrusted conventional wisdom that "of course" Iran's nuclear development program must be aimed at producing nuclear weapons. The NIE stated:

"We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program; Tehran's decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005."

The Key Judgments of that Estimate elicited a vituperative reaction from some Israeli officials and in neoconservative circles in the United States. It also angered then-President George W. Bush, who joined the Israelis in expressing disagreement with the judgments. In January 2008, Bush flew to Israel to commiserate with Israeli officials who he said should have been "furious with the United States over the NIE."

While Bush's memoir, Decision Points, is replete with bizarre candor, nothing beats his admission that "the NIE tied my hands on the military side," preventing him from ordering a preemptive war against Iran, an action favored by hawkish Vice President Dick Cheney.

For me personally it was heartening to discover that my former colleagues in the CIA's analytical division had restored the old ethos of telling difficult truths to power, after the disgraceful years under CIA leaders like George Tenet and John McLaughlin when the CIA followed the politically safer route of telling the powerful what they wanted to hear.

It had been three decades since I chaired a couple of National Intelligence Estimates, but fate never gave me the chance to manage one that played such a key role in preventing an unnecessary and disastrous war - as the November 2007 NIE did.

In such pressure-cooker situations, the Estimates job is not for the malleable or the faint-hearted. The ethos was to speak with courage, and without fear or favor, but that is often easier said than done. In my days, however, we analysts enjoyed career protection for telling it like we saw it. It was an incredible boost to morale to see that happening again in 2007.

Ever since the NIE was published, however, powerful politicians and media pundits have sought to chip away at its conclusions, suggesting that the analysts were hopelessly naïve or politically motivated or vengeful, out to punish Bush and Cheney for the heavy-handed tactics used to push false and dubious claims about Iraq's WMD in 2002 and 2003.

A New Conventional Wisdom

There emerged in Official Washington a new conventional wisdom that the NIE was erroneous and wasn't worth mentioning anymore. Though the Obama administration has stood by it, the New York Times and other FCM outlets routinely would state that the United States and Israel agreed that Iran was developing a nuclear bomb and then add the wink-wink denial by Iran.

However, on Jan. 8, Defense Secretary Panetta told Bob Schieffer on "Face the Nation" that "the responsible thing to do right now is to keep putting diplomatic and economic pressure on them [the Iranians] and to make sure that they do not make the decision to proceed with the development of a nuclear weapon."

Panetta was making the implicit point that the Iranians had not made that decision, but just in case someone might miss his meaning, Panetta posed the direct question to himself: "Are they [the Iranians] trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No."

Barak's Jan. 18 statement to Israeli Army radio indicated that his views dovetail with those of Panetta - and their comments apparently are backed up by the assessments of each nation's intelligence analysts. In its report on Defense Minister Barak's remarks, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on Jan. 19 summed up the change in the position of Israeli leaders as follows:

"The intelligence assessment Israeli officials will present to Dempsey indicates that Iran has not yet decided whether to make a nuclear bomb. The Israeli view is that while Iran continues to improve its nuclear capabilities, it has not yet decided whether to translate these capabilities into a nuclear weapon - or, more specifically, a nuclear warhead mounted atop a missile. Nor is it clear when Iran might make such a decision."

At the New York Times, the initial coverage of Barak's interview focused on another element. An article by Isabel Kershner and Rick Gladstone appeared on Jan. 19 on page A5 under the headline "Decision on Whether to Attack Iran is 'Far Off,' Israeli Defense Minister Says."

To their credit, the Times' Kershner and Gladstone did not shrink from offering an accurate translation of what Barak said on the key point of IAEA inspections: "The Iranians have not ended the oversight exercised by the International Atomic Energy Agency They have not done that because they know that that would constitute proof of the military nature of their nuclear program and that would provoke stronger international sanctions or other types of action against their country."

But missing from the Times' article was Barak's more direct assessment that Iran apparently had not made a decision to press ahead toward construction of a nuclear bomb. That would have undercut the boilerplate in almost every Times story saying that U.S. and Israeli officials believe Iran is working on a nuclear bomb.

But That's Not the Right Line!

So, what to do? Not surprisingly, the next day (Jan. 20), the Times ran an article by its Middle East bureau chief Ethan Bronner in which he stated categorically: "Israel and the United States both say that Iran is pursuing the building of nuclear weapons - an assertion denied by Iran - "

By Jan. 21, the Times had time to prepare an entire page (A8) of articles setting the record "straight," so to speak, on Iran's nuclear capabilities and intentions: Here are the most telling excerpts, by article (emphasis mine):

1- "European Union Moves Closer to Imposing Tough Sanctions on Iran," by Steven Erlanger, Paris:
"Senior French officials are concerned that these measures [sanctions] will not be strong enough to push the Iranian government into serious, substantive negotiations on its nuclear program which the West says is aimed at producing weapons."

"In his annual speech on French diplomacy on Friday, President Nicolas Sarkozy accused Iran of lying, and he denounced what he called its 'senseless race for a nuclear bomb.'"

"Iran says it is enriching uranium solely for peaceful uses and denies a military intent. But few in the West believe Tehran, which has not cooperated fully with inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency and has been pursuing some technologies that have only a military use."

(Pardon me, please. I'm having a bad flashback. Anyone remember the Times' peerless reporting on those infamous "aluminum tubes" that supposedly were destined for nuclear centrifuges - until some folks did a Google search and found they were for the artillery then used by Iraq?)

2- "China Leader Warns Iran Not to Make Nuclear Arms," by Michael Wines, Beijing

"Prime Minister Wen Jiabao wrapped up a six-day Middle East tour this week with stronger-than-usual criticism of Iran's defiance on its nuclear program."

"Mr. Wen's comments on Iran were unusually pointed for Chinese diplomacy. In Doha, Qatar's capital, he said China 'adamantly opposes Iran developing and possessing nuclear weapons.'"
"Western nations suspect that Iran is working toward building a nuclear weapon, while Iran insists its program is peaceful."

3- "U.S. General Urges Closer Ties With Israel." by Isabel Kershner, Jerusalem

"Though Iran continues to insist that its nuclear program is only for civilian purposes, Israel, the United Stated, and much of the West are convinced that Iran is working to develop a weapons program. "

Never (Let Up) on Sunday

Next it was time for the Times to trot out David Sanger from the Washington bullpen. Many will remember him as one of the Times' stenographers/cheerleaders for the Bush/Cheney attack on Iraq in March 2003. An effusive hawk also on Iran, Sanger was promoted to a position as chief Washington correspondent, apparently for services rendered.

In his Jan. 22 article, "Confronting Iran in a Year of Elections," Sanger pulls out all the stops, even resurrecting Condoleezza Rice's "mushroom cloud" to scare all of us - and, not least, the Iranians. He wrote:

"'From the perception of the Iranians, life may look better on the other side of the mushroom cloud,' said Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He may be right: while the Obama administration has vowed that it will never tolerate Iran as a nuclear weapons state, a few officials admit that they may have to settle for a 'nuclear capable' Iran that has the technology, the nuclear fuel and the expertise to become a nuclear power in a matter of weeks or months."

Were that not enough, enter the national champion of the Times cheerleading squad that prepared the American people in 2002 and early 2003 for the attack on Iraq, former Executive Editor Bill Keller. He graced us the next day (Jan. 23) with an op-ed entitled "Bomb-Bomb-Bomb, Bomb-Bomb-Iran?" - though he wasn't favoring a military strike, at least not right now. Here's Keller:

"The actual state of the [nuclear] program is not entirely clear, but the best open-source estimates are that if Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ordered full-speed-ahead - which there is no sign he has done - they could have an actual weapon in a year or so. In practice, Obama's policy promises to be tougher than Bush's. Because Obama started out with an offer of direct talks - which the Iranians foolishly spurned - world opinion has shifted in our direction."

Wow. With Iraqi egg still all over his face, the disgraced Keller gets to "spurn" history itself - to rewrite the facts. Sorry, Bill, it was not Iran, but rather Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other neocons in the U.S. Department of State and White House (with you and neocon allies in the press cheering them on), who "foolishly spurned" an offer by Iran in 2010 to trade about half its low-enriched uranium for medical isotopes. It was a deal negotiated by Turkey and Brazil, but it was viewed by the neocons as an obstacle to ratcheting up the sanctions.

In his Jan. 23 column, with more sophomoric glibness, Keller wrote this:

"We may now have sufficient global support to enact the one measure that would be genuinely crippling - a boycott of Iranian oil. The Iranians take this threat to their economic livelihood seriously enough that people who follow the subject no longer minimize the chance of a naval confrontation in the Strait of Hormuz. It's not impossible that we will get war with Iran even without bombing its nuclear facilities."
How neat! War without even trying!

The Paper of (Checkered Record)

Guidance To All NYT Hands: Are you getting the picture? After all, what does Defense Minister Barak know? Or Defense Secretary Panetta? Or the 16 agencies of the U.S. intelligence community? Or apparently even Israeli intelligence?

The marching orders from the Times' management appear to be that you should pay no heed to those sources of information. Just repeat the mantra: Everyone knows Iran is hard at work on the Bomb.
As is well known, other newspapers and media outlets take their cue from the Times. Small wonder, then, that USA Today seemed to be following the same guidance on Jan. 23, as can be seen in its major editorial on military action against Iran:

"The U.S. and Iran will keep steaming toward confrontation, Iran intent on acquiring the bomb to establish itself as a regional power, and the U.S. intent on preventing it to protect allies and avoid a nuclear arms race in the world's most volatile region.

"One day, the U.S. is likely to face a wrenching choice: bomb Iran, with the nation fully united and prepared for the consequences, or let Iran have the weapons, along with a Cold War-like doctrine ensuring Iran's nuclear annihilation if it ever uses them. In that context, sanctions remain the last best hope for a satisfactory solution."

And, of course, the U.S. press corps almost never adds the context that Israel already possesses an undeclared arsenal of hundreds of nuclear weapons, or that Iran is essentially surrounded by nuclear weapons states, including India, Pakistan, Russia, China and - at sea - the United States.
PBS Equally Guilty

PBS's behavior adhered to its customary

don't-offend-the-politicians-who-might-otherwise-cut-our-budget attitude on the Jan. 18 "NewsHour" - about 12 hours after Ehud Barak's interview started making the rounds. Host Margaret Warner set the stage for an interview with neocon Dennis Ross and Vali Nasr (a professor at Tufts) by using a thoroughly misleading clip from former Sen. Rick Santorum's Jan. 1 appearance on "Meet the Press."

Warner started by saying: "Back in the U.S. many Republican presidential candidates have been vowing they'd be even tougher with Tehran. Former Senator Rick Santorum spoke on NBC's Meet the Press: 'I would be saying to the Iranians, you open up those facilities, you begin to dismantle them and make them available to inspectors, or we will degrade those facilities through air strikes and make it very public that we are doing so.'"

Santorum seemed totally unaware that there are U.N. inspectors in Iran, and host David Gregory did nothing to correct him, leaving Santorum's remark unchallenged. The blogosphere immediately lit up with requests for NBC to tell their viewers that there are already U.N. inspectors in Iran, which unlike Israel is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and allows IAEA inspections.
During the Warner interview, Dennis Ross performed true to form, projecting supreme confidence that he knows more about Iran's nuclear program than the Israeli Defense Minister and the U.S. intelligence community combined:

Margaret Warner: If you hamstring their [Iran's] Central Bank, and the U.S. persuades all these other big customers not to buy Iranian oil, that could be thought of as an act of war on the part of the Iranians. Is that a danger?

Ross: I think there's a context here. The context is that the Iranians continue to pursue a nuclear program. And unmistakably to many, that is a nuclear program whose purpose is to achieve nuclear weapons. That has a very high danger, a very high consequence. So the idea that they could continue with that and not realize that at some point they have to make a choice, and if they don't make the choice, the price they're going to pay is a very high one, that's the logic of increasing the pressure.
Never mind that the Israeli Defense Minister had told the press something quite different some 12 hours before.

Still, it is interesting that Barak's comments on how Israeli intelligence views Iran's nuclear program now mesh so closely with the NIE in 2007. This is the new and significant story here, as I believe any objective journalist would agree.

However, the FCM - led by the New York Times - cannot countenance admitting that they have been hyping the threat from Iran as they did with Iraq's non-existent WMDs just nine years ago. So they keep repeating the line that Israel and the U.S. agree that Iran is building a nuclear weapon.

In this up-is-down world, America's newspaper of record won't even report accurately what Israel (or the CIA) thinks on this important issue, if that goes against the alarmist conventional wisdom that the neocons favor. Thus, we have this divergence between what the U.S. media is reporting as flat fact - i.e., that Israel and the United States believe Iran is building a bomb (though Iran denies it) - and the statements from senior Israeli and U.S. officials that Iran has NOT decided to build a bomb.

While this might strike some as splitting hairs - since peaceful nuclear expertise can have potential military use - this hair is a very important one. If Iran is not working on building a nuclear bomb, then the threats of preemptive war are not only unjustified, they could be exactly the motivation for Iran to decide that it does need a nuclear bomb to protect itself and its people.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed the President's Daily Brief and chaired National Intelligence Estimates. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

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From http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/01/25-6 ...

Published on Wednesday, January 25, 2012 by The Independent
It Suits 'Nuclear Israel' That We Never Forget 'Nuclear Iran'
The Ayatollah ordered the entire nuclear project to be closed down because it was the work of the devil

by Robert Fisk

Turning round a story is one of the most difficult tasks in journalism - and rarely more so than in the case of Iran. Iran, the dark revolutionary Islamist menace. Shia Iran, protector and manipulator of World Terror, of Syria and Lebanon and Hamas and Hezbollah. Ahmadinejad, the Mad Caliph. And, of course, Nuclear Iran, preparing to destroy Israel in a mushroom cloud of anti-Semitic hatred, ready to close the Strait of Hormuz - the moment the West's (or Israel's) forces attack.

Given the nature of the theocratic regime, the repulsive suppression of its post-election opponents in 2009, not to mention its massive pools of oil, every attempt to inject common sense into the story also has to carry a medical health warning: no, of course Iran is not a nice place. But ...

Let's take the Israeli version which, despite constant proof that Israel's intelligence services are about as efficient as Syria's, goes on being trumpeted by its friends in the West, none more subservient than Western journalists. The Israeli President warns us now that Iran is on the cusp of producing a nuclear weapon. Heaven preserve us. Yet we reporters do not mention that Shimon Peres, as Israeli Prime Minister, said exactly the same thing in 1996. That was 16 years ago. And we do not recall that the current Israeli PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, said in 1992 that Iran would have a nuclear bomb by 1999. That would be 13 years ago. Same old story.

In fact, we don't know that Iran really is building a nuclear weapon. And after Iraq, it's amazing that the old weapons of mass destruction details are popping with the same frequency as all the poppycock about Saddam's titanic arsenal. Not to mention the date problem. When did all this start? The Shah. The old boy wanted nuclear power. He even said he wanted a bomb because "the US and the Soviet Union had nuclear bombs" and no one objected. Europeans rushed to supply the dictator's wish. Siemens - not Russia - built the Bushehr nuclear facility.

And when Ayatollah Khomeini, Scourge of the West, Apostle of Shia Revolution, etc, took over Iran in 1979, he ordered the entire nuclear project to be closed down because it was "the work of the Devil". Only when Saddam invaded Iran - with our Western encouragement - and started using poison gas against the Iranians (chemical components arriving from the West, of course) was Khomeini persuaded to reopen it.

All this has been deleted from the historical record; it was the black-turbaned mullahs who started the nuclear project, along with the crackpot Ahmadinejad. And Israel might have to destroy this terror-weapon to secure its own survival, to ensure the West's survival, for democracy, etc, etc.

For Palestinians in the West Bank, Israel is the brutal, colonising, occupying power. But the moment Iran is mentioned, this colonial power turns into a tiny, vulnerable, peaceful state under imminent threat of extinction. Ahmadinejad - here again, I quote Netanyahu - is more dangerous than Hitler. Israel's own nuclear warheads - all too real and now numbering almost 300 - disappear from the story. Iran's Revolutionary Guards are helping the Syrian regime destroy its opponents; they might like to - but there is no proof of this.

The trouble is that Iran has won almost all its recent wars without firing a shot. George W and Tony destroyed Iran's nemesis in Iraq. They killed thousands of the Sunni army whom Iran itself always referred to as "the black Taliban". And the Gulf Arabs, our "moderate" friends, shiver in their golden mosques as we in the West outline their fate in the event of an Iranian Shia revolution.

No wonder Cameron goes on selling weapons to these preposterous people whose armies, in many cases, could scarcely operate soup kitchens, let alone the billions of dollars of sophisticated kit we flog them under the fearful shadow of Tehran.

Bring on the sanctions. Send in the clowns.

© 2012 The Independent

Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent for The Independent newspaper. He is the author of many books on the region, including The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East.

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From http://consortiumnews.com/2012/01/12/herding-americans-to-war-with-iran/ ...

Herding Americans to War with Iran
January 12, 2012

Exclusive: The murder of a fifth Iranian scientist on the streets of Tehran had all the earmarks of an Israeli-sponsored assassination. The killing also worsened tensions at a moment when the momentum toward war with Iran seems unstoppable, reports Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

For many Americans the progression toward war with Iran has the feel of cattle being herded from the stockyard into the slaughterhouse, pressed steadily forward with no turning back, until some guy shoots a bolt into your head.

Any suggestion of give-and-take negotiations with Iran is mocked, while alarmist propaganda, a ratcheting up of sanctions, and provocative actions - like Wednesday's assassination of yet another Iranian scientist - push Americans closer to what seems like an inevitable bloodletting.

Even the New York Times now acknowledges that Israel, with some help from the United States, appears to be conducting a covert war of sabotage and assassination inside Iran. "The campaign, which experts believe is being carried out mainly by Israel, apparently claimed its latest victim on Wednesday when a bomb killed a 32-year-old nuclear scientist in Tehran's morning rush hour," Times reporter Scott Shane wrote in Thursday's editions.

Though U.S. officials emphatically denied any role in the murder, Israeli officials did little to discourage rumors of an Israeli hand in the bombing. Some even expressed approval. Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai said he didn't know who killed the scientist but added: "I am definitely not shedding a tear."

The latest victim, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, was the fifth scientist associated with Iran's nuclear program to be killed in the past four years, with a sixth scientist narrowly escaping death in 2010, Fereydoon Abbasi, who is now head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization.

As might be expected, Iran has denounced the murders as acts of terrorism. They have been accompanied by cyber-attacks on Iranian centrifuges and an explosion at a missile facility late last year killing a senior general and 16 others.

While this campaign has slowed Iran's nuclear progress, it also appears to have hardened its resolve to continue work on a nuclear capability, which Iran says is for peaceful purposes only. Iranian authorities also have responded to tightening economic sanctions from Europe and the United States with threats of their own, such as warnings about closing the oil routes through the Strait of Hormuz and thus damaging the West's economies.

Target: USA

Another front in Israel's cold war against Iran appears to be the propaganda war being fought inside the United States, where the still-influential neoconservatives are deploying their extensive political and media resources to shut off possible routes toward a peaceful settlement, while building support for future military strikes against Iran.

Fitting with that propaganda strategy, the Washington Post's editorial page, which is essentially the neocons' media flagship, published a lead editorial on Wednesday urging harsher and harsher sanctions against Iran and ridiculing anyone who favored reduced tensions.

Noting Iran's announcement that it had opened a better-protected uranium enrichment plant near Qom, the Post wrote: "In short, the new Fordow operation crosses another important line in Iran's advance toward a nuclear weapons capability.

"Was it a red line for Israel or the United States? Apparently not, for the Obama administration at least. In a television interview Sunday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said: 'Our red line to Iran is: do not develop a nuclear weapon.' He asserted that Tehran was not trying to develop a weapon now, only 'a nuclear capability.' The Revolutionary Guard, which controls the nuclear program, might well take that as a green light for the new enrichment operation."

While portraying Panetta as an Iranian tool, the Post suggested that anyone who wanted to turn back from an Iran confrontation was an Iranian useful fool. The Post wrote:

"The recent flurry of Iranian threats has had the intended effect of prompting a new chorus of demands in Washington that the United States and its allies stop tightening sanctions and instead make another attempt at 'engagement' with the regime. The Ahmadinejad government itself reportedly has proposed new negotiations, and Turkey has stepped forward as a host.

"Almost certainly, any talks will reveal that Iran is unwilling to stop its nuclear activities or even to make significant concessions. But they may serve to stop or greatly delay a European oil embargo or the implementation of sanctions on the [Iranian] central bank - and buy time for the Fordow centrifuges to do their work."

The Post's recommended instead "that every effort must be made to intensify sanctions" and to stop Iranian sale of oil anywhere in the world. In other words, continue to ratchet up the tensions and cut off hopes for genuine negotiations.

A Vulnerable Obama

The escalating neocon demands for an ever-harder U.S. line against Iran - and Israel's apparent campaign of killings and sabotage inside Iran - come at a time when President Barack Obama and some of his inner circle appear to be looking again for ways to defuse tensions. But the Post's editorial - and similar neocon propaganda - have made clear that any move toward reconciliation will come with a high political price tag.

Already, a recurring Republican talking point is that Obama's earlier efforts to open channels of negotiation with Iran and other foreign adversaries proved his naivete and amounted to "apologizing" for America. Obama also has faced resistance within his own administration, especially from neocon-lites such as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

For instance, in spring 2010, a promising effort - led by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Brazil's then-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva - got Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to agree to relinquish Iranian control of nearly half the country's supply of low-enriched uranium in exchange for isotopes for medical research.

The Turkish-Brazilian initiative revived a plan first advanced by Obama in 2009 - and the effort had the President's private encouragement. But after Ahmadinejad accepted the deal, Secretary Clinton and other U.S. hardliners switched into overdrive to kill the swap and insist instead on imposing harsher sanctions against Iran.

At the time, Clinton's position was endorsed by editors at the Washington Post and the New York Times, who mocked Erdogan and Lula da Silva as inept understudies on the international stage. If anything, the Post and Times argued, the United States should take an even more belligerent approach toward Iran, i.e. seeking "regime change." [See Consortiumnews.com's "WPost, NYT Show Tough-Guy Swagger."]

As Clinton undercut the uranium swap and pushed instead for a new round of United Nations' sanctions, Lula da Silva released a private letter from Obama who had urged the Brazilians to press forward with the swap arrangement. However, with Washington's political momentum favoring another confrontation with a Muslim adversary, Obama retreated and lined up behind the sanctions.

Over the next nearly two years, the sanctions have failed to stop Iran's work on enriched uranium which it claims is needed for medical research. Israel, the neocons and other American hardliners have responded by demanding still more draconian sanctions, while promoting anti-Iran propaganda inside the United States and winking at the murder of Iranian scientists inside Iran.
In this U.S. election year, Israel and the neocons may understand that their political leverage on Obama is at its apex. So, if he again searches for openings to negotiate with Iran, he can expect the same kind of nasty disdain that the Washington Post heaped on Panetta on Wednesday.

The Carter-Begin Precedent

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Likud leaders appear to fear a second Obama term - when he'd be freed from the need to seek reelection - much as their predecessors feared a second term for President Jimmy Carter in 1980. Then, Prime Minister Menachem Begin thought that Carter in a second term would team up with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in forcing Israel to accept a Palestinian state.

Begin's alarm about that prospect was described by Israeli intelligence and foreign affairs official David Kimche in his 1991 book, The Last Option. Kimche wrote that Begin's government believed that Carter was overly sympathetic to the Palestinians.

"Begin was being set up for diplomatic slaughter by the master butchers in Washington," Kimche wrote. "They had, moreover, the apparent blessing of the two presidents, Carter and Sadat, for this bizarre and clumsy attempt at collusion designed to force Israel to abandon her refusal to withdraw from territories occupied in 1967, including Jerusalem, and to agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state."

Extensive evidence now exists that Begin's preference for Ronald Reagan led Israelis to join in a covert operation with Republicans to contact Iranian leaders behind Carter's back and delay release of the 52 American hostages then being held in Iran until after Reagan defeated Carter in November 1980. [For details, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege or Consortiumnews.com's "The Back Story on Iran's Clashes."]

Today, Obama's relationship with Netanyahu seems as strained as Carter's relationship with Begin was three decades ago. And already many American neocons have signed up with Obama's Republican rivals, including with GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney whose foreign policy white paper was written by prominent neocons.

So the question now is: Will the President of the United States take his place amid the herd of cattle getting steered into the slaughterhouse of another war?

[For more on related topics, see Robert Parry's Lost History, Secrecy & Privilege and Neck Deep, now available in a three-book set for the discount price of only $29. For details, click here.]

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there.

join Jobs Not Jails for next mtg. Sat. Feb. 11th-- speak up against jail expansion!...

2012-02-02T12:04:00.000-08:00

Hi all...

[thx again to Manna Jo Greene for puttin' bee in our bonnet on this; just got confirmed from Bishop Gause and Ann Perry-- it's a go for this next mtg.]

Come out if you can to join us for our next Jobs Not Jails meeting-- Saturday February 11th at 10:30 am at Holy Light Pentecostal Church at 33 South Clover Street in Poughkeepsie!...

We have some serious work to do-- the pressure literally is mounting daily to waste tens of millions of our county tax dollars on unnecessary jail expansion-- not just from recent statements from County Executive Molinaro and GOP Co. Leg. Rolison (and other Republicans)-- but also from the media...(recall media drumbeat for war to invade Iraq, for instance)...

[see http://www.JobsNotJails.weebly.com and my blog post from last Aug. 18th on what we can push for instead of jail expansion (e.g., truly comprehensive and fully funded re-entry system, supports put back for our youth-- for example, Nubian Directions now only has funding to take 31 youths each year off the streets-- while half of the City of Poughkeepsie High School students drop out in four years)...recall also http://www.FightCrime.org -- SO much more to do for our kids;
http://www.dutchessdemocracy.blogspot.com/2011/08/pok-forum-sat-john-chaney-from.html ]

[let's not forget-- former Dutchess County Children Services Council Chair Betsy Brockway was forced to admit publicly upon my questioning her during a meeting that only half the troubled teens are in rehabilitative programs now compared to just a year ago-- before county GOP eliminated all county funding for the Youth Bureau's Project Return program; see http://www.petitiononline.com/cobudget ]

So again-- four reasons why we need to get to work now educating Dutchess folks on why jail expansion unnecessary:

[all 4 of these fairly recently came out in local media!]

1. Poughkeepsie Journal editorial from last Saturday pushing for jail expansion
"Jail Crowding Solutions Must Be Found"
http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/article/20120129/OPINION01/301290043/Jail-crowding-solutions-must-found

2. Jan. 12th Poughkeepsie Journal-- "Jail Panel to County: Learn More" by Larry Hertz [for jail expansion]
http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/article/20120112/NEWS01/301120011/Jail-panel-county-Learn-more

3. Article from Monday's Poughkeepsie Journal on jail overcrowding, inmates shipped to other counties [for jail expansion]
http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/article/20120130/NEWS01/301300017/Dutchess-spared-1-8-million-counties-aid-inmate-transfer

4. WAMC interview with GOP Co. Leg. Public Safety Chair Ken Roman from this past Tuesday [for jail expansion]
"Dutchess County Tackles Overcrowding At County Lock-Up"
http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wamc/news.newsmain/article/1/0/1899755/WAMC.New.York.News/Dutchess.County.Tackles.Overcrowding.At.County.Lock-Up

On the other hand-- the truth is the truth is the truth...

No matter how hard the GOP and media want to ignore it, gloss over it, pretend it's not there-- the facts on how and why we can avoid jail expansion are out there-- at least in some of the media...

To wit...

Fact: "The rate of incarceration per 100,000 people is: USA: 730, Russian: 534, Iran: 334, China: 122, Iraq: 101, and Germany: 86."

Source: International Centre for Prison Studies, University of Essex.
[from Bill Quigley/Sam Schmitt Social Justice Quiz Jan. 30th: https://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/01/30-5 ]

Also-- recall Michelle Alexander of "The New Jim Crow" and Randall Robinson of TransAfrica on Democracy Now Jan. 13th:
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/1/13/on_eve_of_mlk_day_michelle .

And-- see just below-- huge piece that just came out in the New Yorker magazine from Adam Gopnik-- "The Caging of America: Why Do We Lock Up So Many People?"(!)
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik?currentPage=all

Moreover-- just last Thursday, WAMC's Dave Lucas did a piece on the Vera Institute's report on costs of incarceration:
http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wamc/news.newsmain/article/1/0/1898209/WAMC.New.York.News/Prison.Costs.Higher.Than.State.Corrections.Budgets.Reflect .

So-- please-- if you can-- read/digest as much of all this as you can-- and be ready to discuss it all (and more)...

...at our next Feb. 11th mtg. of Jobs Not Jails-- that Saturday morning at Holy Light Pentecostal Church!...

And-- please be prepared to discuss (even if just briefly) the possibility of a Jobs Not Jails rally soon (Feb. and/or
March)....to get media attention, rally community asap!...[we should even consider a serious of rallies]

(esp. now that we have that new, wonderful, professional-looking Jobs Not Jails banner that Manna put together!)

[need more convincing we need to put our nose to grindstone now on this?...read those first four pieces above]

And yes-- more forums with experts like Father Peter Young of http://www.PYHIT.com and John Chaney of
http://www.BrooklynDA.org !...

[and-- also-- letters to the editor too-- and we should all be posting comments @ PoJo articles on this vs. jail expansion]

Pass it on...

Joel
444-0599
joeltyner@earthlink.net

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From new Vera Institute report-- "The Price of Prisons" (yes, pertinent to us here in Dutchess re: jail expansion too!):

http://www.vera.org/pubs/price-prisons
http://www.vera.org/download?file=3410/the-price-of-prisons.pdf
http://www.vera.org/files/price-of-prisons-new-york-fact-sheet.pdf

Fact: "In fiscal year 2010, the New York Department of Correctional Services (DOCS)
had $2.7 billion in prison expenditures. (In 2011, DOCS merged with the
Division of Parole to become the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision.)
However, the state also had $812.5 million in prison-related costs outside the
department’s budget. The total cost of New York’s prisons—to incarcerate an average
daily population of 59,237—was therefore almost $3.6 billion, of which 22.8 percent
were costs outside the corrections budget."

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[note here-- also check out http://www.cases.org -- Joel Copperman from CASES
was interviewed by WAMC's Dave Lucas for this piece-- CASES is amazing;
we need some real funding to make CASES-like program reality in Dutchess County:
a real Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services!]

http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wamc/news.newsmain/article/1/0/1898209/WAMC.New.York.News/Prison.Costs.Higher.Than.State.Corrections.Budgets.Reflect

Prison Costs: Higher Than State Corrections Budgets Reflect

WAMC/Dave Lucas (2012-01-26)

NEW PALTZ, NY (WAMC) - A new report finds New York numbers among 40 states
where prison costs are higher than corrections department budgets reflect.
Hudson Valley Bureau Chief Dave Lucas reports.

The new study by the Vera Institute of Justice, a New York City-based research
organization that tracks criminal justice trends, calculates New York State's
total costs for its adult corrections and prison programs at $3.3 billion.

The report, entitled, The Price of Prisons: What Incarceration Costs Taxpayers,
found that among the 40 states that responded to a survey, the cost of prisons
was $38.8 billion in fiscal year 2010, $5.4 billion more than what their corrections
budgets reflected. States costs outside their corrections departments ranged from
less than 1 percent of total prison costs in Arizona to as much as 34 percent in
Connecticut.

Corrections spending is normally tracked by comparing the budgets for prison
and parole agencies. The Vera Institute study includes additional costs such
as contributions to pension and benefit programs and capital costs.

Nationally, corrections spending is the second fastest-growing budget item for
states, behind Medicaid. In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced in 2011
that he ordered seven New York state prisons closed, fulfilling his pledge to
consolidate the state's correctional facilities based on a declining inmate
population and providing significant savings to New York state taxpayers.

The decline in prison population is also attributed to New York's investment
in Alternatives to Incarceration or ATI s- which began back in the 1980s.

Staff from the Vera Institute of Justice's Center on Sentencing and Corrections
and Cost-Benefit Analysis Unit developed a methodology to calculate the taxpayer
cost of prisons, including costs outside states corrections budgets. 40 states
participated in the survey, including New York, Connecticut and Vermont.

The New York State Department of Corrections did not return calls for comment
in time for broadcast.

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A Critic at Large
The Caging of America
Why do we lock up so many people?
by Adam Gopnik January 30, 2012
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik?curren

Six million people are under correctional supervision in the U.S.—more than were in Stalin’s gulags.

A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.

That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded. “Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard, / Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards,” Dylan sings, and while it isn’t strictly true—just ask the prisoners—it contains a truth: the guards are doing time, too. As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.

For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.

How did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and flogging and disembowelling, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane sanction? There’s a fairly large recent scholarly literature on the history and sociology of crime and punishment, and it tends to trace the American zeal for punishment back to the nineteenth century, apportioning blame in two directions. There’s an essentially Northern explanation, focussing on the inheritance of the notorious Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, and its “reformist” tradition; and a Southern explanation, which sees the prison system as essentially a slave plantation continued by other means. Robert Perkinson, the author of the Southern revisionist tract “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire,” traces two ancestral lines, “from the North, the birthplace of rehabilitative penology, to the South, the fountainhead of subjugationist discipline.” In other words, there’s the scientific taste for reducing men to numbers and the slave owners’ urge to reduce blacks to brutes.

William J. Stuntz, a professor at Harvard Law School who died shortly before his masterwork, “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice,” was published, last fall, is the most forceful advocate for the view that the scandal of our prisons derives from the Enlightenment-era, “procedural” nature of American justice. He runs through the immediate causes of the incarceration epidemic: the growth of post-Rockefeller drug laws, which punished minor drug offenses with major prison time; “zero tolerance” policing, which added to the group; mandatory-sentencing laws, which prevented judges from exercising judgment. But his search for the ultimate cause leads deeper, all the way to the Bill of Rights. In a society where Constitution worship is still a requisite on right and left alike, Stuntz startlingly suggests that the Bill of Rights is a terrible document with which to start a justice system—much inferior to the exactly contemporary French Declaration of the Rights of Man, which Jefferson, he points out, may have helped shape while his protégé Madison was writing ours.

The trouble with the Bill of Rights, he argues, is that it emphasizes process and procedure rather than principles. The Declaration of the Rights of Man says, Be just! The Bill of Rights says, Be fair! Instead of announcing general principles—no one should be accused of something that wasn’t a crime when he did it; cruel punishments are always wrong; the goal of justice is, above all, that justice be done—it talks procedurally. You can’t search someone without a reason; you can’t accuse him without allowing him to see the evidence; and so on. This emphasis, Stuntz thinks, has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice. You can get off if the cops looked in the wrong car with the wrong warrant when they found your joint, but you have no recourse if owning the joint gets you locked up for life. You may be spared the death penalty if you can show a problem with your appointed defender, but it is much harder if there is merely enormous accumulated evidence that you weren’t guilty in the first place and the jury got it wrong. Even clauses that Americans are taught to revere are, Stuntz maintains, unworthy of reverence: the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” was designed to protect cruel punishments—flogging and branding—that were not at that time unusual.

The obsession with due process and the cult of brutal prisons, the argument goes, share an essential impersonality. The more professionalized and procedural a system is, the more insulated we become from its real effects on real people. That’s why America is famous both for its process-driven judicial system (“The bastard got off on a technicality,” the cop-show detective fumes) and for the harshness and inhumanity of its prisons. Though all industrialized societies started sending more people to prison and fewer to the gallows in the eighteenth century, it was in Enlightenment-inspired America that the taste for long-term, profoundly depersonalized punishment became most aggravated. The inhumanity of American prisons was as much a theme for Dickens, visiting America in 1842, as the cynicism of American lawyers. His shock when he saw the Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia—a “model” prison, at the time the most expensive public building ever constructed in the country, where every prisoner was kept in silent, separate confinement—still resonates:

I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers. . . . I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.

Not roused up to stay—that was the point. Once the procedure ends, the penalty begins, and, as long as the cruelty is routine, our civil responsibility toward the punished is over. We lock men up and forget about their existence. For Dickens, even the corrupt but communal debtors’ prisons of old London were better than this. “Don’t take it personally!”—that remains the slogan above the gate to the American prison Inferno. Nor is this merely a historian’s vision. Conrad Black, at the high end, has a scary and persuasive picture of how his counsel, the judge, and the prosecutors all merrily congratulated each other on their combined professional excellence just before sending him off to the hoosegow for several years. If a millionaire feels that way, imagine how the ordinary culprit must feel.

In place of abstraction, Stuntz argues for the saving grace of humane discretion. Basically, he thinks, we should go into court with an understanding of what a crime is and what justice is like, and then let common sense and compassion and specific circumstance take over. There’s a lovely scene in “The Castle,” the Australian movie about a family fighting eminent-domain eviction, where its hapless lawyer, asked in court to point to the specific part of the Australian constitution that the eviction violates, says desperately, “It’s . . . just the vibe of the thing.” For Stuntz, justice ought to be just the vibe of the thing—not one procedural error caught or one fact worked around. The criminal law should once again be more like the common law, with judges and juries not merely finding fact but making law on the basis of universal principles of fairness, circumstance, and seriousness, and crafting penalties to the exigencies of the crime.

The other argument—the Southern argument—is that this story puts too bright a face on the truth. The reality of American prisons, this argument runs, has nothing to do with the knots of procedural justice or the perversions of Enlightenment-era ideals. Prisons today operate less in the rehabilitative mode of the Northern reformers “than in a retributive mode that has long been practiced and promoted in the South,” Perkinson, an American-studies professor, writes. “American prisons trace their lineage not only back to Pennsylvania penitentiaries but to Texas slave plantations.” White supremacy is the real principle, this thesis holds, and racial domination the real end. In response to the apparent triumphs of the sixties, mass imprisonment became a way of reimposing Jim Crow. Blacks are now incarcerated seven times as often as whites. “The system of mass incarceration works to trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage,” the legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes. Young black men pass quickly from a period of police harassment into a period of “formal control” (i.e., actual imprisonment) and then are doomed for life to a system of “invisible control.” Prevented from voting, legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives, most will cycle back through the prison system. The system, in this view, is not really broken; it is doing what it was designed to do. Alexander’s grim conclusion: “If mass incarceration is considered as a system of social control—specifically, racial control—then the system is a fantastic success.”

Northern impersonality and Southern revenge converge on a common American theme: a growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It’s hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible. No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:

Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. . . . The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.

Brecht could hardly have imagined such a document: a capitalist enterprise that feeds on the misery of man trying as hard as it can to be sure that nothing is done to decrease that misery.

Yet a spectre haunts all these accounts, North and South, whether process gone mad or penal colony writ large. It is that the epidemic of imprisonment seems to track the dramatic decline in crime over the same period. The more bad guys there are in prison, it appears, the less crime there has been in the streets. The real background to the prison boom, which shows up only sporadically in the prison literature, is the crime wave that preceded and overlapped it.

For those too young to recall the big-city crime wave of the sixties and seventies, it may seem like mere bogeyman history. For those whose entire childhood and adolescence were set against it, it is the crucial trauma in recent American life and explains much else that happened in the same period. It was the condition of the Upper West Side of Manhattan under liberal rule, far more than what had happened to Eastern Europe under socialism, that made neo-con polemics look persuasive. There really was, as Stuntz himself says, a liberal consensus on crime (“Wherever the line is between a merciful justice system and one that abandons all serious effort at crime control, the nation had crossed it”), and it really did have bad effects.

Yet if, in 1980, someone had predicted that by 2012 New York City would have a crime rate so low that violent crime would have largely disappeared as a subject of conversation, he would have seemed not so much hopeful as crazy. Thirty years ago, crime was supposed to be a permanent feature of the city, produced by an alienated underclass of super-predators; now it isn’t. Something good happened to change it, and you might have supposed that the change would be an opportunity for celebration and optimism. Instead, we mostly content ourselves with grudging and sardonic references to the silly side of gentrification, along with a few all-purpose explanations, like broken-window policing. This is a general human truth: things that work interest us less than things that don’t.

So what is the relation between mass incarceration and the decrease in crime? Certainly, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, many experts became persuaded that there was no way to make bad people better; all you could do was warehouse them, for longer or shorter periods. The best research seemed to show, depressingly, that nothing works—that rehabilitation was a ruse. Then, in 1983, inmates at the maximum-security federal prison in Marion, Illinois, murdered two guards. Inmates had been (very occasionally) killing guards for a long time, but the timing of the murders, and the fact that they took place in a climate already prepared to believe that even ordinary humanity was wasted on the criminal classes, meant that the entire prison was put on permanent lockdown. A century and a half after absolute solitary first appeared in American prisons, it was reintroduced. Those terrible numbers began to grow.

And then, a decade later, crime started falling: across the country by a standard measure of about forty per cent; in New York City by as much as eighty per cent. By 2010, the crime rate in New York had seen its greatest decline since the Second World War; in 2002, there were fewer murders in Manhattan than there had been in any year since 1900. In social science, a cause sought is usually a muddle found; in life as we experience it, a crisis resolved is causality established. If a pill cures a headache, we do not ask too often if the headache might have gone away by itself.

All this ought to make the publication of Franklin E. Zimring’s new book, “The City That Became Safe,” a very big event. Zimring, a criminologist at Berkeley Law, has spent years crunching the numbers of what happened in New York in the context of what happened in the rest of America. One thing he teaches us is how little we know. The forty per cent drop across the continent—indeed, there was a decline throughout the Western world— took place for reasons that are as mysterious in suburban Ottawa as they are in the South Bronx. Zimring shows that the usual explanations—including demographic shifts—simply can’t account for what must be accounted for. This makes the international decline look slightly eerie: blackbirds drop from the sky, plagues slacken and end, and there seems no absolute reason that societies leap from one state to another over time. Trends and fashions and fads and pure contingencies happen in other parts of our social existence; it may be that there are fashions and cycles in criminal behavior, too, for reasons that are just as arbitrary.

But the additional forty per cent drop in crime that seems peculiar to New York finally succumbs to Zimring’s analysis. The change didn’t come from resolving the deep pathologies that the right fixated on—from jailing super predators, driving down the number of unwed mothers, altering welfare culture. Nor were there cures for the underlying causes pointed to by the left: injustice, discrimination, poverty. Nor were there any “Presto!” effects arising from secret patterns of increased abortions or the like. The city didn’t get much richer; it didn’t get much poorer. There was no significant change in the ethnic makeup or the average wealth or educational levels of New Yorkers as violent crime more or less vanished. “Broken windows” or “turnstile jumping” policing, that is, cracking down on small visible offenses in order to create an atmosphere that refused to license crime, seems to have had a negligible effect; there was, Zimring writes, a great difference between the slogans and the substance of the time. (Arrests for “visible” nonviolent crime—e.g., street prostitution and public gambling—mostly went down through the period.)

Instead, small acts of social engineering, designed simply to stop crimes from happening, helped stop crime. In the nineties, the N.Y.P.D. began to control crime not by fighting minor crimes in safe places but by putting lots of cops in places where lots of crimes happened—“hot-spot policing.” The cops also began an aggressive, controversial program of “stop and frisk”—“designed to catch the sharks, not the dolphins,” as Jack Maple, one of its originators, described it—that involved what’s called pejoratively “profiling.” This was not so much racial, since in any given neighborhood all the suspects were likely to be of the same race or color, as social, involving the thousand small clues that policemen recognized already. Minority communities, Zimring emphasizes, paid a disproportionate price in kids stopped and frisked, and detained, but they also earned a disproportionate gain in crime reduced. “The poor pay more and get more” is Zimring’s way of putting it. He believes that a “light” program of stop-and-frisk could be less alienating and just as effective, and that by bringing down urban crime stop-and-frisk had the net effect of greatly reducing the number of poor minority kids in prison for long stretches.

Zimring insists, plausibly, that he is offering a radical and optimistic rewriting of theories of what crime is and where criminals are, not least because it disconnects crime and minorities. “In 1961, twenty six percent of New York City’s population was minority African American or Hispanic. Now, half of New York’s population is—and what that does in an enormously hopeful way is to destroy the rude assumptions of supply side criminology,” he says. By “supply side criminology,” he means the conservative theory of crime that claimed that social circumstances produced a certain net amount of crime waiting to be expressed; if you stopped it here, it broke out there. The only way to stop crime was to lock up all the potential criminals. In truth, criminal activity seems like most other human choices—a question of contingent occasions and opportunity. Crime is not the consequence of a set number of criminals; criminals are the consequence of a set number of opportunities to commit crimes. Close down the open drug market in Washington Square, and it does not automatically migrate to Tompkins Square Park. It just stops, or the dealers go indoors, where dealing goes on but violent crime does not.

And, in a virtuous cycle, the decreased prevalence of crime fuels a decrease in the prevalence of crime. When your friends are no longer doing street robberies, you’re less likely to do them. Zimring said, in a recent interview, “Remember, nobody ever made a living mugging. There’s no minimum wage in violent crime.” In a sense, he argues, it’s recreational, part of a life style: “Crime is a routine behavior; it’s a thing people do when they get used to doing it.” And therein lies its essential fragility. Crime ends as a result of “cyclical forces operating on situational and contingent things rather than from finding deeply motivated essential linkages.” Conservatives don’t like this view because it shows that being tough doesn’t help; liberals don’t like it because apparently being nice doesn’t help, either. Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.

One fact stands out. While the rest of the country, over the same twenty-year period, saw the growth in incarceration that led to our current astonishing numbers, New York, despite the Rockefeller drug laws, saw a marked decrease in its number of inmates. “New York City, in the midst of a dramatic reduction in crime, is locking up a much smaller number of people, and particularly of young people, than it was at the height of the crime wave,” Zimring observes. Whatever happened to make street crime fall, it had nothing to do with putting more men in prison. The logic is self-evident if we just transfer it to the realm of white-collar crime: we easily accept that there is no net sum of white-collar crime waiting to happen, no inscrutable generation of super-predators produced by Dewar’s-guzzling dads and scaly M.B.A. profs; if you stop an embezzlement scheme here on Third Avenue, another doesn’t naturally start in the next office building. White-collar crime happens through an intersection of pathology and opportunity; getting the S.E.C. busy ending the opportunity is a good way to limit the range of the pathology.

Social trends deeper and less visible to us may appear as future historians analyze what went on. Something other than policing may explain things—just as the coming of cheap credit cards and state lotteries probably did as much to weaken the Mafia’s Five Families in New York, who had depended on loan sharking and numbers running, as the F.B.I. could. It is at least possible, for instance, that the coming of the mobile phone helped drive drug dealing indoors, in ways that helped drive down crime. It may be that the real value of hot spot and stop-and-frisk was that it provided a single game plan that the police believed in; as military history reveals, a bad plan is often better than no plan, especially if the people on the other side think it’s a good plan. But one thing is sure: social epidemics, of crime or of punishment, can be cured more quickly than we might hope with simpler and more superficial mechanisms than we imagine. Throwing a Band-Aid over a bad wound is actually a decent strategy, if the Band-Aid helps the wound to heal itself.

Which leads, further, to one piece of radical common sense: since prison plays at best a small role in stopping even violent crime, very few people, rich or poor, should be in prison for a nonviolent crime. Neither the streets nor the society is made safer by having marijuana users or peddlers locked up, let alone with the horrific sentences now dispensed so easily. For that matter, no social good is served by having the embezzler or the Ponzi schemer locked in a cage for the rest of his life, rather than having him bankrupt and doing community service in the South Bronx for the next decade or two. Would we actually have more fraud and looting of shareholder value if the perpetrators knew that they would lose their bank accounts and their reputation, and have to do community service seven days a week for five years? It seems likely that anyone for whom those sanctions aren’t sufficient is someone for whom no sanctions are ever going to be sufficient. Zimring’s research shows clearly that, if crime drops on the street, criminals coming out of prison stop committing crimes. What matters is the incidence of crime in the world, and the continuity of a culture of crime, not some “lesson learned” in prison.

At the same time, the ugly side of stop-and-frisk can be alleviated. To catch sharks and not dolphins, Zimring’s work suggests, we need to adjust the size of the holes in the nets—to make crimes that are the occasion for stop-and-frisks real crimes, not crimes like marijuana possession. When the New York City police stopped and frisked kids, the main goal was not to jail them for having pot but to get their fingerprints, so that they could be identified if they committed a more serious crime. But all over America the opposite happens: marijuana possession becomes the serious crime. The cost is so enormous, though, in lives ruined and money spent, that the obvious thing to do is not to enforce the law less but to change it now. Dr. Johnson said once that manners make law, and that when manners alter, the law must, too. It’s obvious that marijuana is now an almost universally accepted drug in America: it is not only used casually (which has been true for decades) but also talked about casually on television and in the movies (which has not). One need only watch any stoner movie to see that the perceived risks of smoking dope are not that you’ll get arrested but that you’ll get in trouble with a rival frat or look like an idiot to women. The decriminalization of marijuana would help end the epidemic of imprisonment.

The rate of incarceration in most other rich, free countries, whatever the differences in their histories, is remarkably steady. In countries with Napoleonic justice or common law or some mixture of the two, in countries with adversarial systems and in those with magisterial ones, whether the country once had brutal plantation-style penal colonies, as France did, or was once itself a brutal plantation-style penal colony, like Australia, the natural rate of incarceration seems to hover right around a hundred men per hundred thousand people. (That doesn’t mean it doesn’t get lower in rich, homogeneous countries—just that it never gets much higher in countries otherwise like our own.) It seems that one man in every thousand once in a while does a truly bad thing. All other things being equal, the point of a justice system should be to identify that thousandth guy, find a way to keep him from harming other people, and give everyone else a break.

Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures. Most of the time in the history of medicine, the best way to end disease was to build a better sewer and get people to wash their hands. “Merely chipping away at the problem around the edges” is usually the very best thing to do with a problem; keep chipping away patiently and, eventually, you get to its heart. To read the literature on crime before it dropped is to see the same kind of dystopian despair we find in the new literature of punishment: we’d have to end poverty, or eradicate the ghettos, or declare war on the broken family, or the like, in order to end the crime wave. The truth is, a series of small actions and events ended up eliminating a problem that seemed to hang over everything. There was no miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities. Ending sentencing for drug misdemeanors, decriminalizing marijuana, leaving judges free to use common sense (and, where possible, getting judges who are judges rather than politicians)—many small acts are possible that will help end the epidemic of imprisonment as they helped end the plague of crime.

“Oh, I have taken too little care of this!” King Lear cries out on the heath in his moment of vision. “Take physic, pomp; expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.” “This” changes; in Shakespeare’s time, it was flat-out peasant poverty that starved some and drove others as mad as poor Tom. In Dickens’s and Hugo’s time, it was the industrial revolution that drove kids to mines. But every society has a poor storm that wretches suffer in, and the attitude is always the same: either that the wretches, already dehumanized by their suffering, deserve no pity or that the oppressed, overwhelmed by injustice, will have to wait for a better world. At every moment, the injustice seems inseparable from the community’s life, and in every case the arguments for keeping the system in place were that you would have to revolutionize the entire social order to change it—which then became the argument for revolutionizing the entire social order. In every case, humanity and common sense made the insoluble problem just get up and go away. Prisons are our this. We need take more care.

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From http://www.democracynow.org/2012/1/13/on_eve_of_mlk_day_michelle ...
On Eve of MLK Day, Michelle Alexander & Randall Robinson on the Mass Incarceration of Black America

On this eve of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday, we host a wide-ranging discussion with TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson and author Michelle Alexander about the mass incarceration of African Americans that has rolled back many achievements of the civil rights movement. Today there are more African Americans under correctional control, whether in prison or jail, on probation or on parole, than there were enslaved in 1850. And more African-American men are disenfranchised now because of felon disenfranchisement laws than in 1870. Alexander, whose book "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" is newly released in paperback, argues that "[n]othing less than a major social movement has any hope of ending mass incarceration in America or inspiring a recommitment to [Martin Luther] King's dream... My view is that this has got to be a human rights movement. It’s got to be a movement for education, not incarceration; for jobs, not jails; a movement that acknowledges the basic humanity and dignity of all people, no matter who you are or what you have done."

Guests:
Michelle Alexander, civil rights advocate and the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, which has just been re-released in paperback.
Randall Robinson, founder and past president of TransAfrica and a law professor at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of several books, including An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, from Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President. His most recent book is Makeda, his second novel.

AMY GOODMAN: On this eve of Martin Luther King’s birthday, you write about King in the book. You write about how he once shows up in Richmond and the inspiration of Gray when he saw him speak. Did you meet Dr. King?

RANDALL ROBINSON: He came to my high school. And he walked down my aisle. This was just after the beginning of the bus boycott, and he had become a national figure. And my brother Max and I were sitting on the aisle. And my father, who taught history at the school, was back behind us. And he shook our hands, and I looked back at my father. I looked back at my father. It was a special, special and memorable moment. But even Dr. King is said to have said about this lost memory that, to quote him, "The Negro knows nothing of Africa." I think he said that with some pain and some distress.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to a clip of Dr. King. This is from the famous address in 1963, August 28th.

REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

JUAN GONZALEZ: On this eve of Martin Luther King’s birthday, we want to bring Michelle Alexander into this discussion and talk about Black America. Today there are more African Americans under correctional control, whether in prison or jail, on probation or on parole, than there were enslaved in 1850. And more African-American men are disenfranchised now because of felon disenfranchise laws than in 1870.

AMY GOODMAN: A legal scholar and civil rights advocate, Michelle Alexander has argued in her recent book that although Jim Crow laws have been eliminated, the racial caste system it set up remains intact. It’s simply been redesigned, and now racial control functions through the criminal justice system. Michelle Alexander is the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, former director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, now holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Michelle Alexander.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: As you join with Randall Robinson in this discussion, it’s also the hundredth anniversary of the ANC in South Africa. And you have talked about how there are more African Americans percentage-wise imprisoned in the United States, more black people, than were at the height of apartheid South Africa.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes, yes. You know, I think we’ve become blind in this country to the ways in which we’ve managed to reinvent a caste-like system here in the United States, one that functions in a manner that is as oppressive, in many respects, as the one that existed in South Africa under apartheid and that existed under Jim Crow here in the United States. Although our rules and laws are now officially colorblind, they operate to discriminate in a grossly disproportionate fashion. Through the war on drugs and the "get tough" movement, millions of poor people, overwhelmingly poor people of color, have been swept into our nation’s prisons and jails, branded criminals and felons, primarily for nonviolent and drug-related crimes—the very sorts of crimes that occur with roughly equal frequency in middle-class white neighborhoods and on college campuses but go largely ignored—branded criminals and felons, and then are ushered into a permanent second-class status, where they’re stripped of the many rights supposedly won in the civil rights movement, like the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, and the right to be free of legal discrimination in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, one of the fascinating things in the book, which has now been reissued in paperback, is you talk about your own sort of journey of realizing this, that even as an activist, a civil rights legal activist, that you were not clearly aware of the depth and the extensiveness of this mass incarceration.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yeah, I admit in the introduction to the book that I was blind for a long time. Even as a civil rights lawyer, someone who cared deeply about racial justice and who thought I knew, as a lawyer, how the criminal justice system functioned, I was blind. It was really only after years of representing victims of racial profiling and police brutality and investigating patterns of drug law enforcement in poor communities of color and attempting to assist people re-enter into a society that had never shown much use for them in the first place, that I had a series of experiences that really began my own awakening.

I began to see that our criminal justice system does in fact more—operate more like a caste system than a system of crime prevention or control and that so many of the myths that we are fed about why our prison system, you know, has exploded in the past 30 years, why we now have the largest—the highest rate of incarceration in the world, you know, just don’t even pass the laugh test once you take a close look at them. It is not the case that our prison population has exploded due to a surge in crime or crime rates. It is not true that people of color are more likely to commit drug-related crimes than whites. So many of the excuses that have been offered actually just aren’t true, once you dig a little deeper. And my book is an effort to do just that.

AMY GOODMAN: And let’s talk about what happens when you have a person going to prison, how that affects the rest of their life. First of all, just the astounding figures. It’s something like half the young black men in this country have been incarcerated or on parole, probation. Half?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes. Well, you know, in large urban areas, half or more than half of working-age African-American men now have criminal records and are the subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. In some cities like Chicago, it’s been estimated that nearly 80 percent of working-age African-American men have criminal records and are now part of this undercaste, a group of people, defined largely by race, that are relegated to a permanent second-class status by law.

AMY GOODMAN: What it means, for example, for housing?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes. Well, you know, I think most people have a general sense that when you’re released from prison, life is hard, but, you know, if you work hard and apply self-discipline and stay out of trouble, you can make it. But that’s true only for a relative few. You know, when people are released from prison and have a criminal record, they are discriminated against for the rest of their life in employment. For the rest of their life, they’ve got to check that box on employment applications, knowing that application is likely going straight to the trash.

AMY GOODMAN: Sometimes not even convicted, you have to say you were arrested.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes, absolutely. And in public housing, you can be barred from public housing just based on an arrest. You don’t even have to be convicted. People returning home from prison who want to return to their children or their families, their families risk eviction just by allowing their loved ones to come home to them. Under federal law, you’re deemed ineligible for food stamps for the rest of your life if you’ve been convicted of a drug felony. Now, fortunately, many states have now opted out of the federal ban on food stamps for drug offenders, but it’s still the case that thousands of people can’t even get food, food stamps, because they were once caught with drugs.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to bring Randall Robinson into the conversation. When you were at TransAfrica and you were working in Washington, the climate in Washington in the ’80s and ’90s was just more incarceration, more incarceration. Did any of the political leaders that you dealt with realize the long-term impact of what was happening?

RANDALL ROBINSON: I recall that when we were first being arrested at the embassy and I went to jail that first night, everyone in the lock-up with me was black.

AMY GOODMAN: This was—you were being arrested for protesting apartheid South Africa.

RANDALL ROBINSON: For protesting at the embassy. Everyone was black. And I had some sense of this. I think at the time I was told that one out of every three young black males in the District of Columbia was under one or another arm of the criminal justice system. And what stunned me about it, and what continues to bother me about it, is that when we were struggling during the civil rights movement, some of us were in better positions to benefit from this change that was coming than others were. And so, while we had all been in the same boat during segregation, when change came, we weren’t all in the same boat anymore. Some of us could escape, but others of us were bottom-stuck. And I don’t believe that those of us who escaped worked as hard, as tenaciously, since, to remember those of us who could not.

And the result is that we now see our future as a people in America being warehoused. How can we not be concerned, in some relentless way, about the fate of all of these young black people who are being imprisoned? Because we are indissolubly bound up with them. Their future is our future. Our future is their future. And we have to be mindful of that. But it doesn’t so much penetrate if we don’t have news of it every day. So many people don’t know.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes.

RANDALL ROBINSON: In the same way that you said. And you have done an extraordinary work.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Thank you.

RANDALL ROBINSON: I mean, I am so impressed by the work that you have done. And it is so needed to get us to understand that it is a harness that we all have to get in and pull in.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to this discussion, on this eve of Martin Luther King weekend. We’re speaking with Randall Robinson. His latest book is his second novel. It’s called Makeda. It is set in the dawn of the civil rights era. And we’re joined by Michelle Alexander. Her book has just come out in paperback. It’s called The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. When we come back, we’re also going to talk about what it means in this country, mass incarceration, when it comes to voting and determining who are the representatives of the people of this country. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: On this eve of Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday, a federal holiday—the last two states to acknowledge it were New Hampshire and Arizona—we are having a discussion about the state of Black America. Michelle Alexander has written extensively about the mass incarceration in the age of color blindness, and we want to talk about what that means in terms of voting. People died for the right to vote in the United States. And yet, today, what happens to people who are imprisoned? Just a figure: Human Rights Watch says African-American adults have been arrested at a rate of 2.8 to 5.5 times higher than white adults in every year from 1980 to 2007, yet African Americans and whites have similar rates of illicit drug use and dealing. And then how that plays out right to deciding who will vote for these laws?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Well, absolutely. You know, felon disenfranchisement laws have now accomplished what poll taxes and literacy tests, you know, ultimately could not. People in the United States are stripped of the right to vote in many states if they have a felony conviction, including a minor drug conviction can, you know, wind up labeling you as a felon for life. And when people are released from prison, they can be stripped of the right to vote for a period of years, or in, you know, a few states, for the rest of your life.

And I find that many people kind of shrug their shoulders at that when I, you know, remark on the fact that so many people are denied the right to vote because of criminal convictions. But in other Western democracies, people who are in prison have the right to vote. But here, we deny the right to vote not only if you’re in prison, but once you’re released.

AMY GOODMAN: I think in maybe two states, you’re allowed. One of them is Vermont—

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —where you can vote in prison.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Maine and Vermont, yes, absolutely. But we just don’t seem to take democracy as seriously here in the United States, particularly if you’re poor and of color.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And this whole emphasis in recent years on—by many police departments on quality-of-life arrests and stop-and-frisks. In New York City, for instance, 600,000 people stopped and frisked by police, with 90 percent of them black and Hispanic. And increasingly, the militarization of the schools, arresting students in schools, police departments actually functioning within the schools. The impact on the underside of the building of this Jim Crow system at that level, at the street level and at the school level?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes. You know, that is the engine of mass incarceration, is the stream of people who are fed into the system through these kinds of aggressive policing tactics like stop-and-frisk. And, you know, think about that. You know, in one year alone, 2010, more than 600,000 people were stopped and frisked in the city of New York. And in less than 15 percent of those cases was there any kind of suspect description involved. The overwhelming majority of those stops and frisks were police stopping, frisking people on their way to school, on their way to work, on their way to church. And inevitably, people are fed into the criminal justice system in that fashion and labeled criminals or felons for engaging in extremely minor, nonviolent offenses. Drug use and sales is about as common in middle-class white communities and college campuses as it is in the hood, but it’s poor folks of color who are doing time for these kinds of offenses.

AMY GOODMAN: Michelle Alexander, you’ve talked about the war on drugs as a counterrevolution against the civil rights movement.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes, absolutely. You know, numerous historians and political scientists have documented now that the war on drugs was part of a grand Republican Party strategy, known as the Southern Strategy, of using racially coded, "get tough" political appeals on issues of crime and welfare in order to appeal to poor and working-class white voters who were resentful of, anxious about, fearful of many of the gains of African Americans in the civil rights movement.

And, you know, to be fair, I think we have to acknowledge that poor and working-class whites really had their world rocked by the civil rights movement. You know, wealthy whites could continue to give their kids all of the advantages that wealth has to offer, but it was poor and working-class whites who were faced with the social demotion and whose kids might be bused across town to go to schools inferior. And affirmative action programs created this sense that, you know, black folks were now leapfrogging over them on their way to Harvard or Yale or fancy jobs in corporate America. And this state of affairs created enormous amount of anxiety, fear and resentment. But it also created an enormous political opportunity.

Pollsters and political strategists found that these thinly veiled promises to get tough on a group of people, not so subtly defined by race, could be enormously successful in persuading poor and working-class whites to defect from the Democratic New Deal coalition and join the Republican Party in droves. So the war on drugs was really an effort by the Reagan administration to make good on campaign promises to get tough on a group of people defined largely by race.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you and then Randall Robinson about solutions, informed by your research and your life, movements. We see the Occupy movement today and how it has shaken this country. Now, even the Republicans are going at each other for the kind of capitalism that they practice, the Republican presidential hopefuls, Rick Perry calling Romney a vulture capitalist. What movement do you think needs to take place now?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Well, there absolutely has to be a movement. Nothing less than a major social movement has any hope of ending mass incarceration in America or inspiring a recommitment to King’s dream. You know, if we were to return to the rates of incarceration we had in the 1970s, before the war on drugs and the "get tough" movement kicked off, we would have to release four out of five people who are in prison today. You know, a million people employed by the criminal justice system would lose their jobs. So this system isn’t going to just fade away without a major social upheaval, a fairly radical shift in our public consciousness.

So, my view is that this has got to be a human rights movement. It’s got to be a movement for education, not incarceration; for jobs, not jails; a movement that acknowledges the basic humanity and dignity of all people, no matter who you are or what you have done, so that we don’t view it as normal and natural to strip people of basic civil and human rights following their release from prison.

AMY GOODMAN: Randall Robinson, talking about movements, you spearheaded the anti-apartheid movement in this country, getting arrested numerous times, among other places, in front of the South African embassy. You fasted almost unto the death to stop the—to fight the U.S. government—President Clinton, I think, at the time—to allow Haitians to come into this country at the time of the bloody coup of 1991 to 1994 in Haiti. Talk about the power of movements and what you see, from your perspective now living in St. Kitts, having quit America—the name of one of your books—what you think needs to happen in this country.

RANDALL ROBINSON: Just 12 percent of the people who commit nonviolent drug infractions are black, I think 56 percent of those, nonetheless, who are prosecuted, and something on the order of 75 percent of those who are imprisoned. I mean, we can see the striking unfairness of it. But we have to find a way to get that information to people. Outrage has to be informed by information to go anywhere. South Africa worked because everybody knew about the apartheid system when we went to jail. And so, it was instant. This is a little bit more difficult.

We’re backward in the world in so many ways. We find ourselves in bed with China, Iran and two or three other nations in our embrace of the death penalty, when the rest of the world is moving in the other direction. But 75 percent of those executed are black and Hispanic. And so, the unfairness of it is seen in the statistics of who pays and who doesn’t. We get sentences twice as long for commission of the same crime. It’s just fundamentally unfair.

And the question, Amy, is how we can put this together in a way that is consumable and inspiring to people to let them know that this is not just a black or racial issue, it’s an issue for all Americans who care about democracy and equity and fair play and decency. And that’s what we have to do. We are killing our own country’s future, is what we are doing. And we’re killing genius in jail cells that does not have a chance to blossom and to flower.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And you’ve written some amazing books in terms of impacting on social policy—your book on the debt that the Unites States owes to Black America. But now you’ve moved more into fiction. Your sense of the role of fiction and of creative writers in helping to shape the consciousness and understanding of reality by readers?

RANDALL ROBINSON: I read a lot of fiction. I read both fiction and nonfiction. But there are some people who read only fiction. And I think you can write meaningful fiction for people who would be concerned about the kinds of issues that we’re discussing here today. And nonfiction is not as multi-layered as fiction is. Fiction not only conveys information, but it conveys other dimensions of the human personality and the capacity to care and think and to puzzle out problems.

AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there. I thank you so much, both, for being with us. Randall Robinson will be speaking tonight at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem from 6:00 to 8:00. Randall Robinson’s latest book is a novel; it’s called Makeda. The latest book of Michelle Alexander, just out in paperback, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

re: Iran, Caddyshack, Jon Stewart/Daily Show last night-- wake up, folks...

2012-01-25T22:45:00.001-08:00

[Jon Stewart at beginning of last night's "Daily Show" justifiably mocked Obama's continued sabre-rattling re: Iran-- asking when a new war in a Middle Eastern country become the equivalent of Rodney Dangerfield's exuberant exhortation from the end of "Caddyshack"...lol...more background-- recall my blog post: http://dutchessdemocracy.blogspot.com/2011/12/stop-next-us-war-with-iran-call-obama.html ]

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From http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=637261858&ref=ts#!/events/333764903321430/

Albany says, "No War with Iran"
Public Event · By Joe Lombardo

When: Saturday, February 4, 2012

Time: 12:00 pm until 2:00 pm

Where: Wolf Rd and Central Ave, Colonie

Description: Join Occupy Albany and the Capital District antiwar movement to protest the threat of war with Iran. NO WAR, NO Sanctions, No Assassinations. This is part of a national day of action.

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[new must-read just posted online yesterday from Ray McGovern-- "US/Israel: Iran NOT Building Nukes"
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/01/25-5 ]

[also see-- Rabbi Lerner: http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/mj-rosenberg-on-israels-possible-strike-at-iran ]

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From http://www.Progressive.org ...(note fifth paragraph below in particular!):

Published on Wednesday, January 25, 2012 by The Progressive
In Obama's State of the Union, Troublesome Passages for Progressives

by Matthew Rothschild

Excuse me for not yelling myself hoarse for Obama's warmed over State of the Union address.
While I agree with his call for economic fairness, there was not much in his speech that was new or all that promising. And there were several troublesome passages for progressives.

First, mentioning John Boehner, Obama said he was still open to a grand compromise on Social Security and Medicare, which would make Americans have to work longer and get less benefits from Medicare and Medicaid. We don't need a Democrat to hack away at these crucial social programs.

Second, he took a gratuitous swipe at universal single-payer health care. Sounding like Ronald Reagan, he said, "I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believed: That Government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more." As an illustration, he said, "That's why our health care law relies on a reformed private market, not a Government program." Huh?

He used to say he was for single-payer universal health care. Then, when he was running for President the first time, he said, "If I were starting from scratch," I'd be for single-payer universal health care. Now he disparages it to score cheap political points.

Third, he was belligerent on Iran, saying (to raucous applause) that he would take "no options off the table," which is easily decipherable code for saying he'd threaten to blow Iran off the map if it got one nuclear weapon, even though the United States has thousands and Israel has hundreds.
Fourth, he said that America is a "Pacific power," reiterating the theme of his new strategic doctrine, which is aimed recklessly at China.

And finally, sounding like a mix of Madeleine Albright and George W. Bush, he boasted that the United States is the "one indispensable nation in world affairs-and as long as I'm President, I intend to keep it that way."

This was cheap jingoism that the American people, already suffering from a superiority complex, really could have lived without.

© 2012 The Progessive
Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine.

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From http://www.democracynow.org/2012/1/25/he_says_one_thing_and_does ...

January 25, 2012

"He Says One Thing and Does Another":

Ralph Nader Responds to Obama's State of the Union Address

AMY GOODMAN: We are joined right now by Ralph Nader to talk more about President Obama's State of the Union address, longtime consumer advocate, former presidential candidate. His latest book is Getting Steamed to Overcome Corporatism: Build It Together to Win."
Ralph Nader, your response to the State of the Union address? It could be President Obama's last. It could be the beginning of a new President Obama for a second term. What do you think?

RALPH NADER: Well, I think his lawless militarism, that started the speech and ended the speech, was truly astonishing. I mean, he was very committed to projecting the American empire, in Obama terms, force projection in the Pacific, and distorting the whole process of how he explains Iraq and Afghanistan. He talks about Libya and Syria, and then went into the military alliance with Israel and didn't talk about the peace process or the plight of the Palestinians, who are being so repressed. Leaving Iraq as if it was a victory? Iraq has been destroyed: massive refugees, over a million Iraqis dead, contaminated environment, collapsing infrastructure, sectarian warfare. He should be ashamed of himself that he tries to drape our soldiers, who were sent on lawless military missions to kill and die in those countries, unconstitutional wars that violate Geneva conventions and international law and federal statutes, and drape them as if they've come back from Iwo Jima or Normandy. So I think it was very, very poor taste to start and end with this kind of massive militarism and the Obama empire....

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Recall-- from http://consortiumnews.com/2012/01/12/herding-americans-to-war-with-iran/ ...

Herding Americans to War with Iran
January 12, 2012
By Robert Parry
In spring 2010, a promising effort - led by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Brazil's then-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva - got Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to agree to relinquish Iranian control of nearly half the country's supply of low-enriched uranium in exchange for isotopes for medical research. The Turkish-Brazilian initiative revived a plan first advanced by Obama in 2009 - and the effort had the President's private encouragement. But after Ahmadinejad accepted the deal, Secretary Clinton and other U.S. hardliners switched into overdrive to kill the swap and insist instead on imposing harsher sanctions against Iran.
At the time, Clinton's position was endorsed by editors at the Washington Post and the New York Times, who mocked Erdogan and Lula da Silva as inept understudies on the international stage. If anything, the Post and Times argued, the United States should take an even more belligerent approach toward Iran, i.e. seeking "regime change." [See Consortiumnews.com's "WPost, NYT Show Tough-Guy Swagger."] As Clinton undercut the uranium swap and pushed instead for a new round of United Nations' sanctions, Lula da Silva released a private letter from Obama who had urged the Brazilians to press forward with the swap arrangement. However, with Washington's political momentum favoring another confrontation with a Muslim adversary, Obama retreated and lined up behind the sanctions.
Over the next nearly two years, the sanctions have failed to stop Iran's work on enriched uranium which it claims is needed for medical research. Israel, the neocons and other American hardliners have responded by demanding still more draconian sanctions, while promoting anti-Iran propaganda inside the United States and winking at the murder of Iranian scientists inside Iran.
In this U.S. election year, Israel and the neocons may understand that their political leverage on Obama is at its apex.

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From http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/01/25-5 ...

Published on Wednesday, January 25, 2012 by Common Dreams
US/Israel: Iran NOT Building Nukes

by Ray McGovern

Has Iran decided to build a nuclear bomb? That would seem to be the central question in the current bellicose debate over whether the world should simply cripple Iran's economy and inflict severe pain on its civilian population or launch a preemptive war to destroy its nuclear capability while possibly achieving "regime change."
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak meeting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2007

And if you've been reading the New York Times or following the rest of the Fawning Corporate Media, you'd likely assume that everyone who matters agrees that the answer to the question is yes, although the FCM adds the caveat that Iran insists its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only. The line is included with an almost perceptible wink and an "oh, yeah."

However, a consensus seems to be emerging among the intelligence and military agencies of the United States - and Israel - that Iran has NOT made a decision to build a nuclear weapon. In recent days, that judgment has been expressed by high-profile figures in the defense establishments of the two countries - U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Israel's Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

You might think that you would have heard more about that, wouldn't you? U.S. and Israel agree that Iran is NOT building a nuclear bomb. However, this joint assessment that Iran has NOT decided to build a nuclear bomb apparently represented too big a change in the accepted narrative.

Yet, on Jan. 18, the day before U.S. Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey arrived for talks in Israel, Israeli Defense Minister Barak gave an interview to Israeli Army radio in which he addressed with striking candor how he assesses Iran's nuclear program. It was not the normal pabulum.

Question: Is it Israel's judgment that Iran has not yet decided to turn its nuclear potential into weapons of mass destruction?

Barak: confusion stems from the fact that people ask whether Iran is determined to break out from the control [inspection] regime right now in an attempt to obtain nuclear weapons or an operable installation as quickly as possible. Apparently that is not the case.

Question: How long will it take from the moment Iran decides to turn it into effective weapons until it has nuclear warheads?

Barak: I don't know; one has to estimate. Some say a year, others say 18 months. It doesn't really matter. To do that, Iran would have to announce it is leaving the [UN International Atomic Energy Agency] inspection regime and stop responding to IAEA's criticism, etc.

Why haven't they [the Iranians] done that? Because they realize that when it became clear to everyone that Iran was trying to acquire nuclear weapons, this would constitute definite proof that time is actually running out. This could generate either harsher sanctions or other action against them. They do not want that.

Question: Has the United States asked or demanded that the government inform the Americans in advance, should it decide on military action?

Barak: I don't want to get into that. We have not made a decision to opt for that, we have not decided on a decision-making date. The whole thing is very far off.

Question: You said the whole thing is "very far off." Do you mean weeks, months, years?

Barak: I wouldn't want to provide any estimates. It's certainly not urgent. I don't want to relate to it as though tomorrow it will happen.

As noted in my Jan. 19 article, "Israel Tamps Down Iran War Threats," which was based mostly on reports from the Israeli press before I had access to the complete transcript of the interview, I noted that Barak appeared to be identifying himself with the consistent assessment of U.S. intelligence community since late 2007 that Iran has not made a decision to go forward with a nuclear bomb.

A Momentous NIE

A formal National Intelligence Estimate of November 2007 - a consensus of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies - contradicted the encrusted conventional wisdom that "of course" Iran's nuclear development program must be aimed at producing nuclear weapons. The NIE stated:

"We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program; Tehran's decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005."

The Key Judgments of that Estimate elicited a vituperative reaction from some Israeli officials and in neoconservative circles in the United States. It also angered then-President George W. Bush, who joined the Israelis in expressing disagreement with the judgments. In January 2008, Bush flew to Israel to commiserate with Israeli officials who he said should have been "furious with the United States over the NIE."

While Bush's memoir, Decision Points, is replete with bizarre candor, nothing beats his admission that "the NIE tied my hands on the military side," preventing him from ordering a preemptive war against Iran, an action favored by hawkish Vice President Dick Cheney.

For me personally it was heartening to discover that my former colleagues in the CIA's analytical division had restored the old ethos of telling difficult truths to power, after the disgraceful years under CIA leaders like George Tenet and John McLaughlin when the CIA followed the politically safer route of telling the powerful what they wanted to hear.

It had been three decades since I chaired a couple of National Intelligence Estimates, but fate never gave me the chance to manage one that played such a key role in preventing an unnecessary and disastrous war - as the November 2007 NIE did.

In such pressure-cooker situations, the Estimates job is not for the malleable or the faint-hearted. The ethos was to speak with courage, and without fear or favor, but that is often easier said than done. In my days, however, we analysts enjoyed career protection for telling it like we saw it. It was an incredible boost to morale to see that happening again in 2007.

Ever since the NIE was published, however, powerful politicians and media pundits have sought to chip away at its conclusions, suggesting that the analysts were hopelessly naïve or politically motivated or vengeful, out to punish Bush and Cheney for the heavy-handed tactics used to push false and dubious claims about Iraq's WMD in 2002 and 2003.

A New Conventional Wisdom

There emerged in Official Washington a new conventional wisdom that the NIE was erroneous and wasn't worth mentioning anymore. Though the Obama administration has stood by it, the New York Times and other FCM outlets routinely would state that the United States and Israel agreed that Iran was developing a nuclear bomb and then add the wink-wink denial by Iran.

However, on Jan. 8, Defense Secretary Panetta told Bob Schieffer on "Face the Nation" that "the responsible thing to do right now is to keep putting diplomatic and economic pressure on them [the Iranians] and to make sure that they do not make the decision to proceed with the development of a nuclear weapon."

Panetta was making the implicit point that the Iranians had not made that decision, but just in case someone might miss his meaning, Panetta posed the direct question to himself: "Are they [the Iranians] trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No."

Barak's Jan. 18 statement to Israeli Army radio indicated that his views dovetail with those of Panetta - and their comments apparently are backed up by the assessments of each nation's intelligence analysts. In its report on Defense Minister Barak's remarks, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on Jan. 19 summed up the change in the position of Israeli leaders as follows:

"The intelligence assessment Israeli officials will present to Dempsey indicates that Iran has not yet decided whether to make a nuclear bomb. The Israeli view is that while Iran continues to improve its nuclear capabilities, it has not yet decided whether to translate these capabilities into a nuclear weapon - or, more specifically, a nuclear warhead mounted atop a missile. Nor is it clear when Iran might make such a decision."

At the New York Times, the initial coverage of Barak's interview focused on another element. An article by Isabel Kershner and Rick Gladstone appeared on Jan. 19 on page A5 under the headline "Decision on Whether to Attack Iran is 'Far Off,' Israeli Defense Minister Says."

To their credit, the Times' Kershner and Gladstone did not shrink from offering an accurate translation of what Barak said on the key point of IAEA inspections: "The Iranians have not ended the oversight exercised by the International Atomic Energy Agency They have not done that because they know that that would constitute proof of the military nature of their nuclear program and that would provoke stronger international sanctions or other types of action against their country."

But missing from the Times' article was Barak's more direct assessment that Iran apparently had not made a decision to press ahead toward construction of a nuclear bomb. That would have undercut the boilerplate in almost every Times story saying that U.S. and Israeli officials believe Iran is working on a nuclear bomb.

But That's Not the Right Line!

So, what to do? Not surprisingly, the next day (Jan. 20), the Times ran an article by its Middle East bureau chief Ethan Bronner in which he stated categorically: "Israel and the United States both say that Iran is pursuing the building of nuclear weapons - an assertion denied by Iran - "

By Jan. 21, the Times had time to prepare an entire page (A8) of articles setting the record "straight," so to speak, on Iran's nuclear capabilities and intentions: Here are the most telling excerpts, by article (emphasis mine):

1- "European Union Moves Closer to Imposing Tough Sanctions on Iran," by Steven Erlanger, Paris:
"Senior French officials are concerned that these measures [sanctions] will not be strong enough to push the Iranian government into serious, substantive negotiations on its nuclear program which the West says is aimed at producing weapons."

"In his annual speech on French diplomacy on Friday, President Nicolas Sarkozy accused Iran of lying, and he denounced what he called its 'senseless race for a nuclear bomb.'"

"Iran says it is enriching uranium solely for peaceful uses and denies a military intent. But few in the West believe Tehran, which has not cooperated fully with inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency and has been pursuing some technologies that have only a military use."

(Pardon me, please. I'm having a bad flashback. Anyone remember the Times' peerless reporting on those infamous "aluminum tubes" that supposedly were destined for nuclear centrifuges - until some folks did a Google search and found they were for the artillery then used by Iraq?)

2- "China Leader Warns Iran Not to Make Nuclear Arms," by Michael Wines, Beijing

"Prime Minister Wen Jiabao wrapped up a six-day Middle East tour this week with stronger-than-usual criticism of Iran's defiance on its nuclear program."

"Mr. Wen's comments on Iran were unusually pointed for Chinese diplomacy. In Doha, Qatar's capital, he said China 'adamantly opposes Iran developing and possessing nuclear weapons.'"
"Western nations suspect that Iran is working toward building a nuclear weapon, while Iran insists its program is peaceful."

3- "U.S. General Urges Closer Ties With Israel." by Isabel Kershner, Jerusalem

"Though Iran continues to insist that its nuclear program is only for civilian purposes, Israel, the United Stated, and much of the West are convinced that Iran is working to develop a weapons program. "

Never (Let Up) on Sunday

Next it was time for the Times to trot out David Sanger from the Washington bullpen. Many will remember him as one of the Times' stenographers/cheerleaders for the Bush/Cheney attack on Iraq in March 2003. An effusive hawk also on Iran, Sanger was promoted to a position as chief Washington correspondent, apparently for services rendered.

In his Jan. 22 article, "Confronting Iran in a Year of Elections," Sanger pulls out all the stops, even resurrecting Condoleezza Rice's "mushroom cloud" to scare all of us - and, not least, the Iranians. He wrote:

"'From the perception of the Iranians, life may look better on the other side of the mushroom cloud,' said Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He may be right: while the Obama administration has vowed that it will never tolerate Iran as a nuclear weapons state, a few officials admit that they may have to settle for a 'nuclear capable' Iran that has the technology, the nuclear fuel and the expertise to become a nuclear power in a matter of weeks or months."

Were that not enough, enter the national champion of the Times cheerleading squad that prepared the American people in 2002 and early 2003 for the attack on Iraq, former Executive Editor Bill Keller. He graced us the next day (Jan. 23) with an op-ed entitled "Bomb-Bomb-Bomb, Bomb-Bomb-Iran?" - though he wasn't favoring a military strike, at least not right now. Here's Keller:

"The actual state of the [nuclear] program is not entirely clear, but the best open-source estimates are that if Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ordered full-speed-ahead - which there is no sign he has done - they could have an actual weapon in a year or so. In practice, Obama's policy promises to be tougher than Bush's. Because Obama started out with an offer of direct talks - which the Iranians foolishly spurned - world opinion has shifted in our direction."

Wow. With Iraqi egg still all over his face, the disgraced Keller gets to "spurn" history itself - to rewrite the facts. Sorry, Bill, it was not Iran, but rather Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other neocons in the U.S. Department of State and White House (with you and neocon allies in the press cheering them on), who "foolishly spurned" an offer by Iran in 2010 to trade about half its low-enriched uranium for medical isotopes. It was a deal negotiated by Turkey and Brazil, but it was viewed by the neocons as an obstacle to ratcheting up the sanctions.

In his Jan. 23 column, with more sophomoric glibness, Keller wrote this:

"We may now have sufficient global support to enact the one measure that would be genuinely crippling - a boycott of Iranian oil. The Iranians take this threat to their economic livelihood seriously enough that people who follow the subject no longer minimize the chance of a naval confrontation in the Strait of Hormuz. It's not impossible that we will get war with Iran even without bombing its nuclear facilities."
How neat! War without even trying!

The Paper of (Checkered Record)

Guidance To All NYT Hands: Are you getting the picture? After all, what does Defense Minister Barak know? Or Defense Secretary Panetta? Or the 16 agencies of the U.S. intelligence community? Or apparently even Israeli intelligence?

The marching orders from the Times' management appear to be that you should pay no heed to those sources of information. Just repeat the mantra: Everyone knows Iran is hard at work on the Bomb.
As is well known, other newspapers and media outlets take their cue from the Times. Small wonder, then, that USA Today seemed to be following the same guidance on Jan. 23, as can be seen in its major editorial on military action against Iran:

"The U.S. and Iran will keep steaming toward confrontation, Iran intent on acquiring the bomb to establish itself as a regional power, and the U.S. intent on preventing it to protect allies and avoid a nuclear arms race in the world's most volatile region.

"One day, the U.S. is likely to face a wrenching choice: bomb Iran, with the nation fully united and prepared for the consequences, or let Iran have the weapons, along with a Cold War-like doctrine ensuring Iran's nuclear annihilation if it ever uses them. In that context, sanctions remain the last best hope for a satisfactory solution."

And, of course, the U.S. press corps almost never adds the context that Israel already possesses an undeclared arsenal of hundreds of nuclear weapons, or that Iran is essentially surrounded by nuclear weapons states, including India, Pakistan, Russia, China and - at sea - the United States.
PBS Equally Guilty

PBS's behavior adhered to its customary

don't-offend-the-politicians-who-might-otherwise-cut-our-budget attitude on the Jan. 18 "NewsHour" - about 12 hours after Ehud Barak's interview started making the rounds. Host Margaret Warner set the stage for an interview with neocon Dennis Ross and Vali Nasr (a professor at Tufts) by using a thoroughly misleading clip from former Sen. Rick Santorum's Jan. 1 appearance on "Meet the Press."

Warner started by saying: "Back in the U.S. many Republican presidential candidates have been vowing they'd be even tougher with Tehran. Former Senator Rick Santorum spoke on NBC's Meet the Press: 'I would be saying to the Iranians, you open up those facilities, you begin to dismantle them and make them available to inspectors, or we will degrade those facilities through air strikes and make it very public that we are doing so.'"

Santorum seemed totally unaware that there are U.N. inspectors in Iran, and host David Gregory did nothing to correct him, leaving Santorum's remark unchallenged. The blogosphere immediately lit up with requests for NBC to tell their viewers that there are already U.N. inspectors in Iran, which unlike Israel is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and allows IAEA inspections.
During the Warner interview, Dennis Ross performed true to form, projecting supreme confidence that he knows more about Iran's nuclear program than the Israeli Defense Minister and the U.S. intelligence community combined:

Margaret Warner: If you hamstring their [Iran's] Central Bank, and the U.S. persuades all these other big customers not to buy Iranian oil, that could be thought of as an act of war on the part of the Iranians. Is that a danger?

Ross: I think there's a context here. The context is that the Iranians continue to pursue a nuclear program. And unmistakably to many, that is a nuclear program whose purpose is to achieve nuclear weapons. That has a very high danger, a very high consequence. So the idea that they could continue with that and not realize that at some point they have to make a choice, and if they don't make the choice, the price they're going to pay is a very high one, that's the logic of increasing the pressure.
Never mind that the Israeli Defense Minister had told the press something quite different some 12 hours before.

Still, it is interesting that Barak's comments on how Israeli intelligence views Iran's nuclear program now mesh so closely with the NIE in 2007. This is the new and significant story here, as I believe any objective journalist would agree.

However, the FCM - led by the New York Times - cannot countenance admitting that they have been hyping the threat from Iran as they did with Iraq's non-existent WMDs just nine years ago. So they keep repeating the line that Israel and the U.S. agree that Iran is building a nuclear weapon.

In this up-is-down world, America's newspaper of record won't even report accurately what Israel (or the CIA) thinks on this important issue, if that goes against the alarmist conventional wisdom that the neocons favor. Thus, we have this divergence between what the U.S. media is reporting as flat fact - i.e., that Israel and the United States believe Iran is building a bomb (though Iran denies it) - and the statements from senior Israeli and U.S. officials that Iran has NOT decided to build a bomb.

While this might strike some as splitting hairs - since peaceful nuclear expertise can have potential military use - this hair is a very important one. If Iran is not working on building a nuclear bomb, then the threats of preemptive war are not only unjustified, they could be exactly the motivation for Iran to decide that it does need a nuclear bomb to protect itself and its people.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed the President's Daily Brief and chaired National Intelligence Estimates. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

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From http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/01/25-6 ...

Published on Wednesday, January 25, 2012 by The Independent
It Suits 'Nuclear Israel' That We Never Forget 'Nuclear Iran'
The Ayatollah ordered the entire nuclear project to be closed down because it was the work of the devil

by Robert Fisk

Turning round a story is one of the most difficult tasks in journalism - and rarely more so than in the case of Iran. Iran, the dark revolutionary Islamist menace. Shia Iran, protector and manipulator of World Terror, of Syria and Lebanon and Hamas and Hezbollah. Ahmadinejad, the Mad Caliph. And, of course, Nuclear Iran, preparing to destroy Israel in a mushroom cloud of anti-Semitic hatred, ready to close the Strait of Hormuz - the moment the West's (or Israel's) forces attack.

Given the nature of the theocratic regime, the repulsive suppression of its post-election opponents in 2009, not to mention its massive pools of oil, every attempt to inject common sense into the story also has to carry a medical health warning: no, of course Iran is not a nice place. But ...

Let's take the Israeli version which, despite constant proof that Israel's intelligence services are about as efficient as Syria's, goes on being trumpeted by its friends in the West, none more subservient than Western journalists. The Israeli President warns us now that Iran is on the cusp of producing a nuclear weapon. Heaven preserve us. Yet we reporters do not mention that Shimon Peres, as Israeli Prime Minister, said exactly the same thing in 1996. That was 16 years ago. And we do not recall that the current Israeli PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, said in 1992 that Iran would have a nuclear bomb by 1999. That would be 13 years ago. Same old story.

In fact, we don't know that Iran really is building a nuclear weapon. And after Iraq, it's amazing that the old weapons of mass destruction details are popping with the same frequency as all the poppycock about Saddam's titanic arsenal. Not to mention the date problem. When did all this start? The Shah. The old boy wanted nuclear power. He even said he wanted a bomb because "the US and the Soviet Union had nuclear bombs" and no one objected. Europeans rushed to supply the dictator's wish. Siemens - not Russia - built the Bushehr nuclear facility.

And when Ayatollah Khomeini, Scourge of the West, Apostle of Shia Revolution, etc, took over Iran in 1979, he ordered the entire nuclear project to be closed down because it was "the work of the Devil". Only when Saddam invaded Iran - with our Western encouragement - and started using poison gas against the Iranians (chemical components arriving from the West, of course) was Khomeini persuaded to reopen it.

All this has been deleted from the historical record; it was the black-turbaned mullahs who started the nuclear project, along with the crackpot Ahmadinejad. And Israel might have to destroy this terror-weapon to secure its own survival, to ensure the West's survival, for democracy, etc, etc.

For Palestinians in the West Bank, Israel is the brutal, colonising, occupying power. But the moment Iran is mentioned, this colonial power turns into a tiny, vulnerable, peaceful state under imminent threat of extinction. Ahmadinejad - here again, I quote Netanyahu - is more dangerous than Hitler. Israel's own nuclear warheads - all too real and now numbering almost 300 - disappear from the story. Iran's Revolutionary Guards are helping the Syrian regime destroy its opponents; they might like to - but there is no proof of this.

The trouble is that Iran has won almost all its recent wars without firing a shot. George W and Tony destroyed Iran's nemesis in Iraq. They killed thousands of the Sunni army whom Iran itself always referred to as "the black Taliban". And the Gulf Arabs, our "moderate" friends, shiver in their golden mosques as we in the West outline their fate in the event of an Iranian Shia revolution.

No wonder Cameron goes on selling weapons to these preposterous people whose armies, in many cases, could scarcely operate soup kitchens, let alone the billions of dollars of sophisticated kit we flog them under the fearful shadow of Tehran.

Bring on the sanctions. Send in the clowns.

© 2012 The Independent

Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent for The Independent newspaper. He is the author of many books on the region, including The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East.

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From http://consortiumnews.com/2012/01/12/herding-americans-to-war-with-iran/ ...

Herding Americans to War with Iran
January 12, 2012

Exclusive: The murder of a fifth Iranian scientist on the streets of Tehran had all the earmarks of an Israeli-sponsored assassination. The killing also worsened tensions at a moment when the momentum toward war with Iran seems unstoppable, reports Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry

For many Americans the progression toward war with Iran has the feel of cattle being herded from the stockyard into the slaughterhouse, pressed steadily forward with no turning back, until some guy shoots a bolt into your head.

Any suggestion of give-and-take negotiations with Iran is mocked, while alarmist propaganda, a ratcheting up of sanctions, and provocative actions - like Wednesday's assassination of yet another Iranian scientist - push Americans closer to what seems like an inevitable bloodletting.
Even the New York Times now acknowledges that Israel, with some help from the United States, appears to be conducting a covert war of sabotage and assassination inside Iran. "The campaign, which experts believe is being carried out mainly by Israel, apparently claimed its latest victim on Wednesday when a bomb killed a 32-year-old nuclear scientist in Tehran's morning rush hour," Times reporter Scott Shane wrote in Thursday's editions.

Though U.S. officials emphatically denied any role in the murder, Israeli officials did little to discourage rumors of an Israeli hand in the bombing. Some even expressed approval. Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai said he didn't know who killed the scientist but added: "I am definitely not shedding a tear."

The latest victim, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, was the fifth scientist associated with Iran's nuclear program to be killed in the past four years, with a sixth scientist narrowly escaping death in 2010, Fereydoon Abbasi, who is now head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization.

As might be expected, Iran has denounced the murders as acts of terrorism. They have been accompanied by cyber-attacks on Iranian centrifuges and an explosion at a missile facility late last year killing a senior general and 16 others.

While this campaign has slowed Iran's nuclear progress, it also appears to have hardened its resolve to continue work on a nuclear capability, which Iran says is for peaceful purposes only. Iranian authorities also have responded to tightening economic sanctions from Europe and the United States with threats of their own, such as warnings about closing the oil routes through the Strait of Hormuz and thus damaging the West's economies.

Target: USA

Another front in Israel's cold war against Iran appears to be the propaganda war being fought inside the United States, where the still-influential neoconservatives are deploying their extensive political and media resources to shut off possible routes toward a peaceful settlement, while building support for future military strikes against Iran.

Fitting with that propaganda strategy, the Washington Post's editorial page, which is essentially the neocons' media flagship, published a lead editorial on Wednesday urging harsher and harsher sanctions against Iran and ridiculing anyone who favored reduced tensions.

Noting Iran's announcement that it had opened a better-protected uranium enrichment plant near Qom, the Post wrote: "In short, the new Fordow operation crosses another important line in Iran's advance toward a nuclear weapons capability.

"Was it a red line for Israel or the United States? Apparently not, for the Obama administration at least. In a television interview Sunday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said: 'Our red line to Iran is: do not develop a nuclear weapon.' He asserted that Tehran was not trying to develop a weapon now, only 'a nuclear capability.' The Revolutionary Guard, which controls the nuclear program, might well take that as a green light for the new enrichment operation."

While portraying Panetta as an Iranian tool, the Post suggested that anyone who wanted to turn back from an Iran confrontation was an Iranian useful fool. The Post wrote:

"The recent flurry of Iranian threats has had the intended effect of prompting a new chorus of demands in Washington that the United States and its allies stop tightening sanctions and instead make another attempt at 'engagement' with the regime. The Ahmadinejad government itself reportedly has proposed new negotiations, and Turkey has stepped forward as a host.

"Almost certainly, any talks will reveal that Iran is unwilling to stop its nuclear activities or even to make significant concessions. But they may serve to stop or greatly delay a European oil embargo or the implementation of sanctions on the [Iranian] central bank - and buy time for the Fordow centrifuges to do their work."

The Post's recommended instead "that every effort must be made to intensify sanctions" and to stop Iranian sale of oil anywhere in the world. In other words, continue to ratchet up the tensions and cut off hopes for genuine negotiations.

A Vulnerable Obama

The escalating neocon demands for an ever-harder U.S. line against Iran - and Israel's apparent campaign of killings and sabotage inside Iran - come at a time when President Barack Obama and some of his inner circle appear to be looking again for ways to defuse tensions. But the Post's editorial - and similar neocon propaganda - have made clear that any move toward reconciliation will come with a high political price tag.

Already, a recurring Republican talking point is that Obama's earlier efforts to open channels of negotiation with Iran and other foreign adversaries proved his naivete and amounted to "apologizing" for America. Obama also has faced resistance within his own administration, especially from neocon-lites such as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

For instance, in spring 2010, a promising effort - led by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Brazil's then-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva - got Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to agree to relinquish Iranian control of nearly half the country's supply of low-enriched uranium in exchange for isotopes for medical research.

The Turkish-Brazilian initiative revived a plan first advanced by Obama in 2009 - and the effort had the President's private encouragement. But after Ahmadinejad accepted the deal, Secretary Clinton and other U.S. hardliners switched into overdrive to kill the swap and insist instead on imposing harsher sanctions against Iran.

At the time, Clinton's position was endorsed by editors at the Washington Post and the New York Times, who mocked Erdogan and Lula da Silva as inept understudies on the international stage. If anything, the Post and Times argued, the United States should take an even more belligerent approach toward Iran, i.e. seeking "regime change." [See Consortiumnews.com's "WPost, NYT Show Tough-Guy Swagger."]

As Clinton undercut the uranium swap and pushed instead for a new round of United Nations' sanctions, Lula da Silva released a private letter from Obama who had urged the Brazilians to press forward with the swap arrangement. However, with Washington's political momentum favoring another confrontation with a Muslim adversary, Obama retreated and lined up behind the sanctions.

Over the next nearly two years, the sanctions have failed to stop Iran's work on enriched uranium which it claims is needed for medical research. Israel, the neocons and other American hardliners have responded by demanding still more draconian sanctions, while promoting anti-Iran propaganda inside the United States and winking at the murder of Iranian scientists inside Iran.
In this U.S. election year, Israel and the neocons may understand that their political leverage on Obama is at its apex. So, if he again searches for openings to negotiate with Iran, he can expect the same kind of nasty disdain that the Washington Post heaped on Panetta on Wednesday.

The Carter-Begin Precedent

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Likud leaders appear to fear a second Obama term - when he'd be freed from the need to seek reelection - much as their predecessors feared a second term for President Jimmy Carter in 1980. Then, Prime Minister Menachem Begin thought that Carter in a second term would team up with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in forcing Israel to accept a Palestinian state.

Begin's alarm about that prospect was described by Israeli intelligence and foreign affairs official David Kimche in his 1991 book, The Last Option. Kimche wrote that Begin's government believed that Carter was overly sympathetic to the Palestinians.

"Begin was being set up for diplomatic slaughter by the master butchers in Washington," Kimche wrote. "They had, moreover, the apparent blessing of the two presidents, Carter and Sadat, for this bizarre and clumsy attempt at collusion designed to force Israel to abandon her refusal to withdraw from territories occupied in 1967, including Jerusalem, and to agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state."

Extensive evidence now exists that Begin's preference for Ronald Reagan led Israelis to join in a covert operation with Republicans to contact Iranian leaders behind Carter's back and delay release of the 52 American hostages then being held in Iran until after Reagan defeated Carter in November 1980. [For details, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege or Consortiumnews.com's "The Back Story on Iran's Clashes."]

Today, Obama's relationship with Netanyahu seems as strained as Carter's relationship with Begin was three decades ago. And already many American neocons have signed up with Obama's Republican rivals, including with GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney whose foreign policy white paper was written by prominent neocons.

So the question now is: Will the President of the United States take his place amid the herd of cattle getting steered into the slaughterhouse of another war?

[For more on related topics, see Robert Parry's Lost History, Secrecy & Privilege and Neck Deep, now available in a three-book set for the discount price of only $29. For details, click here.]

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there.

Bill/Anne McCabe house party for my Congressional campaign Feb. 12th-- help us take back 20th c.d.!...

2012-01-24T20:43:00.000-08:00

Hi all...

Come out if you can to join former three-term Co. Leg. Bill McCabe and his wife, Dem extraordinaire Anne McCabe-- on Sunday, Feb. 12th from noon to 2 pm-- they're hosting a house party for my Congressional campaign at their home at 81 Darren Rd. in LaGrangeville (12540) that afternoon!...

[momentum building; send $$ now to Joel for Congress, 324 Browns Pond Rd., Staatsburg, NY 12580]

Pass it on...

Joel
845-444-0599/876-2488
joeltyner@earthlink.net
http://www.JoelforCongress.org

p.s. Let us know if you can help us host a house party on our 130-mile, 13-day walk from FDR site to Glens Falls starting Feb. 16th-- our "We Are the 99%-- Walk for Main Street Not Wall Street"-- see http://www.facebook.com/events/299171360128720/ ; rsvp at this FB event link if you can come out to this-- even if just for kickoff on Feb. 16th-- or part of this; along way: will be press conf.'s/rallies @ schools, colleges, hospitals, town/city/village halls-- ending up at Gibson's Glens Falls office Feb. 28!...

[also-- we're looking for house party to happen Sun. Feb. 5th...any takers out there?...let us know asap]

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Forty-eight (48-- count 'em) reasons here below why we, together, will take back the 20th c.d. in Nov.:

[...aside from fact that, as Newt sez-- "people power beats money power every time" (lol).....he's right!...]

1. In case you happened to miss WAMC/Alan Chartock interviews with me that aired Weds. & Thurs.:
http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wamc/news.newsmain/article/5586/0/1894964/Congressional.Corner/Congressional.Corner.with.Joel.Tyner.-.Part.1
http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wamc/news.newsmain/article/5586/0/1894968/Congressional.Corner/Congressional.Corner.with.Joel.Tyner.-.Part.2

2. Our new Students for Tyner group has launched on Facebook-- thx to the efforts of Norman Rodriguez, Spencer Resnick, Evan Seltzer (intern for my campaign @ Vassar College), Stephen Greiner (of DCC), Kyle Van Steenburgh, Brady Massey (many of these from Occupy Poughkeepsie), Nick Streva (of Arlington High School), Steve Meddaugh (of Poughkeepsie High School), and great young folks from Occupy Albany like Daniel Micah Morrissey, Colin Donnaruma, and Jackie Hayes of Save Our SUNY...(we even had seven folks show up this past Sat. for mtg.-- in middle of snowstorm!)...
[join Students for Tyner here: http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Students-for-Tyner/264992996887802

3. Our new Women for Tyner group has launched on Facebook (thx to my Columbia County friends)...

4. Lee Jamison, Christian Sweningsen, Shirley Ripullone, Bruce Burns, Ellen Melnick, Ernie Reis, Leslie Gabriel, and many more have stepped up to the plate to get my signs all over Columbia County...

5. Rebecca Crawford has stepped up to the plate to get my signs out all over Saratoga County...

6. Phil Markham has stepped up to the plate to get my signs out all over Rensselaer County...

7. Tracy Frisch & David Doonan have stepped up to plate to help my campaign in Washington County...

8. Tom Carpenter has stepped up to the plate to put together fundraising for me in Greene County...

9. Matt Funiciello (of Rock Hill Bake House), Enid Mastrianni, & Judith Tully covering Warren County...
[note-- thanks to Matt F. and Fred Nagel-- we'll be co-hosting a free screening of Jamie Johnson's documentary "The One Percent" next Friday, Feb. 3rd at 7 pm at the Rock Hill Bake House at 19 Exchange Street in Glens Falls (admission free; though attendees encouraged to make contributions);
see http://www.TheOnePercentDocumentary.com ; http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0819791/ ]

10. Many anti-fractivists are helping me in Delaware and Otsego counties; support in Essex Co. as well.

11. Among others endorsing my campaign are the Dutchess and Columbia County Democratic Elections Commissioners Fran Knapp and Virginia Martin, Cornel West, Josh Fox, Jeff Cohen, Troy Area Labor Council President Mike Keenan, Wayne Bayer, a DEC engineer who is a shop steward for the Public Employees Federation (someone who has spoken out frequently/publicly against fracking).

12. Check out http://www.PetitionOnline.com/Joel (sign on if you agree!)...220+ other folks from across the 20th c.d. have endorsed my campaign-- many of the best labor activists, peace activists, feminists, fractivists, and Dem activists in the Hudson Valley, Capital District, North Country, and Catskills; click on "view current signatures" at to see for yourself (also-- 3300 following me now on Facebook; join us!).

13. I've also proven that I get votes from folks from all over the political spectrum; I just got elected to a fifth consecutive term to represent Rhinebeck and Clinton in the Dutchess County Legislature-- though both towns now have Republican Town Supervisors (as they have had for many, many years now).

14. Buzz starting to build about my 130-mile, 13-day walk from FDR site to Glens Falls starting Feb. 16:

It's all online: Facebook event, folks-- sign up(!): http://www.facebook.com/events/299171360128720/ ...

[rsvp at this FB event link if you can come out to this-- even if just for kickoff on Feb. 16th-- or part of this;
along way: will be press conf.'s/rallies @ schools, colleges, hospitals, town/city/village halls-- help us; we have over four weeks now to organize for this; let's make events happen each one of these 13 days!]

130-Mile Walk for the 99%-- Voters Beware: Gibson Cut Medicare

Public Event · By Joel Tyner

When: Thursday, February 16, 2012 at 12:30 pm-- until Tuesday, February 28, 2012 at 5:30 pm

Where: Start in front of FDR National Historic Site, Rt. 9 (4097 Albany Post Road), Hyde Park, NY

Description: RSVP here if you can join five-term Dutchess County Legislator Joel Tyner (Rhinebeck/Clinton), Democratic candidate for Congress in the 20th c.d., for at least part of his 13-day, 130-mile "Walk for the 99%-- Voters Beware: Gibson Cut Medicare!"...kicking off Thursday, Feb. 16th at 12:30 pm in front of the FDR National Historic Site on Rt. 9 in Hyde Park-- and ending up Tuesday, Feb. 28th at 5:30 pm in front of Rep. Chris Gibson's Glens Falls district office at 136 Glen Street (12801) there!

[important-- rsvp here even if you only come out for Feb. 16th kickoff, k?]

[recall Joel's blog on all this last Aug. 31st:
http://dutchessdemocracy.blogspot.com/2011/08/truth-re-gibson-anti-senior-anti.html ]

We're looking to have folks walking with Joel along the route (we'll have plenty of 99% for Tyner signs too-- new white-letters-on-purple ones)!

[note-- am also looking to do a similar walk through Greene, Otsego, and Delaware counties; also Essex; the walk above will take me through Dutchess, Columbia, Rensselaer, Saratoga, Washington, Warren counties]

Here's the tentative schedule for our walk:

[let us know if you can help host a gathering/house party along the way; also, let us know if you have constructive feedback/ideas re: route too]

[specifically, also let us know if you can join us for press conferences, rallies, and candlelight vigils we'll be holding along the way-- need your help, folks!]

Day 1: Thurs. Feb. 16th-- from Hyde Park to Rhinebeck

Day 2: Fri. Feb. 17th-- from Rhinebeck to Germantown

Day 3: Sat. Feb. 18th-- from Germantown to Hudson
Day 4: Sun. Feb. 19th-- from Hudson to Stuyvesant

Day 5: Mon. Feb. 20th-- from Stuyvesant to Schodack

Day 6: Tues. Feb. 21st-- from Schodack to Rensselaer

Day 7: Weds. Feb. 22nd-- from Rensselaer to Troy
Day 8: Thurs. Feb. 23rd-- from Troy to Clifton Park

Day 9: Fri. Feb. 24th-- from Clifton Park to Ballston Spa

Day 10: Sat. Feb. 25th-- from Ballston Spa to Saratoga Springs

Day 11: Sun. Feb. 26th-- from Saratoga Springs to Gansevoort
Day 12: Mon. Feb. 27th-- from Gansevoort to Fort Edward

Day 13: Tues. Feb. 28th-- from Fort Edward to Glens Falls

[recall my 12-day, 140-mile NYC-Albany walk back in summer of 2010 for Main Street Not Wall Street --
http://dutchessdemocracy.blogspot.com/2010/07/thanx-tons-to-all-of-you-who-stood-with.html ]

15. Fact: I refuse to accept any campaign donations whatsoever from Wall Street or the insurance industry-- and will fight in Congress to stop any cuts to Medicare or Social Security.

16. Fact: Chris Gibson has raked in over $122,000 over just the last two years alone from securities and investment firms on Wall Street and over $46,000 from the insurance industry as well over same time.
[ http://maplight.org/us-congress/legislator/1461-chris-gibson ]

17. Fact: The Wall Street Journal reported April 4th last year that the Gibson/Cantor/Boehner "Cut, Cap, and Kill" legislation would "essentially end Medicare", eliminating 700,000 jobs; Gibson staff lie re: this.
[ http://dutchessdemocracy.blogspot.com/2011/08/truth-re-gibson-anti-senior-anti.html ]

18. Fact: Gibson voted Nov.: so-called "Balanced Budget Amendment": Social Security/Medicare cuts.
[ http://dutchessdemocracy.blogspot.com/2011/11/hinchey-tonko-owens-right-gibson-wrong.html ]

[again-- am looking for senior citizen(s) out there in 20th c.d. to help us launch Seniors for Tyner on FB!]

19. Fact: "In a recent poll by the Pew Research Center, 77 percent of Americans said too much power is concentrated in the hands of a few rich people and large corporations. In a poll by Time Magazine, 86 percent of Americans said Wall Street and its lobbyists have too much influence in Washington."
[from "Corporate Rule Is Not Inevitable" by Sarah van Gelder (Jan. 20th):
http://www.YesMagazine.org/blogs/sarah-van-gelder/corporate-rule-is-not-inevitable ]

20. Fact: 81% of Americans support taxing millionaires/billionaires more: solve federal budget woes.
[ http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/7333/what_americans_want_the_peoples_budget ]

21. Fact: 78% of Americans support protecting Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid from any cuts.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/poll-shows-americans-oppose-entitlement-cuts-to-deal-with-debt-problem/2011/04/19/AFoiAH9D_story.html

22. Fact: 59% of Americans support expanding Medicare to cover us all-- to save $400 billion a year.
http://www.healthcare-now.org/another-poll-shows-majority-support-for-single-payer/ ; PNHP.org

23. Fact: 80% of Americans support amending Constitution to make it clear-- corporations aren't people.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenumbers/2010/02/in-supreme-court-ruling-on-campaign-finance-the-public-dissents.html ; http://www.freespeechforpeople.org/node/75

24. Fact: 67% of Americans support $10/hour minimum wage to put money in pockets of working class.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/06/americans-minimum-wage-poll_n_752921.html

25. Fact: 53% of Americans support full federal funding for Planned Parenthood & reproductive justice.
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/node/15708

26. Fact: More New Yorkers support protecting drinking water with statewide ban on fracking than not.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/15/new-york-gas-drilling-rul_n_900011.html

27. Fact: 54% of Americans support full funding for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency-- not cuts.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2011/02/16/harris-poll-epa-budget/ ]

28. Fact: 79% of New Yorkers support Clean Money Clean Elections-- real campaign finance reform.
http://rochesterturning.com/2008/04/28/poll-says-3-of-4-new-yorkers-support-publicly-financed-elections/

29. Fact: 59% of Americans support our troops coming home from Afghanistan and Iraq now without delay.
http://www.thinkprogress.org/2011/05/11/afghanistan-get-out-59-percent/

30. Fact: Gibson voted with House majority in Sept. to allocate only half the FEMA funding Senate did.
[ http://dutchessdemocracy.blogspot.com/2011/09/hincheytonko-right-re-fema-shame-on.html ]

31. Fact: Gibson voted for Ryan budget Apr. 15th against the disAbled-- by cutting Medicaid by 35%.
[ http://dutchessdemocracy.blogspot.com/2011/12/gibson-forcing-people-with-disabilities.html ]

32. Fact: Gibson voted last month for REINS-- jeopardizing food safety and Dodd-Frank provisions.
[ http://dutchessdemocracy.blogspot.com/2011/12/another-bad-gibson-vote-this-week-for.html ]

33. Fact: Gibson's signing on to Grover Norquist's "no new tax" pledge means Congressman 1% will continue ignoring an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll in March finding that 81% of Americans support taxing millionaires to solve federal budget problems-- not putting Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security on chopping block (send me to Washington-- I'll be an even louder voice telling both GOP and Dems to save all 3 of these from cuts; see just below-- new United for a Fair Economy update on this.
[recall-- infamous Town Hall forum Gibson hosted in August in Millerton-- folks are upset(!)...I was there]
[ http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/7333/what_americans_want_the_peoples_budget ;
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/invoke-the-14th--and-end-the-debt-standoff/2011/07/01/gHQAUif8yH_story.html ; http://www.PetitionOnline.com/ILikeIke ;
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/08/26/305451/citizen-slams-gop-rep-over-anti-tax-pledge-we-are-your-consituents-not-grover-norquist/ ]

34. Fact: Gibson refuses to support Obama's American Jobs Act-- and he also refuses to support Rep. Jan Schakowsky's even better "Emergency Jobs to Restore the American Dream Act", which would create 2.2 million jobs rebuilding our infrastructure and hiring in our schools, hospitals, child care centers, parks, police officers, firefighters, weatherization, and recycling-- by raising taxes for Americans who earn more than $1 million and $1 billion, by eliminating subsidies for big oil companies, and by closing loopholes for corporations that send American jobs overseas.
[see: http://www.AmericanJobsAct.com ; recall my http://www.PetitionOnline.com/JobsNow effort]

35. Fact: Gibson voted last month for only $3.65 billion in funding for FEMA for Tropical Storm Irene relief for homeowners, businesses, and our communities-- even after the Senate had just approved $6.9 billion for FEMA in strong bipartisan majority.
[ http://dutchessdemocracy.blogspot.com/2011/10/shame-on-gibsonhayworth-only-26-billion.html ]

36. Fact: Gibson voted last month to kill more American jobs by extending so-called "free-trade" agreements to Korea, Panama, and Colombia-- though we've already lost 5 million jobs from NAFTA.
[ http://blog.timesunion.com/capitol/archives/83832/tonko-gibson-at-odds-on-trade-agreements/ ;
http://www.americanjobsalliance.com/content/new-free-trade-pacts-will-hurt-middle-class ]

37. Fact: Gibson voted this February to eliminate $300 million in Title X Planned Parenthood funding-- even though "Title X funding can only be used for family planning services including birth control, life saving cervical and breast cancer screenings, HIV counseling and testing, testing and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, and education. The funding cannot and is not used to provide abortion services. Under the proposal, 48 percent of Planned Parenthood patients nationwide would be cut off from their source of health care for these essential services. Ninety-seven percent of the services provided by Planned Parenthood are preventive, most of which are women's gynecology services."
http://www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us/newsroom/local-press-releases/representatives-gibson-hayworth-vote-block-funds-planned-parenthood-would-cut-health-care-milli-36335.htm

38. Fact: Gibson voted last month for HR 358-- legislation that "would allow a hospital to deny a woman lifesaving emergency abortion care-even if a doctor deems it necessary. It would also take comprehensive health care coverage away from women and create loopholes that states and insurance companies could exploit to undermine the new requirement that insurance companies provide birth control with no co-pays or deductibles."
http://www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us/newsroom/local-press-releases/rep-gibson-votes-deny-lifesaving-emergency-health-care-women-38215.htm

39. Fact: Gibson's allegiance to Grover Norquist jeopardizes national support for farmland protection.
As Rhinebeck resident and Scenic Hudson Senior Vice President Steve Rosenberg noted recently on WAMC, it's crucial that even the small amount of federal funding for farmland protection ($100 million) now in the the farm bill about to be re-authorized be maintained-- the fact is this becomes more and more impossible with Norquist acolytes like Gibson in office who reject progressive taxation.
[ http://www.riverkeeper.org/news-events/news/stop-polluters/pollution-enforcement/outlining-vision/ ]

40. Fact: Gibson refuses to push for a wide variety of common-sense progressive initiatives that have broad populist support, as evidenced repeatedly by many polls-- a statewide ban on fracking (and immediate national moratorium), a liveable minimum wage, Medicare for all, Clean Money Clean Elections campaign finance reform, amending the Constitution to make it clear corporations aren't people, taxing Wall Street, breaking up the big banks, bringing back the Glass-Steagall Act, ending the speculation driving gas/oil prices up through the roof, bringing our troops now from Afghanistan, Iraq, and all over the globe to save $125 billion a year for taxpayers (and redirect $ home to our needs)-- and he refuses to lift a finger to join Sen. Bernie Sanders in seriously challenging the $16 TRILLION the Federal Reserve recently lent out to practically every major financial institution and corporation around.
[ http://www.AMillionFrackingLetters.com ; http://www.FrackAction.com ; http://www.ToxicsTargeting.com
http://sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=9e2a4ea8-6e73-4be2-a753-62060dcbb3c3
http://www.freespeechforpeople.org/node/75 ; http://www.PetitionOnline.com/FDRagain ;
http://www.thinkprogress.org/2011/05/11/afghanistan-get-out-59-percent ]

41. Fact: Rep. Chris Gibson voted Dec. 14th for the atrocious indefinite detention NDAA bill ("The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012-- (House Vote 932 - H.R.1540: On Agreeing to the Conference Report").
[see: http://dutchessdemocracy.blogspot.com/2011/12/fact-gibson-voted-for-indefinite.html ;
http://www.politics.nytimes.com/congress/votes/112/house/1/932 ]

42. Fact: Rep. Maurice Hinchey, Rep. Paul Tonko, and 91 other Democratic (and principled) members of the House of Representatives voted Dec. 14th against the indefinite detention NDAA legislation.
[see: http://www.votesmart.org/bill/14203/37472/ ]

43. Fact: It wasn't just 93 Democrats in the House who voted against the indefinite detention NDAA bill; the truth is also that literally 43 GOP members of the House of Representatives (but not Chris Gibson) voted Dec. 14th against indefinite detention NDAA legislation-- all the following GOP (not Chris Gibson tho):

44. Republicans Justin Amah (MI-3), Larry Buchshon (IN-8), Michael Burgess (TX-26), Dan Burton (IN-5), John Campbell (CA-48), Jason Chaffetz (VT-3), Mike Coffman (CO-6), Scott DesJarlais (TN-4), Jeffrey Duncan (SC-3), John Duncan, Jr. (TN-2), Jeff Flake (AZ-6), J. Randy Forbes (VA-4), Scott Garrett (NJ-5), Robert Goodlatte (VA-6), Paul Gosar (AZ-1), Trey Gowdy (SC-4), Tom Graves (GA-9), Morgan Griffith (VA-9), Andy Harris (MD-1), Robert Hurt (VA-5), Tim Johnson (IL-15), Walter Jones (NC-3), Paul Labrador (ID-1), Cynthia Lumnis (WY-1), Connie Mack (FL-14), Tom McClintock (CA-4), Mick Mulvaney (SC-5), Mike Pence (IN-6), Bill Posey (FL-15), Reid Ribble (WI-8), Phil Roe (TN-1), Dana Rohrabacher (CA-46), Todd Rokita (IN-4), Ed Royce (CA-40), David Schweikert (AZ-5), Mike Simpson (ID-2), Marlin Stutzman (IN-3), Scott Tipton (CO-3), Tim Walberg (MI-7), Joe Walsh (IL-8), and Rob Woodall (GA-7)!
[see: http://www.opencongress.org/roll_call/show/9593 ]

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45. This-- from http://www.DCCC.org/races/district/new_yorks_20th ...

[more info here from Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee]

House Republicans voted for a radical budget that ends Medicare rather than ending taxpayer giveaways for Big Oil or tax breaks for the ultra rich. Republicans' [Chris Gibson's] plan would be devastating to seniors in the district who are currently enrolled in Medicare:

* Increase prescription drug costs for 11,200 Medicare beneficiaries in the district who would be caught in the "donut hole."
* Eliminate new preventative care benefits for 117,000 Medicare beneficiaries in the district.

Republicans' [Chris Gibson's] radical plan to end Medicare would also affect those 54 or younger who are not currently enrolled in Medicare:

* Deny 480,000 individuals age 54 and younger in the district access to Medicare's guaranteed benefits.

* Increase the out-of-pocket costs of health coverage by over $6,000 per year in 2022 and by almost $12,000 per year in 2032 for the 125,000 individuals in the district who are between the ages of 44 and 54.

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46. This NYTimes editorial from Dec. 31st:

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL
The Damage of 2011
Published: December 30, 2011

After they took power in January, the hard-line Republicans who dominate the House reached for a radical overhaul of American government, hoping to unravel the social safety net, cut taxes further for the wealthy and strip away regulation of business. Fortunately, thanks to defensive tactics by Democrats, they failed to achieve most of their agenda.

But they still did significant damage in 2011 to many of the most important functions of government, and particularly to investments in education, training and transportation that the country will need for a sound economic recovery.

With a threatened government shutdown in April, the Republicans pushed through spending cuts of about $25 billion over a decade. Then, in August, the agreement to raise the debt ceiling - an unnecessary crisis created by the Republicans - cut nearly $2 trillion through 2021 with strict spending caps, a move that will hurt hundreds of programs serving millions of Americans for a full decade and longer.

Given the level of extortion they faced, the White House budget office and Congressional Democrats negotiated relatively well. They prevented Republicans from touching Medicare recipients, Medicaid, Social Security and other programs. (President Obama did offer to cut entitlement spending in exchange for higher tax revenues, but Republicans refused that deal.) They arranged for more than $500 billion in cuts to come from defense spending. And they did not agree to extend the Bush tax cuts, now scheduled to expire at the end of 2012.

But that still leaves major reductions in the vital category known as nondefense discretionary spending, which faces cuts of around $800 billion over a decade. That category includes education, housing assistance, transportation, public health, veterans benefits, law enforcement and courts, environmental protection and many other crucial programs.

This spending category has been the main focus of Republican pressure for decades. In the 1970s, nondefense discretionary spending represented about 5 percent of the gross domestic product; that is now down to about 2.5 percent. Over the next decade, once the new cuts go into effect, it will decline to less than 2 percent. This year's spending bill, signed into law a few days ago, is roughly 10 percent lower than last year's, cutting Pell grants, environmental programs and aid to desperate states. Low-income heating assistance was cut by 25 percent.

As the economist Jared Bernstein has noted, this is the category of spending that helps people move up the income ladder, providing nutritious food, improving early education and job training and putting people to work.

The precise cuts on individual programs will be determined each year by appropriators acting under the new caps. Each year's cuts will be more painful than the last because the spending limits fail to keep pace with population growth, inflation and the needs of the economy.

This situation is the result of the Republicans' success at shifting Washington's focus from job creation and revenue increases to deficit reduction, at exactly the wrong time, when the economy was too weak to handle it.

The long-term deficit needs to be reduced once economic growth has returned, but only in the context of higher taxes for the rich...Even if the Bush tax cuts expire on time, much of the $3.8 trillion that that would bring in over a decade would have to be used for deficit reduction if the caps stay in place.

All of this leaves President Obama and the Democrats with much work to do in 2012. When the 2013 budget process begins in a few weeks, they will need to protect vital investments from further cuts and start building the case for raising the spending caps.

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47. This-- from http://www.YesMagazine.org/blogs/sarah-van-gelder/corporate-rule-is-not-inevitable ...

Corporate Rule Is Not Inevitable
7 signs the corporatocracy is losing its legitimacy ... and 7 populist tools to help shut it down.

by Sarah van Gelder
posted Jan 20, 2012

You may remember that there was a time when apartheid in South Africa seemed unstoppable.
Sure, there were international boycotts of South African businesses, banks, and tourist attractions. There were heroic activists in South Africa, who were going to prison and even dying for freedom. But the conventional wisdom remained that these were principled gestures with little chance of upending the entrenched system of white rule.

"Be patient," activists were told. "Don't expect too much against powerful interests with a lot of money invested in the status quo."

With hindsight, though, apartheid's fall appears inevitable: the legitimacy of the system had already crumbled. It was harming too many for the benefit of too few. South Africa's freedom fighters would not be silenced, and the global movement supporting them was likewise tenacious and principled.
In the same way, the legitimacy of rule by giant corporations and Wall Street banks is crumbling. This system of corporate rule also benefits few and harms many, affecting nearly every major issue in public life. Some examples:

* Powerful corporations socialize their risks and costs, but privatize profits. That means we, the 99 percent, pick up the tab for environmental clean ups, for helping workers who aren't paid enough to afford food or health care, for bailouts when risky speculation goes wrong. Meanwhile, profits go straight into the pockets of top executives and others in the 1 percent.

* The financial collapse threw millions of Americans into poverty. 25 million are unemployed, under-employed, or have given up looking for work; four million have been unemployed for more than 12 months. Poverty increased 27 percent between 2006 and 2010. And students who graduated with student loans in 2010 had borrowed 5 percent more than the previous year's graduating class-owing more than $25,000. Meanwhile, those who caused the collapse continue the same practices. And the unwillingness of the 1 percent to pay their fair share of taxes means the the public services we rely on are fraying.

* Scientists say that we are on the brink of runaway climate change; we only have a few years to make the needed investments in clean power and energy efficiency. This transition could be a huge job creator-on the order of the investments made during World War II, which got us out of the Depression. But fossil fuel industries don't want to see their investment in dirty energy undermined by the switch to clean energy and conservation. So far, by paying millions to climate deniers, lobbyists, and political campaigns, they've succeeded in stymieing change.

* Agribusiness get taxpayer subsidies for foods that make us sick; for farming practices that destroy rivers, soils, the climate, and the oceans; and for trade practices that cause hunger at home and abroad.

* Through ALEC, the private prison industry crafts state laws that boost the numbers behind bars, lengthen sentences, and privatize prisons.

* Big Pharma jacks up prices; insurance companies raise premiums and delivers fewer benefits; the burden of inflated care drags down the economy and bankrupts families. But only a very few politicians stand up to the health care industry's war chests and advocate for Canadian-style single-payer health care, which would go a long way toward solving the cost problem.

* Corporations and wealthy executives fund an army of lobbyists and election campaigns, spreading untruths and self-serving policy prescriptions.

It's not that we, the people, haven't noticed all this.

In a recent poll by the Pew Research Center, 77 percent of Americans said too much power is concentrated in the hands of a few rich people and large corporations. In a poll by Time Magazine, 86 percent of Americans said Wall Street and its lobbyists have too much influence in Washington.

And 80 percent of Americans oppose Citizens United, the pro-corporate Supreme Court ruling that turns two years old today. Eighty percent-that's among Republicans, Democrats, and Independents.
Some say corporations have such a strong grip on politicians and big media that it is impossible to challenge them, no matter how many of us there are.

But I believe we can do it. In the past few months, YES! Magazine has been researching ways that ordinary people can challenge corporate power (look for strategies in our spring issue, out in February). And we found that there are actually a lot of tools at our disposal:

* Corporations were created by public law to provide a public benefit. If we the people no longer feel that a corporation is providing a benefit-or if we feel that it is operating in a lawless and destructive manner-we can revoke their charter. That's what Free Speech for People has asked the attorney general of Delaware to do to Massey Energy, which has been one of the worst culprits in mountaintop removal and which has operated its mines in a lawless and negligent manner, resulting in 29 deaths at the Upper Big Branch Mine.

* We can insist that, in exchange for use of our public airwaves, broadcasters provide free airtime to candidates for public office. If they don't need to raise millions for media buys, they don't need to be as beholden to the 1 percent.

* We can get our governments to quit banking with Bank of America and Chase, and start our own state banks-14 states, including California and Washington, are considering such a move. And while we're at it, we can localize food, energy, and other aspects of our economy so local, independent businesses and cooperatives can thrive.

* We can stand up to specific parts of the corporate agenda by engaging in the sort of direct action that halted the KXL Pipeline.

* We can call for a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United, corporate personhood, and the ridiculous notion that money is the same thing as speech. So far, Los Angeles, New York City, and about 50 other towns and cities have done so far.

* We can use mechanisms like clean elections, electoral transparency, citizen review of legislation, and recalls to keep corporate control of our democracy in check.

* Finally, the reason I am most hopeful today: We can take a cue from Occupy Wall Street and continue to name the source of political corruption-something the political establishment and mainstream media have refused to do. We can occupy homes that are slated for foreclosure, as people have been doing all over the country. We can mic check places like Walmarts that intimidate and fire workers who want to unionize. We can set up tents in public places and in other ways join with the Occupy movement to take a stand for a world that works for the 100 percent-a world where we all benefit.

None of these actions will be easy. It will take time-potentially years of work-to make big change. But just as the legitimacy of apartheid crumbled well before the institutions of apartheid went down, the legitimacy of corporate rule is crumbling. So I'm convinced that, with you and me and all the others out there creating alternatives and taking a stand, we will see change.

Sarah van Gelder will deliver these comments at Seattle's rally on the second anniversary of the Citizens United ruling. Sarah is YES! Magazine's co-founder and executive editor, and editor of the new book: "This Changes Everything: Occupy Wall Street and the 99% Movement."

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48. This-- from http://www.TheNation.com ...(Americans are sick to death of this corruption)...

Eleven Shocking Facts About Campaign Finance
George Zornick on January 20, 2012 - 1:57pm ET

It's been two years since the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Citizen's United vs. Federal Election Commission, allowing a torrent of secret money to flow into the political process.
To be clear, the corrupting influence of big money was distorting the democratic process for years before that decision. But it unquestionably made the problem worse, exacerbating both the volume and secrecy of campaign donations.

Here's eleven disturbing facts about the extent to which money is playing an increasing role in our politics:

* The amount of independent expenditure and electioneering communication spending by outside groups has quadrupled since 2006. [Center for Responsive Politics]

* The percentage of spending coming from groups that do not disclose their donors has risen from 1 percent to 47 percent since the 2006 mid-term elections. [Center for Responsive Politics]

* Campaign receipts for members of the House of Representatives totaled $1.9 billion in 2010-up from $781 million in 1998. [Committee for Economic Development]

* Outside groups spent more on political advertising in 2010 than party committees-for the first time in at least two decades. [Center for Responsive Politics]

* A shocking 72 percent of political advertising by outside groups in 2010 came from sources that were prohibited from spending money in 2006. [Committee for Economic Development]

* In 2004, 97.9 percent of outside groups disclosed their donors. In 2010, 34.0 percent did. [Committee for Economic Development]

* In 2010, the US Chamber of Commerce spent $31,207,114 in electioneering communications. The contributions for which it disclosed the donors: $0. [Committee for Economic Development]

* Only 26,783 Americans donated more than $10,000 to federal campaigns in 2010-or, about one in 10,000 Americans. Their donations accounted for 24.3 percent of total campaign donations. [Sunlight Foundation]

* Average donation from that elite group was $28,913. (The median individual income in America is $26,364) [Sunlight Foundation]

* Amount the Karl Rove-led Crossroads GPS says it will spend on the 2012 elections: $240 million. [On the Media]

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As Sen. Bernie Sanders noted last June 28th in a 90-minute speech on the Senate floor...

http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=aa0f5904-c400-415e-aaff-86ca62fa2b3b

"The Republican budget passed by the House this year would end Medicare as we know it within 10 years. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that under the Ryan proposal, in 2022, a private health care plan for a 65-year-old equivalent to Medicare coverage would cost about $20,500. Yet the Republican budget would provide a voucher for only $8,000 of those premiums. Seniors would be on their own to pay the remaining $12,500, a full 61 percent of the total. Now, how many of the 20 million near elderly Americans who are now ages 50 to 54 will be able to afford that?

So let's review what we have. Let's say when a person becomes 65 in 10 years and they are earning or living on $15,000 in Social Security, they are going to be asked to pay $12,500 more for health care than is currently the case. How do they do that? What kind of health care plan are they going to buy when they are old and sick and are given an $8,000 voucher? How many days in the hospital will they be able to have? You can run up an $8,000 bill in 1 day, in 2 days. So this ending of Medicare as we know it, forcing seniors to somehow come up with all kinds of money that in many cases they don't have, will be a disaster for tens of millions of people.

The Republican budget would also force 4 million seniors in this country to pay $3,500 more on average for their prescription drugs by reopening the Medicare Part D doughnut hole. That goes into effect as soon as that bill would be passed, if it were to be passed.

Under the Republican budget, nearly 2 million children would lose their health insurance over the next 5 years by cuts to the Children's Health Insurance Program according, again, to the Congressional Budget Office. At a time when 50 million Americans have no health insurance, the Republican budget would cut Medicaid by over $770 billion, causing millions and millions of Americans to lose their health insurance, and it would cut nursing home assistance in half.

Right now, Medicaid pays the lion's share of nursing home care. If we make savage cuts in Medicaid, what happens to the elderly who are in nursing homes and what happens to their children in terms of trying to provide the help their parents desperately need?

Republicans in Washington have never believed in Medicaid or in Medicare or in Federal assistance in education or providing any direct government assistance to those in need. They have always believed tax breaks for the wealthy and the powerful would somehow miraculously trickle down to every American despite all history and all evidence to the contrary. So in that sense it is not strange at all that they would use the deficit crisis we are now in as an opportunity for an ideological attack against some of the most vulnerable people in our country.

That is exactly what the Ryan Republican budget, passed in the House of Representatives earlier this year and supported by the vast majority of Republicans in the Senate just last month, is all about."

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As a good friend of Joel's who's been a noted statewide/national heathcare activist/expert/advocate here in NYS for decades just shared this with us on this-- "Unfortunately the big New York City hospitals who spent big bucks to send out a mailing glossing over Gibson's effort to kill Medicare are playing politics with our health care and have made it clear they care only about their own narrow special interests. Sadly, they have cozied up to a Congressman who voted to destroy Medicare and Medicaid in order to protect their little piece of the pie..."

Here below-- seven must-read's Gibson's wealthy buddies are spending beaucoup bucks to gloss over:

[yes, folks-- Gibson voted for Ryan budget-- http://politics.nytimes.com/congress/votes/112/house/1/277
http://www.dccc.org/races/district/new_yorks_20th ; also see: http://www.NCPSSM.org/ !]

1. Gibson Votes for ‘Cut, Cap and Balance’ [Kill]; Dems Don’t" by Jimmy Vielkind (AT-Union 7/20/11)
http://blog.timesunion.com/capitol/archives/75496/gibson-votes-for-cut-cap-and-balance-dems-dont/

2. "Gibson Votes To Kill Medicare-- Again" (6/2/11)
http://rensscopolitico.blogspot.com/2011/06/gibson-votes-to-kill-medicare-again.html

3. "NY-20: Gibson Lies About Medicare Vouchers" by Devtob (4/15/11)
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/15/967406/-NY-20:-Gibson-lies-about-Medicare-vouchers

4. July 16th CBPP/Greenstein Statement re: GOP/Gibson "Cut, Cap, Kill Medicare" Legislation
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3537

5. "AARP Launches Second Ad To Fight GOP [Gibson] Medicare Plan" by Michael McAuliff (6/16/11)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/16/aarp-second-ad-republican-medicare_n_877944.html

6. NCPSSM: Leading Seniors' Organization Reacts to Senate Defeat Of GOP/Ryan Budget Plan (5/25/11)
http://www.ncpssm.org/news/archive/senate_defeat_ryan/

7. NCPSSM: "Debt "Super Committee" Not Looking So Super for America's Seniors and the Middle-Class"
http://www.ncpssm.org/news/archive/supercommittee_selection_release/ (8/11/11)

Also-- as Paul Krugman reminded us in his column last August 24th:

"Raising the Medicare age would make America as a whole poorer...treatment of some conditions would be delayed and impose higher costs when people finally do get on Medicare), it would push people into higher-cost private coverage. Austin Frakt estimates $2 of private costs for every dollar of budget savings."
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/24/the-strange-power-of-really-bad-ideas-medicare-edition/
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2011/07/paul-krugman-messing-with-medicare.html ;
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2011/06/paul-krugman-medicare-saves-money.html ;
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2011/05/paul-krugman-medicare-and-mediscares.html

And-- don't forget-- it's not just the folks in Kathy Hochul's 26th c.d.-- Americans SUPPORT senior care!...

[yes, you better believe the seniors here in the 20th are just like the seniors in the 26th c.d.-- ticked off]

[health care for all is an issue near and dear to Joel personally-- his own stepfather Bob Malstrom died of a heart attack at the age of 59 as Joel was giving him CPR-- Bob had known something was dreadfully wrong with his health, but didn't have health insurance at the time, even though Joel's stepfather had worked for IBM for 20 years; recall Joel's http://www.PetitionOnline.com/forpiggy ; http://www.petitiononline.com/duhealth efforts]

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http://blog.timesunion.com/capitol/archives/75496/gibson-votes-for-cut-cap-and-balance-dems-dont/

Gibson votes for ‘cut, cap and balance’; Dems don’t
Posted on July 20, 2011 at 8:32 am by Jimmy Vielkind, Capitol bureau in Bill Owens, Chris Gibson, NY-20, NY-21, NY-23

Rep. Chris Gibson, a Kinderhook Republican, voted for a House GOP “cap, cut and balance” plan intended to signal the chamber’s focus on spending cuts. Leaders are negotiating a plan that will raise the federal debt ceiling as it reduces the project deficit — House Republicans say they want to do that with pure cuts, while Democrats are pushing for taxes and other revenue items as part of a package.

This plan would impose spending caps as a percentage of GDP and would require a balanced budget amendment. Gibson signaled this vote two weeks ago. Yhe House bill passed 234-190. It’s not expected to pass the Senate.

Two local Democrats, Reps. Paul Tonko and Bill Owens, voted against the plan. Here’s a statement from Tonko, D-Amsterdam:

“The Republican Majority in the House continues to work against the will of the American people. While my constituents ask for us to create jobs, the Republicans today voted for their ‘Cut, Cap, and End Medicare Plan” that will instead destroy 700,000 jobs, slash education, and bring an end to Medicare. Creating new jobs is the best way we can drive down the deficit. Instead of looking out for the middle class and our seniors, Republicans are telling Americans that Big Oil and millionaires and billionaires do not have to sacrifice and pay their fair share. Republicans are essentially saying they’d rather ask for sacrifices from the middle class than eliminate tax breaks for their friends with deep pockets.”
And Owens, D-Plattsburgh:

“I voted against this legislation because, not only does it include the Ryan budget proposal which would cripple Medicare and Social Security, but it caps spending at a specific percentage that does not take into account the cost of war or the management of the current economic crisis. This plan is dangerous for Fort Drum, the nation’s security, and local job creators. It is does not reflect Upstate New York values.

“Most leading economists – as well as the general public – believe Congress must craft a plan that includes spending cuts and revenue increases in the ongoing debt limit debate. For months, I have called for this type of compromise that will protect programs important to Upstate New York, and I will continue to do so until it is done.”

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From http://rensscopolitico.blogspot.com/2011/06/gibson-votes-to-kill-medicare-again.html ...

RenssCoPolitico
Your blogsource for all things political in Rensselaer County.

THURSDAY, JUNE 2, 2011
Gibson votes to kill Medicare - AGAIN

Isn't it just like a Republican to double down on failure? Faced with the loss of NY 26 and overwhelming poll numbers showing how much the American people hate the Ryan Budget and its Medicare-killing provisions, Chris Gibson cast a second vote to kill Medicare and raise health care costs for New York seniors.

But while Gibson is doubling down on the House Republican plan to end Medicare, he is still refusing to end taxpayer giveaways to Big Oil or tax breaks for millionaires. In a procedural move, Gibson voted to accept the House Republicans’ controversial budget which includes the Republican plan to end Medicare. Gibson’s plan is for millionaires to get a $100,000 tax break and seniors to get a $6,400 medical bill.

The move Gibson used to signal his unwavering support for big oil and millionaires and "let them eat cake" attitude toward the rest of us, was his support of a “deeming resolution” in H. Res. 287 which states “the provisions of House Concurrent Resolution 34 […] shall have force and effect […] in the House as though Congress has adopted such concurrent resolution”. [H. Res. 287, Vote #382, 6/1/11]

The result: millionaires get more than a $100,000 tax cut in GOP Budget, while seniors get a $6,400 medical bill. [Tax Policy Center via Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 4/20/11, 4/07/11]

Gibson voted to end Medicare by supporting the Republican budget. [H Con. Res. 34, Vote #277, 4/15/11]; opposed a measure that could have cut taxpayer subsidies to big oil when he voted to bypass consideration of the Big Oil Welfare Repeal Act of 2011 (H.R. 1689) which would repeal key taxpayer funded subsidies for oil and gas companies. As reported by The Hill newspaper, “House Democrats intend to force a vote on a measure that would eliminate a key oil industry tax break when Republicans bring a bill to expand domestic oil and-gas drilling to the floor Thursday.” [H Res 245, Vote #293, 5/05/11; The Hill, 5/04/11; CBS News, 5/04/11]

But it is not just us saying Gibson wants to kill Medicare. Read what others are saying:

• Wall Street Journal: The House Republican Budget for 2012 Would “Essentially End Medicare.” “The plan would essentially end Medicare, which now pays most of the health-care bills for 48 million elderly and disabled Americans, as a program that directly pays those bills.” [Wall Street Journal, 4/4/11

• Nonpartisan Congressional Research Service: Individuals Would Not Be Able to Enroll in Current Medicare Program. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) found that the Republican budget ends Medicare: “Individuals who become eligible (based either on age or disability) for Medicare in 2022 and later years would not be able to enroll in the current Medicare program. Instead, they would be given the option of enrolling in a private insurance plan through a newly established Medicare exchange.” [CRS Report, 4/13/11]

• NCPSSM: GOP Budget Plan Destroys Medicare and Cuts Social Security Benefits. Max Richtman, executive vice-president of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, said the Republican budget would destroy Medicare: “Over time, this will destroy the only health insurance program available to 47 million Americans.” [NCPSSM press release, 4/5/11]
Sadly, his supporters in NY 20 just don't get the implication, preferring to keep their heads buried in the sand, thinking Gibson is doing the right thing for his constituents.

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From http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3537 ...

CBPP Statement: Updated July 16, 2011
For Immediate Release
Greenstein Statement on the “Cut, Cap, and Balance Act” That the House Will Consider on July 19

Robert Greenstein

The “Cut, Cap, and Balance Act” that the House of Representatives will vote on next week stands out as one of the most ideologically extreme pieces of major budget legislation to come before Congress in years, if not decades. It would go a substantial way toward enshrining Grover Norquist’s version of America into law.
• The plan would lock in cuts over the next ten years at least as severe as those in the Ryan budget plan that the House passed in April, by writing spending caps into law at the year-by-year levels of spending (as a share of GDP) the Ryan budget contains.

• It also would hold the increase in the debt limit needed by August 2 hostage to approval by two-thirds of the House and the Senate of a constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget every year while effectively barring any increases in revenues. The constitutional amendment would make all revenue-raising measures unconstitutional unless they secured a two-thirds supermajority in both the House and the Senate.

• The “Cut, Cap & Balance” measure cites three constitutional balanced-budget amendments (H.J. Res 1, S.J. Res 10, and H.J. Res 56) and states that Congress must approve one of them or a similar measure before the debt limit can be raised. All three of the cited proposals would require cuts deeper than those in the Ryan budget. All three measures would establish a constitutional requirement that total federal expenditures may not exceed 18 percent of GDP, and all three would essentially require that the budget be balanced within the coming decade.

The Ryan plan, by contrast, does not reach balance until the 2030s, and its federal spending level is just below or modestly above 20 percent of GDP for most of the next two decades, equaling 20? percent of GDP in 2030 for example, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The only budget that comes close to meeting the requirements of these constitutional amendments is the Republican Study Committee budget, which eliminates 70 percent of non-defense discretionary funding by 2021, contains deeper Medicare cuts than the Ryan budget, cuts Medicaid, food stamps, and Supplemental Security Income for the elderly and disabled poor in half by the end of the decade, and raises the Social Security retirement age to 70.

Talking points that the legislation’s proponents circulated on July 15 seek to foster an impression that the measure would protect Social Security and Medicare. Such an impression would not be accurate. The legislation would inexorably subject Social Security and Medicare to deep reductions.

The measure does not cut Social Security or Medicare in 2012. And it does not subject them to automatic cuts if its global spending caps are missed. It is inconceivable, however, that policymakers would meet the bill’s severe annual spending caps through automatic across-the-board cuts year after year; if they did, key government functions would be crippled.

Policymakers would have little alternative but to institute deep cuts in specific programs. And as noted elsewhere in this statement, before the debt limit could be raised, Congress would have to approve a constitutional balanced budget amendment that essentially requires cuts even deeper than those in the Ryan budget. Reaching and maintaining a balanced budget in the decade ahead while barring any tax increases would necessitate deep cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. After all, by 2021, total expenditures for these three programs will be nearly 45 percent greater than expenditures for all other programs (except interest payments) combined. Big cuts in these programs would be inevitable.

Moreover, because taxes — including payroll taxes — would be virtually impossible to raise as a result of the new constitutional barrier, Social Security solvency would have to be restored entirely through benefit cuts. Balanced Social Security packages that include measures to raise Social Security’s $106,000 payroll tax cap, so that higher-income Americans do not escape the tax on much of their earnings, would effectively be ruled out.

• The “Cut, Cap, and Balance Act” would require cuts totaling $111 billion immediately, in the fiscal year that starts 75 days from now, despite a 9.2 percent unemployment rate. These cuts would equal 0.7 percent of the projected Gross Domestic Product in fiscal year 2012 and would thus cause the loss of roughly 700,000 jobs in the current weak economy, relative to what the number of jobs otherwise would be.

• The bill overturns a feature of various bipartisan budget laws over the past quarter century, by subjecting programs for the poorest Americans to the specter of meat-axe across-the-board cuts. It does so even as it protects tax breaks and tax subsidies for the wealthy and powerful by erecting a constitutional barrier to any measure that would raise any revenue.

The “Cut, Cap, and Balance Act” that House Republican leaders are circulating achieves these results through a multi-faceted attack on the federal government. It would require that total federal spending shrink to about 20 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) starting in 2015 (by writing the Ryan budget’s year-by-year expenditure levels as a share of GDP into law, as caps to be enforced through automatic across-the-board budget cuts if the caps otherwise wouldn’t be met). The Ryan budget would slash non-security discretionary programs by 33 percent by 2021 (relative to CBO’s January baseline), cut Medicaid by $1.4 trillion over the decade, and cut an array of other programs from Medicare to Pell Grants, while shielding the defense budget and further cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans.

In addition, as noted, the measure seeks to render it virtually impossible to raise new revenue by barring the necessary increase in the debt limit until both houses of Congress have approved a constitutional amendment which requires that the budget be balanced every year, that no measure raising any taxes may pass Congress unless two-thirds of the House and Senate approve it, and that budget cuts deeper than Ryan’s be instituted.

Adding to the extreme nature of the measure, the legislation also reverses a feature of every law of the past quarter-century that has contained a fiscal target or standard enforced by across-the-board cuts. Since the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings law of 1985, all such laws have exempted the core basic assistance programs for the poorest Americans from such across-the-board cuts. “Cut, Cap, and Balance,” by contrast, specifically subjects all such programs to across-the-board cuts if its spending caps would be exceeded.

It does so even as it seeks to erect a constitutional firewall to safeguard tax cuts and tax breaks for the most well-off Americans. Thus, an impoverished elderly widow living on Supplemental Security Income — which provides benefits that lift people to just 75 percent of the poverty line — could have her assistance cut back under the measure’s across-the-board budget cuts even as millionaire hedge-fund managers retained their lucrative carried-interest tax breaks.

# # # #
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization and policy institute that conducts research and analysis on a range of government policies and programs. It is supported primarily by foundation grants.

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From http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/15/967406/-NY-20:-Gibson-lies-about-Medicare-vouchers

devtob
A Daily Kos Community Site

FRI APR 15, 2011 AT 06:00 PM PDT
NY-20: Gibson lies about Medicare vouchers
by
devtob

Tea Party Rep. Chris Gibson voted for the Ryan budget today, like almost every other Republican Member of Congress.

So he voted to end Medicare as we know it, and turn it into a voucher program that will impoverish senior citizens of modest means.

Like most Republican candidates last fall, Gibson ran ads decrying the fictional $500 billion cuts to Medicare in the health care reform law.

Gibson lied in scaring seniors during the campaign, and he also lied in telling them that he opposed Medicare vouchers.

For an allegedly squeaky-clean veteran, Gibson is quite the accomplished liar.

Details of his serial lies, on just this one issue, below.

During the campaign, Gibson benefitted from some six-figures worth of Medicare scare ads paid for by the 60 Plus Association, a Republican astroturf outfit that supports privatizing Social Security and Medicare.

Back in September, Maury Thompson of the Glens Falls Post-Star asked Gibson a question about 60 Plus that resonates today:

Thompson: What about Medicare vouchers?

Gibson: No — not at all. I don’t support that.

Pants on fire.

Gibson strongly supported the Ryan budget, with its Medicare voucher plan, as soon as it was announced, appearing several times on local conservative talk radio to sing Ryan's praises.

And, when called out on that, Gibson lied about it some more on his Facebook page last week:

The plan proposed by House Republicans is based on a proposal developed by the Obama Deficit Commission. It is NOT a voucher program.

Two lies in two sentences, par for the course with Gibson -- of course, it is a voucher program, and it's based on a proposal developed NOT by the Obama Deficit Commission, but by one of its wingnut members, Paul Ryan.

Later in that comment thread, Gibson says that the Ryan Medicare proposal is "premium support," not vouchers.

Yet another lie, according to Henry Aaron, a think tanker who developed a premium support model for Medicare.

Ezra Klein got Aaron on the record, under the headline "Creator of premium support says Ryan has ‘vouchers, not premium support’".

Aaron's take on the Ryan plan that Gibson mendaciously supports and voted for:

Ryan is associated with at least three different plans. There was Rivlin-Ryan, plain old Ryan, and now there’s the Path to Prosperity. They’re all different. In some ways, the Path to Prosperity plan improves on previous version, because the role of exchanges and risk adjustment is nearer to what we had in mind. But it is hands down the worst because it links premiums to consumer prices, which is the slowest growing index.

We’re looking at linking to an index that grows less rapidly than health-care costs by three to four percentage points a year. Piled up over 10 years, and that’s a huge erosion of coverage. It’s vouchers, not premium support.

There’s one provision of the Ryan bill that stands out as being hands-down the worst, and that is giving the seniors who are poor enough to also be on Medicaid a medical savings account. Does he know who these people are? They’re very sick, they’re very poor and many of them have cognitive as well as physical problems. They would be asked to cope with the inevitable headaches of dealing with private insurance and managing a personal checking account to pay periodic bills. This is not a sensible proposal.

The other five NY Republican freshmen -- Michael Grimm, NY-13; Nan Hayworth, NY-19; Richard Hanna, NY-24; Ann Marie Buerkle, NY-25; and Tom Reed, NY-29 -- also voted to end Medicare as we know it and substitute an impoverishing voucher program.

They presumably have lied about it too, but it would be hard for any of them to match Gibson's record of mendacity on this issue.

AFAIK, Gibson is in a class of his own, at least among that motley crew, as a shameless serial liar about Medicare.

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From http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/16/aarp-second-ad-republican-medicare_n_877944.html :

Michael McAuliff
mike.mcauliff@huffingtonpost.com

AARP Launches Second Ad To Fight GOP Medicare Plan

First Posted: 06/16/11 08:06 AM ET Updated: 06/16/11 08:19 AM ET

WASHINGTON -- Maybe the government should cut funding for treadmills for shrimp and poetry in zoos before hacking away at Medicare or Social Security, the influential lobby for older Americans, AARP, is arguing in a new national TV ad released Thursday.

With Congress and the White House locked in intense negotiations over spending cuts and the nation's looming debt limit, the multimillion-dollar ad buy marks AARP's second major campaign aimed at derailing proposals to cut and privatize Medicare and Social Security.

AARP had been relatively quiet when House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) first released his proposal in the spring that included a spending plan that replaces Medicare with a private system the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found would nearly double costs for seniors over 10 years.

Democrats had worried that AARP was standing on the sidelines, but sources familiar with the influential lobby say it didn't think the Ryan plan could pass.

The fact that it has made its second expensive ad buy suggests it is much more worried now that some of the Ryan ideas could be adopted in the high-pressure budget negotiations being conducted on Capitol Hill. That pressure will only rise as negotiations near Aug. 2, the date by which Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has warned the country must hike its $14.3 trillion borrowing cap or face default.

"While some members of Congress are considering making changes to Medicare’s structure, what few people realize is that some proposals being discussed behind closed doors include harmful cuts to the critical Medicare and Social Security benefits that are lifelines for millions of today’s seniors," said AARP's Nancy LeaMond.

The new ad takes a more mocking tone thanAARP's first spot, pointing to several questionable programs funded by Congress over the last few years, including a cotton institute in Brazil, treadmills for shrimp and poetry in zoos.

Those efforts likely don't amount to much in the greater federal budget, but the point is clear.
"Instead of cutting waste, or closing tax loopholes, next month Congress could make a deal that cuts Medicare, even Social Security," says the ad script. "I guess it’s easier to cut the benefits we earned -- than to cut pickle technology."

AARP has also mounted a broader lobbying effort that includes a petition that it says has been signed by nearly 1.5 million people, and a campaign that has generated almost 260,000 phones calls and emails to members of Congress.

LeaMond says the new ad "will put Congress on notice that AARP will fight with the strength of our millions of members to prevent harmful cuts to Medicare and Social Security from being included in any deal to pay the nation’s bills."

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From http://www.ncpssm.org/news/archive/supercommittee_selection_release/ ...

THE NATIONAL COMMITTEE TO PRESERVE SOCIAL SECURITY & MEDICARE
~ Trusted ~ Independent ~ Effective ~
August 11, 2011
NEWS RELEASE
Debt "Super Committee" Not Looking So Super for America's Seniors and the Middle-Class

"You don't have to be a Washington insider to see that, with the selection of appointees to Congress' new 'Super Committee', our nation's vital safety net programs still remain the primary targets in this debt debate. Half of these Committee members have pledged to keep revenues out of the solution, and even more than half are on the record with statements about the need to consider cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. We can only hope the political deck is not stacked in this process in which decisions impacting virtually every American family will be debated by just 12 people, could be passed by just 7 and then fast-tracked through Congress without amendment.

Even though Social Security has not contributed to our current deficit crisis, too many on this 'Super Committee' are willing to trade away its benefits while vigorously protecting the tax cuts for the wealthy and corporate loopholes which contribute so much to our deficit. Let's be very clear - the American people want fiscal sanity returned to Washington . But they also know cutting more than $1 trillion from programs serving millions of average Americans while protecting Bush era tax cuts that added $1.7 trillion in added deficits is not fiscal responsibility. Even though the majority of Americans understands this - I'm not convinced a majority of this committee does." Max Richtman, NCPSSM President/CEO

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The National Committee, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization acts in the interests of its membership through advocacy, education, services, grassroots efforts and the leadership of the Board of Directors and professional staff. The work of the National Committee is directed toward developing better-informed citizens and voters.
Media Inquiries to:
Pamela Causey 202-216-8378/202-236-2123
Kim Wright 202-216-8414
http://www.ncpssm.org/

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From http://www.ncpssm.org/news/archive/senate_defeat_ryan/ ...

THE NATIONAL COMMITTEE TO PRESERVE SOCIAL SECURITY & MEDICARE
~ Trusted ~ Independent ~ Effective ~
May 25, 2011
NEWS RELEASE
Leading Seniors' Organization Reacts to Senate Defeat Of GOP/Ryan Budget Plan

"We applaud the Senate for turning back efforts to pass a budget which is more about ideological politics than sound fiscal policy. Americans of all ages understand we don't have to destroy vital programs like Medicare and Social Security to be fiscally responsible. That message has been delivered loud and clear in town halls nationwide, in poll after poll, and again last night in New York's Congressional race, where Medicare played a key role in that outcome.

The GOP/Ryan budget would turn Medicare into a privatized voucher system meaning future beneficiaries would lose Medicare's guaranteed benefit. This budget would have also shifted the rising costs of healthcare directly to seniors, doubling their healthcare costs without adequately addressing ways to contain those costs. The trigger mechanism included in this GOP budget would force the creation of legislated benefit cuts in Social Security, while also fast-tracking those provisions through Congress.

The GOP/Ryan budget would have had devastating effects on millions of Americans still struggling in our weakened economy. Thankfully, the Senate understands this and has rejected this fiscal approach."...Max Richtman, Executive Vice President/ Acting CEO, National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare.

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The National Committee, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization acts in the interests of its membership through advocacy, education, services, grassroots efforts and the leadership of the Board of Directors and professional staff. The work of the National Committee is directed toward developing better-informed citizens and voters.
Media Inquiries to:
Pamela Causey 202-216-8378/202-236-2123
Kim Wright 202-216-8414
http://www.ncpssm.org/

banks got bailed out-- we got sold out-- don't let this deal go down, folks!...

2012-01-23T15:33:00.000-08:00

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[here below-- letter to Obama I just placed on all county legislators' desks here in Legislative Chambers on sixth floor of County Office Building at 22 Market St. in Poughkeepsie-- let's see how many of 'em sign on to this at tonight's full board mtg. of our County Legislature!...(email all 25 of us on this at countylegislators@co.dutchess.ny.us-- call White House at 202-456-1111!)...Joel]

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January 23, 2012

Dear President Obama:

After months of negotiation with big banks, it’s our understanding that you may soon announce a settlement that would let the banks off the hook for their role in the foreclosure crisis--- paying a tiny fraction of what's needed in exchange for blanket immunity from future lawsuits. Five banks— Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citibank and Ally Financial (formerly GMAC)— would pay the federal government $25 billion. About $17 billion would be used to reduce the principal that some struggling homeowners owe, $5 billion more would be used for federal and state programs, and $3 billion would be used to help homeowners refinance at 5.25 percent. Civil immunity would be granted to the banks for any role in foreclosure fraud, and there would be no investigations.

Here are the hard facts about the housing crisis we face: 3.5 million Americans are homeless, 18.5 million homes sit vacant, and since 2007, more than 7.5 million homes have been foreclosed. Default and foreclosure rates are now several times higher than at any time since the Great Depression. Meanwhile, U.S. banks raked in $35 billion in profits last summer alone and are currently sitting on a historically high level of cash reserves of $1.64 trillion. The six biggest banks -- Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley -- hold assets totaling $9.5 trillion; and together paid an income tax rate of only 11% in 2009 and 2010, far below the federally mandated 35% corporate tax rate.

Add up all the underwater homes in America, and there's an estimated $700 billion in negative equity in the country, according to a recent study. If banks fix what they broke and write down principals for all underwater mortgages, this would free up millions of people to pump billions of dollars back into local economies, create jobs, and ultimately generate revenue to help invest in things that will help our economy grow.

We, the undersigned members of the Dutchess County Legislature, urge you to stop and change the direction of this sweetheart deal. You should reject any deal that benefits the one percent and lets the big banks get away with their crimes. Instead, you should stand with the 99 percent and push for real accountability and a solution that will help millions of people in this country. If you are serious about solving this crisis, he must ensure that the banks must pay a minimum $300 billion in principal reduction for homeowners with underwater mortgages and/or restitution for foreclosed-on families. This is essential. Every effort to date to reboot the housing market has failed because it has not done the most essential thing -- actually reduce the massive debt load carried by homeowners.

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From http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/01/23-5 ...

Published on Monday, January 23, 2012 by Common Dreams Obama's Choice on Housing: A Sweetheart Deal for the 1% or a Fair Deal for the 99%
by Van Jones and George Goehl

Rumor has it that as early as today, after months of negotiation with big banks, the White House may announce a settlement that would let the banks off the hook for their role in the foreclosure crisis -- paying a tiny fraction of what's needed in exchange for blanket immunity from future lawsuits.

(Daniel Goodman / Business Insider)
We hope these rumors are untrue.

President Obama has the ability to stop and change the direction of this sweetheart deal. He should reject any deal that benefits the one percent and lets the big banks get away with their crimes. Instead, the president should stand with the 99 percent and push for real accountability and a solution that will help millions of people in this country.

Here are the hard facts about the housing crisis we face:

•3.5 million Americans are homeless.
•18.5 million homes sit vacant.
•Since 2007, more than 7.5 million homes have been foreclosed.
Default and foreclosure rates are now several times higher than at any time since the Great Depression.

If President Obama is serious about solving this crisis, he must ensure three things:

First: The banks must pay a minimum $300 billion in principal reduction for homeowners with underwater mortgages and/or restitution for foreclosed-on families. This is essential. Every effort to date to reboot the housing market has failed because it has not done the most essential thing -- actually reduce the massive debt load carried by homeowners.

As it stands, the deal likely to be announced Monday would have the banks pay only $20 billion, an astonishingly small fraction of what's needed. Add up all the underwater homes in America, and there's an estimated $700 billion in negative equity in the country, according to a recent study. If banks fix what they broke and write down principals for all underwater mortgages, this would free up millions of people to pump billions of dollars back into local economies, create jobs, and ultimately generate revenue to help invest in things that will help our economy grow.

Second: There must be a full-fledged, full-blown investigation into Wall Street financial fraud by the Department of Justice. There should be a task force with the staff resources, the authority, and the explicit mission of seriously investigating fraudulent behavior in the way home mortgages were securitized.

Reports of the current deal suggest banks could walk away without any actual investigation into their role in the housing crisis.

Third: There should be no civil or criminal immunity for the banks from future lawsuits. That means there should be no broad release of claims in any current or future negotiation or settlement.

The banks must pay to help solve the crisis they played such a big role in creating. They can afford it.

U.S. banks raked in $35 billion in profits last summer alone and are currently sitting on a historically high level of cash reserves of $1.64 trillion. The six biggest banks -- Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley -- hold assets totaling $9.5 trillion; and together paid an income tax rate of only 11% in 2009 and 2010, far below the federally mandated 35% corporate tax rate.

And that's not all. Despite their bleak performance this year, the nation's top six banks paid out $144 billion in bonuses and compensation for 2011, second only to the record $147 billion they paid out in 2007 at the height of the economic boom.

While banks enjoy record profits and the prospect of total immunity, millions of Americans are drowning in underwater mortgages.

Everyday people are already out front, fighting against the malfeasance of the banks; the White House should stand with them. Our national leaders need look no farther than Atlanta, GA, for an instructive profile in courage. Earlier this month, a community church in Dr. Martin Luther King's old neighborhood refused to be ignored. In 2008, a tornado devastated the historic, 108-year-old Higher Ground Empowerment Center church, and they were forced to take out a loan to cover repairs. The loan went underwater and became harder and harder to pay back. For nearly four years, the church asked the bank to modify their loan, but BB&T bank ignored them. Instead, last week, the bank started to evict the church. Sound familiar? Anyone with an underwater mortgage can tell you: banks these days just can't seem to treat their own customers with decency and manners.

However, after Occupy Atlanta staged a high-profile press conference, and 65,000 people signed a national petition by Rebuild the Dream, the church got BB&T bank to agree to modify their loan to something affordable and reasonable.

This happy ending is, unfortunately, the rare exception. BB&T, after being shaken to their senses (and shamed in the media), came to the table and did the right thing. But millions of homeowners have no way to stage protests and press conferences. Abuse, fraud, conflicts of interest, and lawlessness have been endemic at every stage of the mortgage origination and foreclosure process. This chain of misconduct by many of the nation's largest financial companies is at the root of the foreclosure avalanche and it's time to demand a course of action that will resolve the current crisis and create jobs in the future.

If these folks in Atlanta can show this level of courage in standing up to a big bank, then certainly Obama and state attorneys general can show the same courage.

The banks got their bailout. Now we need a strong and fair settlement to help Americans drowning in underwater mortgages.

Van Jones, President of Rebuild the Dream, is the founder and former president of Green for All and author of The Green Collar Economy. In 2009, he served as the green jobs advisor in the Obama White House. Van is currently a senior fellow at the Center For American Progress, and also holds a joint appointment at Princeton University, as a distinguished visiting fellow in both the Center for African American Studies and in the Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

more Van Jones . George Goehl is the Executive Director of National People’s Action, a network of metropolitan and statewide community organizations dedicated to advancing economic and racial justice.

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From http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/01/23-2 ...

Published on Monday, January 23, 2012 by Common Dreams Critics of Mortgage Deal Press Obama, State AGs to Reject Big Bank Proposal
Progressives "Furious" at Emerging Details of Mortgage Deal
- Common Dreams staff

A long anticipated draft settlement between the nation's largest private mortgage lenders and US states has been announced, but it doesn't look good for industry critics who hoped the banking giants — Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citibank and Ally Financial —would suffer full investigations and payouts equal to the damage they caused to homeowners and the overall economy. The deal would still have to be accepted by the states.

Occupy Wall Street demonstrators block an entrance to a Bank of America building during a protest aimed to disrupt the city's financial district in San Francisco, California January 20, 2012. Weeks after their eviction from several area encampments, anti-Wall Street activists in San Francisco, including a former Pacific Stock Exchange president, are vowing to disrupt the city's financial district on Friday with a series of protests. (REUTERS/Stephen Lam) UPDATE: George Zornick writes at The Nation:

Obama Is on the Brink of a Settlement With the Big Banks—and Progressives Are Furious

For months, a massive federal settlement with big Wall Street banks over their role in the mortgage crisis has been in the offing. The rumored details have always given progressives heartburn: civil immunity, no investigations, inadequate help for homeowners and a small penalty for the banks. Now, on the eve President Obama’s State of the Union address—in which he plans to further advance a populist message against big money and income inequality—the deal may be here, and it’s every bit as ugly as progressives feared.

UPDATE: Wall Street Accountability Advocates to Obama: Stand Against a Sweetheart Deal With the Big Banks

In a statement, Robert L. Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, had this to say:

“Americans from across the political spectrum are angry that the Wall Street banks blew up the economy and got bailed out, while home owners and taxpayers were stuck with the bill.

“This is a fundamental question of justice and democracy. The law is respected only if it is enforced. Cutting a settlement with the banks before there is an investigation violates our basic sense of justice. No one who robbed a bank would be offered immunity, a modest fine and no admission of guilt – before there was an investigation into who stole the money and how much they took.

“And there is a fundamental question of whether the democracy can hold the wealthiest few accountable. Americans are increasingly cynical about politicians, believing that Wall Street can buy and sell Washington. This is destructive to our democracy. The President’s campaign will highlight his commitment to fair rules and a fair shot for every American. A sweetheart deal with the banks would be a glaring contradiction to that theme. Any deal, enforced over the objections of the most independent Attorneys General, like New York’s Eric Schneiderman, will fail that test.

“What the people want is clear: Investigation before immunity. Penalize the perpetrators, not their victims. Any settlement must have sufficient scope to deal with the scale of the problem. There is an estimated $700 billion of negative equity in underwater homes. While 1 million homeowners have been helped by efforts to save homeowners, 10.7 million homeowners are underwater and that does not count people who have already suffered foreclosure. The top six banks paid bonuses worth $140 billion last year alone, or $420 billion over the last three years. They hold assets of $9.5 trillion. The rumored settlement of $25 billion is barely a slap on the wrist.

“It is vital to this country that the banks are made accountable. It is vital that they do not see the law as simply a minor price of doing profitable business, a speed bump on the way to their bonuses.

As Simon Johnson writes at Politico, the Obama administration is in danger in pushing this failed policy at just the wrong time:

Robo-signing. (Illustration by Matt Mahurin)
The Obama administration has continued to press for a small-scale settlement of the alleged abuses around mortgage practices, repeating and compounding the mistake. The White House has routinely overlooked voters’ dismay at its favoring “too big to fail” banks. But given how its electoral base is now reacting, this time may be different — because a lack of enthusiasm among Democratic voters in swing states could cost President Barack Obama reelection.

The Obama administration’s pattern of behavior is unmistakable. Its first, and worst, decision was to keep the management and boards of big banks in place — despite the fact that these financial institutions had been driven into the ground by incompetence, greed and notoriously failed governance.

And AFL-CIO President, Richard Trumka, had this to say in response to reports about the deal:

Obama's campaign will highlight his commitment to fair rules and a fair shot for every American. A sweetheart deal with the banks would be a glaring contradiction to that theme. Any deal, enforced over the objections of the most independent Attorneys General, like New York’s Eric Schneiderman, will fail that test.
The economy is currently weighed down by $750 billion in negative home equity, so relief on a massive scale is needed to lift home values and stimulate the economy by increasing consumer demand. A comprehensive settlement must force banks to write down underwater mortgages. A sum significantly larger than the rumored $25 billion is needed for the economy to grow and create jobs.

Specifically, the administration must stand strong against the big banks and insist on:

1) A full and thorough investigation into problems tied to the residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) market, and

2) A guaranteed minimum amount of money set aside for reducing the mortgage principal of "underwater" homeowners in key states impacted by the foreclosure crisis.

This is an opportunity for the administration to demonstrate leadership and show that it has the political will to do what's right for homeowners and right for our economy.

Naked Capitalism's Yves Smith was indignant, pointing out that Obama is poised to use this deal to point towards "bank accountability" when it would, in her mind, be the opposite:

It’s yet another gambit designed to generate a campaign talking point while making the underlying problem worse.
Obama’s latest housing market chicanery should come as no surprise. As we discuss below, he will use the State of the Union address to announce a mortgage “settlement” by Federal regulators, and at least some state attorneys general. It’s yet another gambit designed to generate a campaign talking point while making the underlying problem worse.

The president seems to labor under the misapprehension that crimes by members of the elite must be swept under the rug because prosecuting them would destabilize the system. What he misses is that we are well past the point where coverups will work, and they may even blow up before the November elections. If nothing else, his settlement pact has a non-trivial Constitutional problem which the Republicans, if they are smart, will use to undermine the deal and discredit the Administration.

To add insult to injury, Obama is apparently going to present his belated Christmas present to the banking industry as a boon to ordinary citizens. He refused to appoint a real middle class advocate, Elizabeth Warren, to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but he’s not above stealing her talking points.

***

Earlier today the Associated Press reported:

The nation's five largest mortgage lenders have agreed to overhaul their industry after deceptive foreclosure practices drove homeowners out of their homes, government officials said Monday.

A draft settlement between the banks and U.S. states has been sent to state officials for review.

Those who lost their homes to foreclosure are unlikely to get their homes back or benefit much financially from the settlement, which could be as high as $25 billion. About 750,000 Americans — about half of the households who might be eligible for assistance under the deal — will likely receive checks for about $1,800.

Others, however, would fret and perhaps re-phrase the AP report to read instead, "as low as $25 billion." Van Jones, of Rebuild the Dream, and George Goehl, of National People's Action, in an op-ed today, called for the settlement to be no less than "$300 billion," calling something closer to $20 billion "an astonishingly small fraction of what's needed."

Add up all the underwater homes in America, and there's an estimated $700 billion in negative equity in the country, according to a recent study. If banks fix what they broke and write down principals for all underwater mortgages, this would free up millions of people to pump billions of dollars back into local economies, create jobs, and ultimately generate revenue to help invest in things that will help our economy grow.

In addition, they say, the settlement must not preclude further investigations into the robo-signing debacle and the creation of the mortgage crisis that left millions underwater or out of their homes after what they claim were illegal foreclosures.

As the AP report continues:

Critics, including some members of Congress, say they want a thorough investigation of potentially illegal foreclosure practices before a settlement is hammered out.

"Wall Street again is trying to pass the buck. Instead of criminal prosecutions, we're talking about something that's not more than a slap on the wrist," said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who has been critical of the proposed settlement.

Yves Smith, writing at Naked Capitalism, gets into the details of the proposal (though she acknowledges its impossible at this point to have a precise understanding of what the final deal looks like):

...previous leaks have indicated that the bulk of the supposed settlement would come not in actual monies paid by the banks (the cash portion has been rumored at under $5 billion) but in credits given for mortgage modifications for principal modifications. There are numerous reasons why that stinks. The biggest is that servicers will be able to count modifying first mortgages that were securitized toward the total. Since one of the cardinal rules of finance is to use other people’s money rather than your own, this provision virtually guarantees that investor-owned mortgages will be the ones to be restructured. Why is this a bad idea? The banks are NOT required to write down the second mortgages that they have on their books. This reverses the contractual hierarchy that junior lien-holders take losses before senior lenders. So this deal amounts to a transfer from pension funds and other fixed income investors to the banks, at the Administration’s instigation.

Another reason the modification provision is poorly structured is that the banks are given a dollar target to hit. That means they will focus on modifying the biggest mortgages. So help will go to a comparatively small number of grossly overhoused borrowers, no doubt reinforcing the “profligate borrower” meme.

And NPR reports this morning on another prominent government figure who has resisted appeasing the banks:

NY Attorney General Eric Schneiderman may reject a settlement with big banks over the robo-signing scandal. He says authorities have done too little to investigate the banks' role in the financial crisis. (Frank Franklin II/AP)
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is raising objections, and may reject the settlement because he believes authorities have done too little to investigate the role of big banks in the financial crisis.

On a ride with the attorney general in his state-issued SUV, we pass the site of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Schneiderman didn't take part in the protests, but he agrees with some of the message.

"People aren't sure what happened, but they know that ... this was a man-made catastrophe, [and] that there are people who caused the bubble and the crash," he says.

This sentiment is echoed by Jones and Goehl, when they write, "The banks got their bailout. Now we need a strong and fair settlement to help Americans drowning in underwater mortgages."

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http://www.thenation.com/signupad/165806?destination=blog/165806/obama-brink-settlement-big-banks-and-progressives-are-furious

Obama Is on the Brink of a Settlement With the Big Banks—and Progressives Are Furious
George Zornick on January 23, 2012 - 1:07pm ET

For months, a massive federal settlement with big Wall Street banks over their role in the mortgage crisis has been in the offing. The rumored details have always given progressives heartburn: civil immunity, no investigations, inadequate help for homeowners and a small penalty for the banks. Now, on the eve President Obama’s State of the Union address—in which he plans to further advance a populist message against big money and income inequality—the deal may be here, and it’s every bit as ugly as progressives feared.

The Associated Press reports that a proposed deal could be announced within weeks. Five banks—Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citibank and Ally Financial (formerly GMAC)—would pay the federal government $25 billion. About $17 billion would be used to reduce the principal that some struggling homeowners owe, $5 billion more would be used for future federal and state programs and $3 billion would be used to help homeowners refinance at 5.25 percent. Civil immunity would be granted to the banks for any role in foreclosure fraud, and there would be no investigations.

There are several reasons why this is could be a terrible deal. For one, the dollar amount is inadequate in relation to both the tremendous loss of wealth via mortgage fraud and the hefty balance sheets of these massive companies. Furthermore, the banks might be allowed to use investor money instead of their own funds—this makes the penalty even lower. Beyond all that: it’s extremely hard to justify the absence of investigations and punishment for mortgage fraud that was so widespread and so damaging to people’s lives.

There are also many other, more serious problems besides a lack of punitive action. The small amount of money—and the federal government’s recent inability to truly help underwater mortgage holders, of which there are currently 11 million—means that the victims of mortgage fraud might not see enough relief. And perhaps most importantly, with no real punishment for widespread damaging fraud, what are the incentives on Wall Street not to engage in similarly destructive practices once again?

On a major conference call this morning, many leading progressive voices inside Washington and out blasted the deal.

Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio characterized the rumored deal as “not much more than a slap on the wrist,” and added that while banks were always know to be too big to fail, they were now apparently “too big to jail.”

“When laws are broken there need to be full investigations,” Brown said. “Wall Street should not get another bailout.”

Brown urged Obama to reject the deal and order investigations into the banks’ practices immediately. Simon Johnson, an economist at MIT and well-known progressive voice, also called for no deal and immediate investigations.

“This is not just the right thing do, and not just good politics, it’s good economics,” Johnson said. “What’s at stake here is the rule of law.”

Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, blasted the rumored deal as well and urged the administration to consider the political optics.

“No one who robbed a bank would be offered immunity, a modest fine, and no admission of guilt before there was an investigation,” Borosage said. “Americans are increasingly cynical with the ability of democracy to deal with special interests.

“The president’s campaign will sensibly highlight his commitment to fairer rules,” he continued. “Needless to say, a sweetheart deal with the banks will contrast with that.”

As we noted last week, many progressive groups have begun a massive petition drive to push back against the settlement and demand fair investigations. Moreover, attorneys general in California, New York, Delaware, Nevada and Massachusetts have previously said they won’t be a part of any deal that offers civil immunity.

So the deal is far from done—but it’s certainly moving towards an undesirable conclusion. We’ll have plenty more in this space all week.

more GOP hypocrisy re: RRA, TASC, jobs, democracy-- speak up!...

2012-01-23T13:41:00.000-08:00

"L'État, c'est moi." -- Louis XIV of France

[whose spirit lives on even to this day, personified in Mr. Molinaro himself (proof below)]

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Hi all...

Four reasons here below to come out to speak up at tonight's (Monday's) 7 pm Co. Leg. full board mtg.: on 6th floor of 22 Market St. in Poughkeepsie; feel free-- email countylegislators@co.dutchess.ny.us!...

See below: agenda: http://www.co.dutchess.ny.us/CountyGov/Departments/Legislature/CLagenda.htm :

[and recall/note-- you can download actual texts of all these resolutions by clicking on green res. #'s!]

Joel
845-444-0599/876-2488
http://www.DutchessDemocracy.blogspot.com
http://www.JoelforCongress.org

p.s. Click here for webcast of this past Thurs.-- http://www.co.dutchess.ny.us/CLStreamingVideoLink.htm

p.p.s. I got elected five times in a row to Co. Leg. (only one other Dem now in office has done this)-- but I was bypassed for both the #1 and #2 spots in Dem caucus....and-- it was confirmed in spades at this past Thursday's Committee Day-- to add insult to injury, I've also been stripped of my voting power/rights on the Co. Leg. Public Works and Capital Projects Committee!...(not one Dem or GOP legislator spoke up for me after I brought this up at end of PW/CP committee mtg. Thurs.; priceless-- you truly must view video of this to see for yourself; shameful)...(instead, voting rights status on this committee has been given to someone elected to Co. Leg. for first time just two months ago; lol)...as the worm turns, folks (the price of speaking truth to power, methinks?)...GOP got all Dems but me in Nov. 2010 to cave in on what used to be core Dem progressive values in this county-- re: approval of jail expansion study as part of Capital Projects Plan for 2011 (back when I still had voting rights on the Public Works/Capital Projects Committee)...I launched http://www.JobsNotJails.weebly.com with Ann Perry, Manna Jo Greene, Mae Parker-Harris, Earl Brown, many more because of this...wake up, folks]

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1. RESOLUTION #2012021-- AUTHORIZING THE DESIGNATION OF COUNTY OF DUTCHESS AS THE "PLANNING UNIT" PURSUANT TO NEW YORK STATE ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION LAW SECTION 27-0107
[see: http://www.midhudsonnews.com/News/2012/January/20/DC_SW_mgmt-20Jan12.html ]

Recall-- even Dutchess County Attorney Jim Fedorchak told us all at this past Thursday's Environmental Committee mtg. that this resolution empowered the EXECUTIVE BRANCH of our county government to deal with the Solid Waste Management Plan-- in just the same way King Molinaro actually had the gall to email out last Weds. night at 10 pm to hundreds of us on Dr. Peter Rostenberg's Hudson Valley Environment list serv re: resolution 2012021-- "I can only tell you that this proposal appropriately empowers the Executive Branch of county government to act as solid waste planning unit." [Molinaro's own words-- in his own peculiar blue font, to us all this past Weds.]

Fact: Several different reliable sources have told us over the last few years that it's actually BOTH the Legislative AND Executive branches of our county government that have to approve the Solid Waste Management Plan for the county-- Terry Laibach (DEC Region 3 Recycling Coordinator) has told us this, Barbara Warren (Ex. Dir. for Citizens Environmental Coalition) has told us this, and David Sears, citing DEC law/website, has told us this as well.
[see http://www.dec.ny.gov/chemical/71265.html ; http://www.CECToxic.org ; recall-- re: discussion of
http://www.dutchessny.gov/CountyGov/Departments/Legislature/ResolutionsPDF/2012021.pdf ]

[update-- I just spoke with DEC Region 3 Recycling Coordinator Terry Laibach on this-- she reminded me that, "the County Legislature has to adopt the SWMP; the problem with the RRA being the planning unit was that the County Legislature was not involved until the end of the process-- but no matter what, even with the RRA being the planning unit [as had been the case for the past few years], the County Legislature gets to vote on the Solid Waste Management Plan"]

Fact: After I specifically asked for someone to confirm this, NO one was interested in actually guaranteeing publicly at this past Thursday's Environmental Committee that the Dutchess County Legislature would, indeed, get a chance to vote on the Solid Waste Management Plan for our county (in spite of the fact that the law and DEC rules/reg.'s stipulate this)...so I voted no to this resolution on Thurs.

[...and yes, there was a meek/mild/meager attempt to backpedal/cover up by Molinaro/GOP on all this at this past Thurs.'s Environmental Committee mtg....but still-- no commitment for Co. Leg. vote on SWMP!]

[.......one more update here-- Molinaro himself just walked into the Democratic Caucus room here on the sixth floor of our County Office Building at 22 Market St. in Poughkeepsie-- and specifically asked me to attempt no amendments to this resolution tonight (similar to what I tried at this past Thursday's Environmental Committee mtg.-- to stipulate that the County Executive work together with the County Legislature and county staff on the SWMP......(don't kill me Marcus-- but why are you so bent on not actually having it in writing in black and white in this resolution that the County Legislature and county staff be involved in developing the SWMP?)....arrrgh]

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2. RESOLUTION #2012018-- CONFIRMING APPOINTMENT OF THE INDEPENDENT DIRECTOR TO THE DUTCHESS TOBACCO ASSET SECURITIZATION CORPORATION (TASC)

[below-- 8 key facts on this; see http://www.PutItOutRockland.com -- what we should have in Dutchess; instead, we don't even have the Reality Check anti-smoking program for kids in our county any more!]

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3. RESOLUTION #2012022-- ALLOCATING THE POSITION OF DEPUTY COMMISSIONER FOR STRATEGIC PLANNING AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

[see below-- article in today's paper on this]

Of course, it's COMPLETELY a coincidence that John MacEnroe, Pres./CEO of the Dutchess County Economic Development Corporation, was just ushered out...of course, NOTHING to do with this, natch...

Curious, isn't it-- Molinaro/GOP priorities (ushering cronies into county government)-- as opposed to making sure law is followed and county contract with 22 county Dept. of Mental Hygiene employees honored; recall 500+ signed on to http://www.change.org/petitions/stop-the-layoffs ; layoffs by Mar./Apr...

Recall-- "The County will not exercise its right to contract work out if the result of contracting out is the layoff or discharge of then existing employees"... [recall efforts from Shaun Chesley, Liz Piraino]
[from page 25 of Dutchess County's contract (1/1/05-12/31/09) with CSEA-- still in effect now, folks;
http://www.dutchessdemocracy.blogspot.com/2011/12/emergency-candlelight-vigil-mon-630-pm.html ]

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4. RESOLUTION #2012020-- ADOPTION OF THE PERMANENT RULES OF THE DUTCHESS COUNTY LEGISLATURE

[for years we Dems have pushed for members of the public to be able to speak on non-agenda items at the beginning of Co. Leg. full board mtg.'s-- GOP don't care 'bout this-- come out and speak up today!]

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From http://www.PutItOutRockland.com/index.php?section=making-a-difference ...

[again-- Rockland County (even with GOP County Exec there) provides shining example for us here]

Rockland is Putting It Out!

Rockland County's smoking rates are lower than those of the US as a whole, New York State as a whole and are the lowest of any county in the Hudson Valley and Long Island! Plus, exposure to second-hand smoke has been dramatically reduced since 2003. Data from a 2008 survey demonstrate a 27% drop in the number of homes in which smoking is allowed, and, a 34% drop in the number of smokers who live in homes where smoking is allowed.

Put It Out Rockland: A History of Success:

Since its inception in 2001, Put it Out Rockland has helped hundreds of Rockland County residents quit smoking. We've also reduced second hand smoke exposure county wide and advocated for important quit smoking initiatives. This is only the beginning--we're not going to quit until you do!

Here are some of the highlights of our program:

* Since 2002 over 1500 smokers have participated in PIOR group or one-on-one quit smoking programs.

* The county youth tobacco use rate dropped since 2002 by 17% among 10th graders and 34% among 8th graders.

* Put It Out Rockland and Reality Check (youth led anti tobacco action program) collaborated with POW'R Against Tobacco to obtain the following signed resolutions:

1. 4 Municipalities and 9 PTA's and School boards signed resolutions supporting Smoke Free Movies

2. 8 School districts and PTA's signed resolutions supporting Tobacco Free Magazine Advertisement's for schools. School Boards & PTA

3. 8 Municipalities plus the Rockland County Board of Legislators signed a resolution supporting reducing or removing tobacco advertising from stores (Point of Purchase [P.O.P])

Exposure to second-hand smoke has been dramatically reduced since 2003. Collaborative efforts have strengthened the resolve in Rockland County to continue to make our environment a safe and healthy one. Steps to a Healthier NY and Put It Out Rockland invited all municipalities in Rockland County, NY to join the Young Lungs at Play campaign, a county-wide effort to ban tobacco in outdoor spaces where children play.

1. Over 85 towns, villages and municipalities now provide smoke free playgrounds, ball fields and other outdoor spaces

2. Over 80 day cares, apartment complexes, schools, camps, and faith-based organizations now provide smoke free playgrounds, ball fields and other outdoor spaces

3. The Village of Nyack signed an ordinance in 2009, making their entire park system completely smoke free.

* Along with all these ordinances, policies and resolutions the Rockland County legislature and the County Executive signed into law a unique smoking regulation, called the Kids in Cars Smoking Safety Act, Local Law #6. This law prohibits smoking in cars in which there are minors present. The law protects and promotes the public health, welfare, and safety of children in Rockland County. Rockland is one of the few counties in the state as well as in the country that has a law protecting children in cars from the hazards of tobacco smokes

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Again-- 8 reasons here why you all need to question same old status quo re: TSAC resolution above:

Fact #1: Just confirmed from DC Health Dept.: Dutchess Co. no longer has tobacco cessation program.

Fact #2: Sadly, Cuomo announced this week a $5 million cut to tobacco cessation programs across the state like SmokeFree Dutchess and the Tobacco-Free Action Coalition of Ulster: disgusting:
http://www.tobacco.org/news/332148.html ; http://www.99PercentNY.org ; http://www.FiscalPolicy.org ; http://www.tobaccoreviews.net/anti-tobacco-control-down-in-new-york/ (recall: $3B in tax cuts to rich).

Fact #3: Maine, Vermont, North Dakota, and Alaska all spend 50% or more of the CDC recommendation on tobacco prevention programs-- literally twice what New York State spends.

Fact #4: NYS spends less than 25% of the CDC recommendation on tobacco prevention programs.

Fact #5: "The states have cut funding for tobacco prevention and cessation programs to the lowest level since 1999, when they first received tobacco settlement funds. The states this year (Fiscal Year 2012) will collect $25.6 billion in revenue from the tobacco settlement and tobacco taxes, but will spend only 1.8 percent of it - $456.7 million - on programs to prevent kids from smoking and help smokers quit. This means the states are spending less than two cents of every dollar in tobacco revenue to fight tobacco use. The states have cut funding for such programs by 12 percent ($61.2 million) in the past year and by 36 percent ($260.5 million) in the past four years." [thx to Ellen Reinhard for these facts]
[from "A Broken Promise to Our Children: The 1998 State Tobacco Settlement 13 Years Later"
http://www.tobaccofreekids.org/what_we_do/state_local/tobacco_settlement/ ]

Fact #6: "On Nov. 23, 1998, the nation's four largest cigarette sellers agreed to pay $200 billion over 30 years in what seemed like a victory for David over Goliath. The money was supposed to help the states pay for health care and anti-smoking campaigns. Instead, much of it -- even payments that aren't due for 20 years -- has already been spent on politically popular tax breaks through complicated borrowing schemes initiated by Wall Street investment banks. The cigarette companies agreed to make annual payments that would total $200 billion by 2025. The money was to be divided among the 46 participating states, with New York and California each getting about $700 million a year, Ohio about $300 million, Wisconsin just over $100 million and so on."
[from "Ten Years Later, Tobacco Deal Going Up in Smoke" by Bob Sullivan
http://redtape.msnbc.com/2008/11/ten-years-later.html ]

Fact #7: "It didn't take long for Wall Street to invent a way to take a cut. The creative minds at the now-defunct Bear Stearns investment bank traveled the country making this pitch to statehouses: Why wait for the money? Why not take a lump sum payment up front? Bear Stearns and other Wall Street firms eventually persuaded legislators in most states to "securitize" the payouts by issuing bonds and paying the bondholders back with the annual tobacco payments. The first tobacco bond issue hit in 1999. Soon, states around the country fell in line."
[from "Ten Years Later, Tobacco Deal Going Up in Smoke" by Bob Sullivan
http://redtape.msnbc.com/2008/11/ten-years-later.html ]

Fact #8: "Taking the early lump-sum payment has its price, however. Many states receive only 30 or 40 cents on the dollar. In a typical example, Wisconsin would have been entitled to about $5 billion in payments through 2025. Instead, it settled on one payment of $1.6 billion in 2001. "When you securitize on the municipal market, you lose a lot of money," said Kevin Olson, who runs the independent Web site MunicipalBonds.com. "It's not very efficient.""
[from "Ten Years Later, Tobacco Deal Going Up in Smoke" by Bob Sullivan
http://redtape.msnbc.com/2008/11/ten-years-later.html ]

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[below-- from today's paper]

http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2012301230010

Reaction to job-growth post mixed
Lawmakers will weigh Molinaro's plan for deputy

11:16 PM, Jan. 22, 2012 | 1 Comments

Written by
Larry Hertz
Poughkeepsie Journal

The Dutchess County Legislature will field its first major request from newly elected County Executive Marc Molinaro tonight when it considers a proposal to create a new economic development post in the planning department...

The Legislature’s government services committee voted 9-3 to send Molinaro’s request to the full Legislature for a vote tonight. But some lawmakers, including several Republicans, said they had some reservations about it...

Michael Kelsey, R-Pleasant Valley, said he was “troubled philosophically” by the proposal.

“I think county government ought to tread lightly here. Maybe it’s better to let the EDC (spearhead economic development efforts) rather than entangling county government in the process,” Kelsey said.

help make an Independent Project reality in YOUR high school!...

2012-01-22T10:28:00.001-08:00

[over this weekend I sent this letter below to Dr. Davenport & Mr. Phelan of my alma mater (Rhinebeck High School); follow up politely as you wish, folks-- with superintent/principal of the high school in YOUR school district!...Joel]

[thx again to Anne McGrath/all of http://www.RhinebeckYouth.org for showing "Race to Nowhere" film Friday!]

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To: edavenport@rhinebeckcsd.org, jphelan@rhinebeckcsd.org

From: Joel Tyner

Subject: Mr. Phelan/Dr. Davenport-- chance for Independent Project at Rhinebek High School?...

Hi Superintendent Phelan, Principal Davenport!...

Kudos to you both (and the Community Coalition for Rhinebeck Youth http://www.RhinebeckYouth.org )-- for showing that great http://www.RacetoNowhere.com documentary Friday night at the high school...

Dr. Davenport-- I spoke to you briefly at the end of the film about an op-ed I read last year in the Times about an incredibly successful trial program in a Massachusetts high school-- the Independent Project-- about "a group of eight public high school students, aged 15 to 17, in western Massachusetts as they designed and ran their own school within a school; hey represented the usual range: two were close to dropping out before they started the project, while others were honors students. They named their school the Independent Project...the results of their experiment have been transformative. An Independence Project student who had once considered dropping out of school found he couldn't bear to stop focusing on his current history question but didn't want to miss out on exploring a new one..."

[see just below-- "Let Kids Rule the School" by Susan Engel from last Mar. 14th:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/opinion/15engel.html ]

See video here for much more on this-- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTmH1wS2NJY ...

Check out this from John Tesh' website-- "The 'Independent Project' Inspires Kids to Stay in School":
http://www.Tesh.com/topics.html?cc_id=8&dc_id=20428 ...

And this one-- "Why The Independent Project Inspires Us at PEPY" by Jen Enrique and Daniela Papi
http://Journal.PePYride.org ...

So-- is there a chance that something like the Independent Project could be tried with students here?...

Just thought I'd ask!...(at least perhaps a small demonstration project at Rhinebeck High, maybe?)...

Joel Tyner
876-2488/444-0599
1981 Rhinebeck High School graduate
Rhinebeck/Clinton County Legislator since 2004
324 Browns Pond Road
Staatsburg, NY 12580

p.s. Also check out http://www.RethinkingSchools.org -- much food for thought there too; great ideas...

[aside from my political activism over the last few decades, I've also worked with students in public and private schools for twenty-five years now-- as a math teacher in the Bronx for five years, as a music teacher in Poughkeepsie for a year-- literally all over...from Hudson to Arlington to Millbrook to New Paltz to Kingston to Wappingers to Beacon (even in Rhinebeck)-- so education is a passion for me too]

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From http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/opinion/15engel.html ...

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Let Kids Rule the School
By SUSAN ENGEL
Published: March 14, 2011

New Marlborough, Mass.

IN a speech last week, President Obama said it was unacceptable that "as many as a quarter of American students are not finishing high school." But our current educational approach doesn't just fail to prepare teenagers for graduation or for college academics; it fails to prepare them, in a profound way, for adult life.

We want young people to become independent and capable, yet we structure their days to the minute and give them few opportunities to do anything but answer multiple-choice questions, follow instructions and memorize information. We cast social interaction as an impediment to learning, yet all evidence points to the huge role it plays in their psychological development.

That's why we need to rethink the very nature of high school itself.

I recently followed a group of eight public high school students, aged 15 to 17, in western Massachusetts as they designed and ran their own school within a school. They represented the usual range: two were close to dropping out before they started the project, while others were honors students. They named their school the Independent Project.

Their guidance counselor was their adviser, consulting with them when the group flagged in energy or encountered an obstacle. Though they sought advice from English, math and science teachers, they were responsible for monitoring one another's work and giving one another feedback. There were no grades, but at the end of the semester, the students wrote evaluations of their classmates.
The students also designed their own curriculum, deciding to split their September-to-January term into two halves.

During the first half, they formulated and then answered questions about the natural and social world, including "Are the plant cells at the bottom of a nearby mountain different than those at the top of the mountain?" and "Why we do we cry?" They not only critiqued one another's queries, but also the answers they came up with. Along the way, they acquired essential tools of inquiry, like how to devise good methods for gathering various kinds of data.

During the second half, the group practiced what they called "the literary and mathematical arts." They chose eight novels - including works by Kurt Vonnegut, William Faulkner and Oscar Wilde - to read in eight weeks. That is more than the school's A.P. English class reads in an entire year.

Meanwhile, each of them focused on specific mathematical topics, from quadratic equations to the numbers behind poker. They sought the help of full-time math teachers, consulted books and online sources and, whenever possible, taught one another.

They also each undertook an "individual endeavor," learning to play the piano or to cook, writing a novel or making a podcast about domestic violence. At the end of the term, they performed these new skills in front of the entire student body and faculty.
Finally, they embarked on a collective endeavor, which they agreed had to have social significance. Because they felt the whole experience had been so life-changing, they ended up making a film showing how other students could start and run their own schools.

The results of their experiment have been transformative. An Independence Project student who had once considered dropping out of school found he couldn't bear to stop focusing on his current history question but didn't want to miss out on exploring a new one. When he asked the group if it would be O.K. to pursue both, another student answered, "Yeah, I think that's what they call learning."

One student who had failed all of his previous math courses spent three weeks teaching the others about probability. Another said: "I did well before. But I had forgotten what I actually like doing." They have all returned to the conventional curriculum and are doing well. Two of the seniors are applying to highly selective liberal arts colleges.

The students in the Independent Project are remarkable but not because they are exceptionally motivated or unusually talented. They are remarkable because they demonstrate the kinds of learning and personal growth that are possible when teenagers feel ownership of their high school experience, when they learn things that matter to them and when they learn together. In such a setting, school capitalizes on rather than thwarts the intensity and engagement that teenagers usually reserve for sports, protest or friendship.

Schools everywhere could initiate an Independent Project. All it takes are serious, committed students and a supportive faculty. These projects might not be exactly alike: students might apportion their time differently, or add another discipline to the mix. But if the Independent Project students are any indication, participants will end up more accomplished, more engaged and more knowledgeable than they would have been taking regular courses.

We have tried making the school day longer and blanketing students with standardized tests. But perhaps children don't need another reform imposed on them. Instead, they need to be the authors of their own education.

Susan Engel is the author of "Red Flags or Red Herrings: Predicting Who Your Child Will Become."

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From http://www.Tesh.com/topics.html?cc_id=8&dc_id=20428 ...

The "Independent Project" Inspires Kids to Stay in School

It's time to rethink high school! That's the takeaway from a new experiment we heard about, called the "Independent Project." Last fall, a high school in Massachusetts chose eight students to basically design and run their own school-within-a-school. Some were honors students, while others were on the verge of dropping out. The students were free to get advice from teachers and their guidance counselor, but they were mostly responsible for monitoring their own work, and giving each other feedback.

Sounds like an invitation to slack off, right? Check out what happened: In the first half of the semester, the students decided to study science and history. In the second half, they focused on math and literature. At the same time, each student learned something on their own - like cooking, playing the piano, or making a podcast. Finally, they all created a film, where they talked about their experiences, and the lessons they learned. By the end of the experiment, two students who had considered dropping out said they were eager to stay in school! Another student who had been failing math, volunteered to help teach it.

So why the turnaround? Susan Engel directs a teaching program at Williams College in Massachusetts. She says the most remarkable thing about the Independent Project is that it shows what can happen when teenagers take "ownership" of their education. In other words: When you take away all the standardized tests, multiple-choice questions, and precise lesson plans, this experiment shows that teens want to learn. They just want to learn things that matter to them, on their own terms. Engel says that's important when you consider a quarter of North American students don't finish high school! As she puts it: The current education system is broken and the Independent Project may offer some clues to help fix it.

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From http://Journal.Pepyride.org ...

Why The Independent Project Inspires Us at PEPY
Child to Child
PEPY Journal
By Jen Enrique and Daniela Papi

We are so inspired by the article about The Independent Project in the New York Times last week.

In Massachusetts, a group of 8 high school students, ranging from 15 to 17 years of age, successfully designed and operated their own school within a school, calling it The Independent Project. The students who embarked on this project came from a range of academic backgrounds, from students close to dropping out of school to honors students preparing for college. The results of this year-long project have been impressive: Not only did every student remain in school, but the participants also rediscovered a spark of excitement for learning that had been laying dormant for years.

The Independent Project resonated with us for a number of reasons.

One, it showed that student-driven projects, in which participants who are given more control of the strategies and goals of the program, can be successful. Two, the structure of the independent study program is very similar to a number of PEPY's own pilot programs in terms of formats and goals. Three, it reinforces many of PEPY's core beliefs - that investing time in people is the most effective way to create long-lasting impact, and that sharing the lessons we are learning is the best way to continually improve our work.

Our Child-to-Child model is very similar to The Independent Project. Over 280 children (ages 8 to 16) work together to identify issues they encounter on a regular basis, conduct independent research, and then plan a course of action to work for change within their own communities.

Like The Independent Project, the children decide what they want to study and then teach it to their peers. Topics researched in the past have included malaria and inaccessibility of clean drinking water. After asking questions and discussing the topic in groups, students create dramas, brochures, songs, or other activities to teach others in their community about what they have learned.

Last June, another amazing group of children from Chanleas Dai started their own educational organization, Volunteer Community Development (VCD). They were inspired by their experiences in PEPY's Child-to-Child program and by the teachers in our Creative Learning Classes & English programs, as well as by their own desire to help each other and their communities.

What started with 17 junior high school kids has now grown into 54 young educators (in grades 7-12) who collectively teach more than 700 kids, 5 nights per week, in more than 20 different locations in the district! They have implemented a management structure that involves sending a rotating group of teachers to ensure that the quality of the classes is consistent in each location.

In addition, the commune Chief has shown his support for the program by dedicating a small building for students to hold planning and strategy meetings. It all happened because of the phenomenon highlighted in the NY Times: Students who are given more freedom to design their own learning experiences and create their own future are more engaged in continuing their education and sharing their self-acquired knowledge.

Wall Street scamming Dutchess County on tobacco settlement securitization-- speak up!...

2012-01-20T21:19:00.000-08:00

Hi all...

Tune in to our show on WHVW 950 AM today (Sat.) morning from 8 to 10 am-- and call in with whatever might be on your mind-- at 845-471-9500-- our special guest will be Ellen Reinhard, Director of SmokeFree Dutchess/TFAC-Ulster County!...(see just below-- two great articles she sent us today)...

[note-- we're hopin' Rich Carlson will also be with us too; call 845-444-0599 to get on air if other busy!]

Here's what Ellen and I will be discussing tomorrow morning on the air (with your help)-- the innocuous-sounding resolution #2012018 on the agenda for Monday's 7 pm Co. Leg. full board mtg.-- "Confirming Appointment of Independent Director to Dutchess Tobacco Asset Securitization Corp."...

[see full agenda: http://www.co.dutchess.ny.us/CountyGov/Departments/Legislature/CLagenda.htm ;
text-- http://www.dutchessny.gov/CountyGov/Departments/Legislature/ResolutionsPDF/2012018.pdf ]

Recall-- back in 2003, in spite of my lobbying (and the lobbying of Sandy Goldberg), unfortunately the uber-GOP Co. Leg. majority decided to take a lump sum of the tobacco settlement monies...

Eight key facts we need your help to expose at Monday night's County Legislature full board mtg.(!):

[speak truth to power on these on 6h floor of County Office Building at 22 Market St. in Poughkeepsie; can't make it?...zip off email to all 25 of us on this-- at countylegislators@co.dutchess.ny.us; pass it on!]

Fact #1: Confirmed yesterday from our county's Health Dept.: Dutchess County no longer has tobacco cessation program as part of our county's Health Department (check out PutItOutRockland.com for Rockland County's amazing program-- a model for Dutchess and all counties in the Hudson Valley; scroll down to see more on this great model county program we should have here).

Fact #2: Sadly, Cuomo announced this week a $5 million cut to tobacco cessation programs across the state like SmokeFree Dutchess and the Tobacco-Free Action Coalition of Ulster: disgusting:
http://www.tobacco.org/news/332148.html ; http://www.99PercentNY.org ; http://www.FiscalPolicy.org ; http://www.tobaccoreviews.net/anti-tobacco-control-down-in-new-york/ (recall: $3B in tax cuts to rich from Cuomo/Skelos tax scheme).

Fact #3: Maine, Vermont, North Dakota, and Alaska all spend 50% or more of the CDC recommendation on tobacco prevention programs-- literally twice what New York State spends.

Fact #4: NYS spends less than 25% of the CDC recommendation on tobacco prevention programs.

Fact #5: "The states have cut funding for tobacco prevention and cessation programs to the lowest level since 1999, when they first received tobacco settlement funds. The states this year (Fiscal Year 2012) will collect $25.6 billion in revenue from the tobacco settlement and tobacco taxes, but will spend only 1.8 percent of it - $456.7 million - on programs to prevent kids from smoking and help smokers quit. This means the states are spending less than two cents of every dollar in tobacco revenue to fight tobacco use. The states have cut funding for such programs by 12 percent ($61.2 million) in the past year and by 36 percent ($260.5 million) in the past four years." [thx to Ellen Reinhard for these facts]
[from "A Broken Promise to Our Children: The 1998 State Tobacco Settlement 13 Years Later"
http://www.tobaccofreekids.org/what_we_do/state_local/tobacco_settlement/ ]

Fact #6: "On Nov. 23, 1998, the nation's four largest cigarette sellers agreed to pay $200 billion over 30 years in what seemed like a victory for David over Goliath. The money was supposed to help the states pay for health care and anti-smoking campaigns. Instead, much of it -- even payments that aren't due for 20 years -- has already been spent on politically popular tax breaks through complicated borrowing schemes initiated by Wall Street investment banks. The cigarette companies agreed to make annual payments that would total $200 billion by 2025. The money was to be divided among the 46 participating states, with New York and California each getting about $700 million a year, Ohio about $300 million, Wisconsin just over $100 million and so on."
[from "Ten Years Later, Tobacco Deal Going Up in Smoke" by Bob Sullivan
http://redtape.msnbc.com/2008/11/ten-years-later.html ]

Fact #7: "It didn't take long for Wall Street to invent a way to take a cut. The creative minds at the now-defunct Bear Stearns investment bank traveled the country making this pitch to statehouses: Why wait for the money? Why not take a lump sum payment up front? Bear Stearns and other Wall Street firms eventually persuaded legislators in most states to "securitize" the payouts by issuing bonds and paying the bondholders back with the annual tobacco payments. The first tobacco bond issue hit in 1999. Soon, states around the country fell in line."
[from "Ten Years Later, Tobacco Deal Going Up in Smoke" by Bob Sullivan
http://redtape.msnbc.com/2008/11/ten-years-later.html ]

Fact #8: "Taking the early lump-sum payment has its price, however. Many states receive only 30 or 40 cents on the dollar. In a typical example, Wisconsin would have been entitled to about $5 billion in payments through 2025. Instead, it settled on one payment of $1.6 billion in 2001. "When you securitize on the municipal market, you lose a lot of money," said Kevin Olson, who runs the independent Web site MunicipalBonds.com. "It's not very efficient.""
[from "Ten Years Later, Tobacco Deal Going Up in Smoke" by Bob Sullivan
http://redtape.msnbc.com/2008/11/ten-years-later.html ]

[pass it on]

Joel
845-444-0599/876-2488
http://www.DutchessDemocracy.blogspot.com
http://www.JoelforCongress.org

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From: Ellen Reinhard

Date: Jan 20, 2012 4:51 PM

Per your request, here are links to a news story and a website with information about the MSA. I hope you find them helpful.
Thanks,

Ellen

"A Broken Promise to Our Children: The 1998 State Tobacco Settlement 13 Years Later"
http://www.tobaccofreekids.org/what_we_do/state_local/tobacco_settlement/

"Ten Years Later, Tobacco Deal Going Up in Smoke" by Bob Sullivan
http://redtape.msnbc.com/2008/11/ten-years-later.html

Ellen Reinhard
Director
TFAC-Ulster County
SmokeFree Dutchess
741 Grant Avenue
Lake Katrine, NY 12449
845-943-6070
FAX 845-943-6080
ellen.reinhard@hahv.org
www.tobaccofreeactioncoalition.org
www.smokefreedutchess.org

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[here's what we need you all to come out to speak up about at Monday night's mtg. if you care!]

From http://www.dutchessny.gov/CountyGov/Departments/Legislature/ResolutionsPDF/2012018.pdf ...

[already passed out of Dutchess County Legislature Government Services & Administration Committee yesterday]

RESOLUTION NO. 2012018

RE: CONFIRMING APPOINTMENT OF THE INDEPENDENT DIRECTOR
TO THE DUTCHESS TOBACCO ASSET SECURITIZATION CORPORATION

LEGISLATORS ROLISON, FLESLAND, and BORCHERT offer the following and move its adoption:

WHEREAS, this Legislature, by the enactment of Local Law No. 5 of 2003, authorized
the creation of a Local Development Corporation (LDC) now known as the Dutchess Tobacco Asset Securitization Corporation (Dutchess TASC) and the sale to the Dutchess TASC of all of the County's rights, title and interest to the Tobacco Settlement Revenues the County is entitled to received under the Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) pursuant to the Consent Decree resulting from the class action against Philip Morris Incorporated, et al., and

WHEREAS, the Dutchess TASC, as authorized, is to have three directors to oversee its
operation, one of whom to be appointed by the County Executive, one of whom to be appointed by the Chairman of the Legislature and the third, a person not connected in any way to Dutchess County Government, the "independent", to be appointed jointly by the County Executive and the Chairman of the Legislature subject to confirmation by this Legislature, and

WHEREAS, County Executive Marcus J. Molinaro and Legislative Chairman Robert
Rolison have jointly appointed Jerome A. Simonetty as the independent director of the Dutchess TASC, and submitted their joint appointment to this Legislature for confirmation, and

WHEREAS, the person proposed as the independent director is qualified in all respects to be the independent director of the Dutchess TASC, now therefore, be it

RESOLVED, that the appointment of Jerome A. Simonetty as the "independent"
director of the Dutchess Tobacco Asset Securitization Corporation is hereby confirmed.

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From http://www.putitoutrockland.com/index.php?section=making-a-difference ...

Rockland is Putting It Out!

Rockland County’s smoking rates are lower than those of the US as a whole, New York State as a whole and are the lowest of any county in the Hudson Valley and Long Island! Plus, exposure to second-hand smoke has been dramatically reduced since 2003. Data from a 2008 survey demonstrate a 27% drop in the number of homes in which smoking is allowed, and, a 34% drop in the number of smokers who live in homes where smoking is allowed.

Put It Out Rockland: A History of Success:

Since its inception in 2001, Put it Out Rockland has helped hundreds of Rockland County residents quit smoking. We've also reduced second hand smoke exposure county wide and advocated for important quit smoking initiatives. This is only the beginning--we're not going to quit until you do!

Here are some of the highlights of our program:

* Since 2002 over 1500 smokers have participated in PIOR group or one-on-one quit smoking programs.

* The county youth tobacco use rate dropped since 2002 by 17% among 10th graders and 34% among 8th graders.

* Put It Out Rockland and Reality Check (youth led anti tobacco action program) collaborated with POW'R Against Tobacco to obtain the following signed resolutions:

1. 4 Municipalities and 9 PTA's and School boards signed resolutions supporting Smoke Free Movies

2. 8 School districts and PTA's signed resolutions supporting Tobacco Free Magazine Advertisement's for schools. School Boards & PTA

3. 8 Municipalities plus the Rockland County Board of Legislators signed a resolution supporting reducing or removing tobacco advertising from stores (Point of Purchase [P.O.P])

Exposure to second-hand smoke has been dramatically reduced since 2003. Collaborative efforts have strengthened the resolve in Rockland County to continue to make our environment a safe and healthy one. Steps to a Healthier NY and Put It Out Rockland invited all municipalities in Rockland County, NY to join the Young Lungs at Play campaign, a county-wide effort to ban tobacco in outdoor spaces where children play.

1. Over 85 towns, villages and municipalities now provide smoke free playgrounds, ball fields and other outdoor spaces

2. Over 80 day cares, apartment complexes, schools, camps, and faith-based organizations now provide smoke free playgrounds, ball fields and other outdoor spaces

3. The Village of Nyack signed an ordinance in 2009, making their entire park system completely smoke free.

* Along with all these ordinances, policies and resolutions the Rockland County legislature and the County Executive signed into law a unique smoking regulation, called the Kids in Cars Smoking Safety Act, Local Law #6. This law prohibits smoking in cars in which there are minors present. The law protects and promotes the public health, welfare, and safety of children in Rockland County. Rockland is one of the few counties in the state as well as in the country that has a law protecting children in cars from the hazards of tobacco smokes

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From http://www.tobaccofreekids.org/what_we_do/state_local/tobacco_settlement/ ...

A Broken Promise to Our Children
The 1998 State Tobacco Settlement 13 Years Later

Since the November 1998 multi-state tobacco settlement, we have issued annual reports assessing whether the states are keeping their promise to use a significant portion of their settlement funds - estimated at $246 billion over the first 25 years - to attack the enormous public health problems posed by tobacco use in the United States.

Our latest report, issued November 30, 2011, finds that the states have cut funding for tobacco prevention and cessation programs to the lowest level since 1999, when they first received tobacco settlement funds.

The states this year (Fiscal Year 2012) will collect $25.6 billion in revenue from the tobacco settlement and tobacco taxes, but will spend only 1.8 percent of it - $456.7 million - on programs to prevent kids from smoking and help smokers quit. This means the states are spending less than two cents of every dollar in tobacco revenue to fight tobacco use.
The states have cut funding for such programs by 12 percent ($61.2 million) in the past year and by 36 percent ($260.5 million) in the past four years.

Interactive Map: State Funding for Tobacco Prevention

This report is issued by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, American Heart Association, American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, American Lung Association, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights.

Other key findings of this report include:

* Most states are falling short of funding levels for tobacco prevention programs recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The $456.7 million the states have budgeted amounts to just 12.4 percent of the $3.7 billion the CDC recommends for all the states combined.

* Only two states - Alaska and North Dakota - currently fund tobacco prevention programs at CDC-recommended levels. Only four other states provide even half the recommended funding, while 33 states and DC provide less than a quarter. Four states - Connecticut, Nevada, New Hampshire and Ohio - and DC provide zero state funds for tobacco prevention this year.

* Tobacco companies spend nearly $23 to market tobacco products for every $1 the states spend to fight tobacco use. According to the latest data from the Federal Trade Commission, tobacco companies spend $10.5 billion a year on marketing.

The report comes as recent surveys have found that smoking declines in the United States have slowed. To continue reducing tobacco use, elected officials at all levels must redouble efforts to implement proven strategies. That includes using more tobacco money to fund tobacco prevention programs.

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From http://redtape.msnbc.com/2008/11/ten-years-later.html ...

Ten years later, tobacco deal going up in smoke
By Bob Sullivan

Consider this the next time you see a teenager take a drag on a cigarette: Your state government likely has a financial stake in that kid continuing to smoke. And quite possibly, so does your retirement portfolio.

That was hardly the intention 10 years ago, when a collection of state attorneys general delivered a crushing blow to Big Tobacco. On Nov. 23, 1998, the nation's four largest cigarette sellers agreed to pay $200 billion over 30 years in what seemed like a victory for David over Goliath. The money was supposed to help the states pay for health care and anti-smoking campaigns. Instead, much of it -- even payments that aren't due for 20 years -- has already been spent on politically popular tax breaks through complicated borrowing schemes initiated by Wall Street investment banks.

Because these states have essentially borrowed against future payments from the tobacco industry, they are now dependent on the continued vitality of cigarette sales. If Big Tobacco stumbles, states will be on the hook for these massive, billion-dollar loans. In other words, David and Goliath are now allies.

Where did those loans come from? Perhaps from you. When Wall Street talked 25 states into borrowing against future tobacco payments -- a process known as "securitization" -- it sold bonds to individual investors and mutual funds that buy municipal bonds. Now, they are betting on Big Tobacco, too.

Worse yet, anyone invested in tobacco bonds has been seeing their money go up in smoke. Some bond funds that are heavily invested in tobacco have lost nearly 40 percent of their value this year. The reason for the sharp drop is disputed, but some observers say it's partly attributable to anti-smoking efforts. For the first time, fewer than 20 percent of American adults are smoking, new government statistics show. In other words, good news for the state health department is bad news for the revenue department -- and for the portfolios of those who invested in tobacco bonds.

It's a stunning reversal: The lawsuit designed to cut the legs out from under the tobacco industry has instead landed much of America -- often unwittingly - in the industry's corner. One such investor is Avivah Litan, of Potomac, Md., who two years ago purchased shares in one of Oppenheimer & Co.'s "Rochester" municipal bond funds.

Like many investors, she was attracted to municipal bonds by tax free returns and the relatively low risk. Governments rarely go bankrupt. Cities issue municipal bonds to pay for such infrastructure as firetrucks and schools, and bond funds pool hundreds of such securities together. Similar to stock funds, the value of a bond fund fluctuates with changes in investors' perceptions of the ability of the issuer to repay the loan. Because of governments' solid record of paying off bonds, the funds have proven popular with investors. Americans have placed about $1.7 trillion in bond funds, according to the Investment Company Institute, compared with about $6.5 trillion in stock funds.

Litan was taken aback by the Rochester fund's recent poor performance, and began looking into its holdings. What she saw was confusing: 4 percent invested in "Tobacco Settlement," about 3 percent in "Golden St. Tob Securitization" and another 1 percent in the "Buckeye Ohio Tob Settlement."

In fact, none of the fund's top 10 holdings appeared to have anything to do with government infrastructure projects.

Here's the explanation: Bond issues aren't just for firetrucks and schools anymore. Bond funds can invest in complicated bonds issued by pseudo-government agencies that are ultimately backed by private ventures, such as housing developments. The largest segment of this pseudo-bond market is made up of tobacco bonds -- bonds issued by states that have borrowed against their future tobacco settlement payments.

"I didn't really understand that I would lose money every time a state passed an anti-smoking law," Litan said. "I didn't really understand what tobacco bonds were."

What are tobacco bonds?

Oppenheimer's Rochester family offers 18 different bond funds, some of which have as much as 20 percent of their assets invested in tobacco bonds, according to fund manager Daniel Loughran. The Rochester funds, while among the most aggressive investors in tobacco bonds, are hardly unique. A review of 660 leading bond funds covered by the investment research firm Morningstar Inc., conducted at msnbc.com's request, showed that more than 260 are invested in tobacco bonds.

The rush to tap the revenue stream began soon after the tobacco settlement was signed 10 years ago. The cigarette companies agreed to make annual payments that would total $200 billion by 2025. The money was to be divided among the 46 participating states, with New York and California each getting about $700 million a year, Ohio about $300 million, Wisconsin just over $100 million and so on.

It didn't take long for Wall Street to invent a way to take a cut. The creative minds at the now-defunct Bear Stearns investment bank traveled the country making this pitch to statehouses: Why wait for the money? Why not take a lump sum payment up front? Bear Stearns and other Wall Street firms eventually persuaded legislators in most states to "securitize" the payouts by issuing bonds and paying the bondholders back with the annual tobacco payments. The first tobacco bond issue hit in 1999. Soon, states around the country fell in line.
"Every time there are economic problems in a state, it happens," said Eric Lindblom, director of Policy Research at Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "The governor says, 'We're in trouble, we need money. But we are not going to get it by raising taxes, we're going to do this securitization gobbledygook.' People think, 'Well, either our taxes are going up or they will do this thing we don't understand. So let's do that.' "

For years, tobacco bonds have been an easy sell. Because they are perceived as more risky than standard state-issued bonds, they offer slightly higher interest rates, making them popular with municipal bond fund managers seeking strong returns. The first tobacco bond and the 94 others that followed have raised a total of $55 billion, said Loughran, the Oppenheimer fund manager.

30 cents on the dollar

Taking the early lump-sum payment has its price, however. Many states receive only 30 or 40 cents on the dollar. In a typical example, Wisconsin would have been entitled to about $5 billion in payments through 2025. Instead, it settled on one payment of $1.6 billion in 2001.

"When you securitize on the municipal market, you lose a lot of money," said Kevin Olson, who runs the independent Web site MunicipalBonds.com. "It's not very efficient."

Through the years, state officials have offered numerous rationales for the benefits of securitization. Five years ago, Don Benton, a Republican state senator in Washington, told USA Today that spending on smoking cessation programs was "a complete waste of money.
You'd be hard-pressed to find any citizen who does not know smoking is hazardous to your health." He wanted the money to go instead to infrastructure projects like new roads. "Sitting in traffic for two hours would make you want to smoke," he told the newspaper.
States also say that they prefer the certainty of immediate payments to the uncertainty surrounding the tobacco industry's long-term future.

But Lindblom, the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids official, said that line of thinking is foolish.

"The states have this horribly naive view that they will outsmart Wall Street," he said. "Wall Street always gets the better deal."

Investment banks, in particular, love tobacco bonds. Because they are more complex than standard debt offerings, they offer steeper commissions. In 2007, when Ohio traded its future payments for an immediate payout of about $5 billion, it paid brokers $30 million. During the dot-com bust, when initial public offerings all but vanished from Wall Street, tobacco bond offerings filled the void for companies like Bear Stearns, nearly doubling from around $7 billion in 2002 to nearly $13 billion in 2003.

From the beginning, Bear Stearns was at the forefront of tobacco bond sales, and ultimately brokered about half of them before it was sold off to JPMorgan Chase.
The outcome for many states - including California, New York, Ohio and Wisconsin -- is that the tobacco money destined for state coffers in 2010, 2015 and 2025 has already been spent.

'An incentive not to put tobacco out of business'

The irony is that the states and some smaller governmental bodies need tobacco firms to make their payments every year because, to varying degrees, they are on the hook to pay off bondholders if the cigarette companies default. Some, including New York and California, have directly guaranteed their tobacco bond debt with general revenue in order to secure more favorable rates. Others have an implied obligation not to let their bonds default, lest their credit ratings be tarnished.

"They have created mass structural deficits," said Hans Baden, a lawyer at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank that has filed a lawsuit claiming that the Master Settlement Agreement is unconstitutional. "They have sold the money they are getting in the future in exchange for money now, based on a gradually dwindling revenue stream.
They have retained the risk while selling the money and now they have an incentive not to put tobacco out of business."

An interruption in tobacco industry payments would be catastrophic both to state budgets and individual investors. For example, when the tobacco industry threatened to exercise a loophole in the settlement in 2006 and withhold about $1.5 billion in payments, the value of tobacco bonds sank. It happened again in 2007. The price recovered even though the payments remain in dispute, but notice was served of the perilous relationship between governments and the smoking industry.

Critics of the arrangement contend that states that have issued tobacco bonds have no incentive to pass anti-smoking laws or launch advertising campaigns. Doing so could lead to fiscal ruin. So could any additional class-action lawsuit success against the tobacco industry.

Fears that new tobacco litigation could undermine the settlement run so high that 36 states filed briefs in 2003 in support of the tobacco industry after it was hit with a $10 billion judgment from a lawsuit for alleged false advertising.

David, in other words, was sticking up for Goliath.

In the briefs, state officials fretted that the judgment would impair the industry's ability to make its annual payments and "directly impact important state programs."

'A real tragedy for our country'

Those state programs often have nothing to do with tobacco.

From the start, the tobacco settlement money was intended to help states pay for health care costs related to smoking illnesses and to fund smoking-cessation programs, though the agreement not bind the states to use it for those purposes.

But to date, only about 3 percent of the tobacco settlement money has gone to cessation efforts, such as "quit smoking" marketing campaigns. Meanwhile, 10 times that amount has been used by state legislatures to plug budget gaps, or by governors to offer tax relief.
"There is a horrible failure of the states to invest even a minuscule amount of the funds for tobacco control," said Lindblom of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "It's a real tragedy for our country."

Though smoking continues to decline in the U.S., it remains a major health problem. Every year, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control, smoking-related illnesses are responsible for $96 billion in health-care expenses. But states have invested only about $3 billion from the settlement fund in the past 10 years on anti-smoking campaigns.

Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire, who was the state's attorney general at the time of the tobacco settlement and one its chief negotiators, said five years ago that tobacco securitization was her "wildest nightmare." Over her objections, Washington state securitized part of its tobacco settlement in 2002, before she became governor.

"My hope was to see as much of the settlement money as possible go to improving health," she told msnbc.com recently. "We've certainly done that in Washington state and the results have been tremendous - youth smoking is down by half and adult smoking is down 25 percent. I'm disappointed that other states haven't done the same thing. Far too many have used the money for purposes other than it was intended."

None of the states covered by the settlement spends the amount recommended by the Centers for Disease Control on tobacco-cessation programs. Only nine states pay even half that amount. Meanwhile, 13 states spend less than 10 percent of what the agency recommends. Ohio, for example, will spend $7.1 million on anti-smoking efforts in 2009, compared to the $266 million prescribed by the CDC.

Anti-smoking education can have a tremendous impact, the agency says. If every smoker on Medicare quit smoking today, Ohio would save more than $500 million annually.

The end of Ohio's tobacco-fighting foundation

Ohio had planned to spend much more on anti-smoking campaigns. Soon after the signing of the tobacco settlement , the state Legislature created the Ohio Tobacco Prevention Foundation and vowed to put $1 billion of the $10 billion it expected to receive over 25 years in a trust fund to generate $60 million a year for the foundation's operating expenses.

Ohio's smoking rate in 2001 was 28 percent, well above the national average. But thanks in part to foundation-funded projects like the state's toll-free Ohio Tobacco Quit Line, it had fallen to 22 percent by 2006.

But by that time, Ohio's economy was reeling and the tobacco money was too tempting for new Gov. Ted Strickland. In 2007, Ohio traded in its future payments for a one-time sum of $5 billion - the largest tobacco bond issue to date. The money paid for a massive property tax relief program for senior citizens and helped build schools.

It did not, however, shore up the state's economy. This year Strickland pushed through a $1.4 billion economic stimulus package funded in part by money from the Ohio Tobacco Prevention Foundation trust fund. The bill authorized seizure of most of the $300 million in the foundation's accounts, leaving it with $40 million - less than one year's operating expenses. The foundation rebelled and tried to shift the money to an anti-smoking nonprofit agency. In retaliation, the Legislature voted to close the foundation. Dozens of anti-smoking programs around the state were shut down.

After a 2003 lawsuit scare, the market for tobacco bonds went silent. This year's credit crunch has similarly discouraged new tobacco bond issues.

Keith Daily, a spokesman for Strickland, said the money, which remains frozen pending resolution of a lawsuit over the state seizure, is critical to the effort to create more than 50,000 jobs by investing in infrastructure and boosting industries.

"We recognize the great importance of reducing tobacco use and making other healthy decisions," he said. "The governor's top priority is creating jobs here in Ohio -- ... $230 million from the former Ohio Tobacco Prevention Foundation's endowment will be used to pay for the biomedical and bio-products portions of the jobs plan."

Lindblom, the anti-smoking activist, said the decision of the Ohio legislature to close effective tobacco-fighting programs has been repeated around the country.

'It's in the prospectus'

"There was the full expectation that the money was going to be used to prevent and reduce tobacco use and to treat smoking-caused illnesses," he said. "That's gone out the window. There's been a complete breaking of the promise of the settlement."

Loughran, the Oppenheimer manager, said that the settlement money is "fungible" and states can use it for anything they choose.

While it's "certainly possible" some people invest unknowingly in tobacco, Loughran said it should be obvious to anyone who researches Rochester funds that they are heavily tilted toward tobacco bonds. "It's in the prospectus," he said.

"Some people, when they look at this sector, they think, 'this is tobacco, so it's evil.' But remember, the settlement penalizes the industry," Loughran said. Buying one of his funds is more like investing in the penalty, he suggested. And plenty of consumers clearly have no moral issues with tobacco bonds, he said, noting that many individual investors buy them directly.

The future of tobacco bond issues

While a substantial amount of the tobacco settlement money has already been spent, some states have held out. But each year, Lindblom said, more dominoes fall.

Earlier this year, Nevada Lt. Gov. Brian Krolicki tried to persuade state legislators to trade in the state's $50 million annual payment for a one-time $600 million windfall. While legislators argued, the bond market collapsed, effectively eliminating any opportunity for issuing tobacco bonds.

But with the bond market expected to recover before the overall economy does, pressure is certain to mount for states like Nevada to seek quick fiscal rescues courtesy of the tobacco industry.

"I expect more of this as our economic situation continues. From our perspective and a fiscal perspective it will be hard to beat it back," Lindblom said.

As for individual investors who are backing tobacco, Loughran - whose fund bought the very first tobacco bond in 1999 -- makes a compelling case that the bonds will recover. Their yields are still higher than other state-issued bonds, he said, and in 10 years there hasn't been any hint of a default.

"Every one has made their scheduled interest and principal payments on time, and many of them have made principal payments ahead of maturity," he said. While the smoking rate has been sinking about 2 percent every year, inflation adjustments built into the settlement make up for the loss, he said. He wouldn't predict when tobacco bonds might turn around, but he asserted that their fundamental value remains strong.

"The main risk some people (worry about) is litigation," he said. "We've identified it as a risk but a very slight risk. In fact the industry has a long winning streak against class-action lawsuits" -- a 57-case run dating to 1998.

Having state attorneys general filing amicus briefs on your behalf doesn't hurt, he noted, adding, "They are in our corner."

That, he suggested, indicates the smoking industry isn't going anywhere for a long time.
But Baden, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, isn't so sure. He said the constitutional challenge filed by his organization or other legal challenges could undo the settlement. Or the declining smoking rate could at some point overtake the tobacco companies' ability to pay, he said.

"It just seems weird the idea that the tobacco (settlement) is going to go on forever," Baden said. "In the long run my suspicion is something will take out the settlement. The thing won't last forever."

re: RRA-- GOP now ready to pass our Dem resolution I spearheaded last April...

2012-01-19T12:33:00.000-08:00

"What a difference a day made...Twenty-four little hours...Brought the sun and the flowers...Where there used to be rain...My yesterday was blue, dear...Today I'm part of you, dear...My lonely nights are through, dear...Since you said you were mine...What a difference a day makes...There's a rainbow before me...Skies above can't be stormy...Since that moment of bliss, that thrilling kiss...It's heaven when you find romance on your menu...What a difference a day made...And the difference is you...What a difference a day makes...There's a rainbow before me...Skies above can't be stormy...Since that moment of bliss, that thrilling kiss...It's heaven when you find romance on your menu...What a difference a day made...And the difference is you."

--"What a Difference A Day Made" by Maria Grever and Stanley Adams
[song Dinah Washington won Grammy for in 1959: Best Rhythm and Blues Performance]

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Hi all...

Check out http://www.co.dutchess.ny.us/CountyGov/Departments/Legislature/CLagenda.htm ...

[it's the agenda for today's County Legislature Committee Day]

Of note (among other things)-- check out resolution #2012021-- the only resolution on the agenda for the Environmental Committee meeting at 5 pm today ("Authorizing the Designation of County of Dutchess as the "Planning Unit" Pursuant to New York State Department of Environmental Conservation Law Section 27-0107)...

[text-- http://www.dutchessny.gov/CountyGov/Departments/Legislature/ResolutionsPDF/2012021.pdf ]

Fact: It bears an uncanny resemblance to resolutions like this one just below that I tried all last year to get uber-GOP Co. Leg. majority to pass (with help of Co. Leg. Jim Doxsey)...(GOP refused to pass it when Dem caucus brought it before our Co. Leg.'s Environmental Committee last Apr. 7th; see resolution text below).

[stop-- GOP thief; where's Michael Moore when needed?...(re: crime scene tape; need citizen's arrest)]

[recall my Feb. 21st blog post last year on this to my http://www.DutchessDemocracy.blogspot.com site]

What a difference a year makes, indeed...(recall testimony from Vassar RePower on this as well)...

Would be lovely to see some of you out there joining us today (Thurs.) at 5 pm to call GOP out for their rank hypocrisy on this on 6h floor of our County Office Building at 22 Market St. in Poughkeepsie...

Can't make it?...zip off an email to all 25 of us on this-- at countylegislators@co.dutchess.ny.us...

[letters to editor to local papers needed on this too; hope GOP don't dupe media on this too; pass it on]

Joel
845-444-0599/876-2488
joeltyner@earthlink.net
http://www.JoelforCongress.org

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[here below-- resolution that I (with support of Jim Doxsey) tried to get passed last year-- but GOP killed]

Environment

Amended & Defeated 4/7/11

Resolution No. 2011102

RE: DUTCHESS COUNTY LEGISLATURE DECLARES THAT IT HAS THE POWER TO APPROVE, REJECT, AND/OR AMEND THE SOLID WASTE MANAGEMENT PLAN FOR DUTCHESS COUNTY
Legislator TYNER and DOXSEY offer the following and move its adoption:

WHEREAS, the Poughkeepsie Journal recently reported that “the Dutchess County Resource Recovery Agency has the highest per-ton processing cost of 14 trash-burning plants in the region, at 46 percent higher than the average-- with heavy debt, higher costs and no-bid contracts at the agency; the subsidy has grown 250 percent since 2001,” and

WHEREAS, Dutchess County’s Solid Waste Management Plan was due at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation at the end of last December, and

WHEREAS, Mid-Atlantic Solid Waste Consultants have already finished drafting half of a Solid Waste Management Plan for Dutchess County and have adequately proven themselves to be more competent than the DCRRA’s hired consultants Germano & Cahill, and

WHEREAS, unfortunately the Dutchess County Resource Recovery Agency’s hired consultants Germano & Cahill have proposed a Solid Waste Management Plan that promotes extending and expanding incineration in Dutchess County indefinitely, and

WHEREAS, Clearwater, Sierra Club, NYPIRG, and many other members of the New York State Zero-Waste Coalition also strongly recommend an 85%-by-2020 recycling rate goal for our state and our county; unfortunately, our county’s Resource Recovery Agency and Germano & Cahill propose only a 20% recycling rate goal at most for our county by 2020, and

WHEREAS, it is well within the legal right of the Dutchess County Legislature to have the power to vote to approve, reject, and/or amend the Solid Waste Management Plan for Dutchess County; given all the problems at the Dutchess County Resource Recovery Agency exposed in the local press over the last few years, anything less than our County Legislature assuming this power is an abdication of the responsibility to properly manage solid waste in Dutchess County, and therefore be it

RESOLVED, that the Dutchess County Legislature hereby declares that it has the power to approve, reject, and/or amend the Solid Waste Management Plan for Dutchess County, and be it further

RESOLVED, that a copy of this resolution be sent to Dutchess County Executive William Steinhaus, Dutchess County Resource Recovery Agency Executive Director William Calogero, and New York State Department of Environmental Conservation Region 3 Director Willie Janeway.

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[here below-- earlier version]

[from the official minutes on this-- "[GOP] Legislator [Gary] Cooper denied unanimous consent."]

FOR THE DUTCHESS COUNTY LEGISLATURE TO TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR PROPER MANAGEMENT OF SOLID WASTE IN DUTCHESS COUNTY BY ASSUMING PLANNING UNIT STATUS FOR SOLID WASTE MANAGEMENT PLAN

Legislators TYNER [and DOXSEY] offer the following and move its adoption:

WHEREAS, the Poughkeepsie Journal recently reported that, "the Dutchess County Resource Recovery Agency has the highest per-ton processing cost of 14 trash-burning plants in the region, at 46 percent higher than the average-- with heavy debt, higher costs, and no-bid contracts at the agency; the subsidy has grown 250 percent since 2001," and

WHEREAS, Dutchess County's Solid Waste Management Plan was due at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation at the end of last December, and

WHEREAS, Mid-Atlantic Solid Waste Consultants have already finished drafting half of a Solid Waste Management Plan for Dutchess County and have adequately proven themselves to be more competent than the DCRRA's hired consultants Germano & Cahill, and

WHEREAS, unfortunately the Dutchess County Resource Recovery Agency's hired consultants Germano & Cahill have proposed a Solid Waste Management Plan that promotes extending and expanding incineration in Dutchess County indefinitely, and

WHEREAS, Clearwater, Sierra Club, NYPIRG, Citizens Environmental Coalition, and many other members of the New York State Zero Waste Coalition also strongly recommend an 85%-by-2020 recycling rate goal for our state and our county; unfortunately, our county's Resource Recovery Agency and Germano & Cahill propose only a 20% recycling rate goal for our county by 2020, and

WHEREAS, it is well within the legal right of the Dutchess County Legislature to declare itself the planning unit with the power to vote to approve or reject the Solid Waste Management Plan for Dutchess County; given all the problems at the Dutchess County Resource Recovery Agency exposed in the local press over the last few years, anything less than our County Legislature assuming this power is an abdication of the responsibility to properly manage solid waste in Dutchess County, and therefore be it

RESOLVED, that the Dutchess County Legislature hereby declares itself to be the planning unit with the power to approve or reject the Solid Waste Management Plan for Dutchess County, and be it further

RESOLVED, that a copy of this resolution be sent to Dutchess County Executive William Steinhaus, Dutchess County Resource Recovery Agency Executive Director William Calogero, and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation Region 3 Director Willie Janeway.

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From http://www.dutchessny.gov/CountyGov/Departments/Legislature/ResolutionsPDF/2012021.pdf ...

[here's what we'll be discussing and voting on tomorrow]

Environmental Committee

RESOLUTION NO. 2012021

RE: AUTHORIZING THE DESIGNATION OF COUNTY OF DUTCHESS
AS THE "PLANNING UNIT" PURSUANT TO NEW YORK STATE
ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION LAW SECTION 27-0107

LEGISLATORS MICCIO, TRAUDT, BORCHERT, FLESLAND, ROLISON,
ROMAN, and BOLNER offer the following and move its adoption:

WHEREAS, the New York State Environmental Conservation Law (ECL)
Section 27-0106 outlines the State solid waste management policy which in summary form is to:
reduce the amount of solid waste generated; reuse material and recycle that material which
cannot be reused; recover, in an environmentally acceptable manner, energy from solid waste
and dispose of that waste which cannot be reused, recycled or recovered pursuant to programs
approved by NYS Department of Environmental Conservation (NYS DEC), and

WHEREAS, ECL Section 27-0107 and the regulations adopted pursuant thereto
authorize the preparation of a Local Solid Waste Management Plan (LSWMP) by counties and
other local governments, referred to as "planning units", in order to accomplish the goals set
forth in ECL Section 27-0106, and

WHEREAS, the Dutchess County Resource Recovery Agency (RRA), pursuant
to the agency's Resolution 204 of 1989, declared itself to be the planning unit in connection with
the preparation of the LSWMP which was finalized and adopted in February 1992, and

WHEREAS, the NYS DEC has required that the county's planning unit submit an
acceptable updated LSMWP which shall address the issues of solid waste management in
Dutchess County, and

WHEREAS, ECL Section 27-0107 states that a county qualifies as a planning
unit, and

WHEREAS, the RRA has no objection to the County being designated as the
planning unit, now therefore, be it

RESOLVED, that the County of Dutchess is hereby authorized to be the county's
planning unit pursuant to New York State Environmental Conservation Law Section 27-0107.

##################################################

Recall my Feb. 21st blog post last year on this to http://www.DutchessDemocracy.blogspot.com ...

This past Monday (Feb. 14th) I learned after meeting with former
Dutchess County Legislature Attorney David Sears that, contrary to
Co. Leg. Chair Rolison's statements to the contrary at the end of
last Thursday, the fact is that even the NYS Department of
Environmental Conservation's own website clearly states that it is
necessary for the Dutchess County Legislature to approve the Solid
Waste Management Plan for Dutchess County(!)...(kudos to Minority
Leader Goldberg for leading line of questioning on this last week)...

See below-- specifically, the DEC website itself states that "A
Resolution of adoption of the LSWMP [Local Solid Waste Management
Plan] from the Local Planning Unit's Legislative Board [County
Legislature]"(!)...

Fact: This is completely contrary to Co. Leg. Chair Rolison's
statements at end of last Thursday's County Legislature Environmental
Committee meeting (Feb. 10th).

[go to http://www.totalwebcasting.com/view/?id=dutchess to view
webcast of this for yourself!]

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From [former Dutchess County Legislature Attorney]: David Sears

To: Joel Tyner joeltyner@earthlink.net

Joel, The County is the planning unit and even DEC Regs require the
Legs approval and either a EIS for adoption or a negative
declaration. This is clearly "cover" to continue to distance
themselves from the mis-managed RRA.

From the NYSDEC's own website [see http://www.dec.ny.gov/chemical/71265.html ]

"LSWMP Formal Approval Process

This page describes some of the procedures involved in DEC approval
of a Local Solid Waste Management Plan (LSWMP). More details on these
procedures can be found in 6 NYCRR Section 360-15.10.

All LSWMPs must be submitted to DEC in draft for approval.

DEC reviews the draft LSWMP to determine whether it effectively
addresses all matters required by 6 NYCRR 360-15.9

If it does not, DEC will specify the matters in which the draft LSWMP
is deficient (review letter). The Draft LSWMP must be revised based
on DEC comments. It is possible that more than one round of comments
and revisions may occur to the LSWMP document.

Once DEC determines that the draft LSWMP is a substantive
consideration of the elements in 360-15.9, DEC provides notice to the
Local Planning Unit of its intent to approve the LSWMP. This notice
is colloquially known as the "approvable letter".

DEC recommends that the Local Planning Unit conduct the Public
Comment period after receipt of the "Approvable Letter" from DEC.
This sequence serves to avoid the potential for needing two Public
Comment Periods, once for the Draft and once for the Final LSWMP, if
significant changes are made after DEC review. The same
recommendation applies to the resolution from the Governing Board,
described below.

The Approvable Letter indicates that the Local Planning Unit must
submit to DEC:

A Final stand-alone LSWMP

A Resolution of adoption of the LSWMP from the Local Planning Unit's
Legislative Board.

An EIS for the adoption of the LSWMP, SEQR findings statement --OR-
negative declaration

Once DEC determines that the Final LSWMP, adopting resolution, and
SEQR findings statement or Negative Declaration are complete and
acceptable, DEC approves the LSWMP. This notice is colloquially known
as the "Final Approval Letter."

The approved LSWMP becomes the LSWMP in effect for the Local Planning Unit."

####################################################

[recall below sent out originally to this list Dec. 5th]

Miss yesterday's Poughkeepsie Journal editorial?...(it's 100% spot-on; sometimes PoJo gets it right!)...

[note-- after you read the editorial, see: http://www.dps.state.ny.us/phonebook.html -- and contact NYS Public Service Commission Secretary to the Commission in Public Affairs Office Jaclyn Brilling-- at secretary@dps.ny.gov and (518) 474-6530; make "Comments on New York State Public Service Commission Cases/Initiatives/Proceedings (Opinion Line): 800-335-2120"-- pass this along to all!]

[recall facts-- http://dutchessdemocracy.blogspot.com/2011/10/rally-for-zero-waste-oct-27th-save.html ]

[174 at "Zero Waste Dutchess"Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=130081000338005 ]

[see http://www.cectoxic.org/ZeroWaste.html for NYS Zero Waste Coalition-- TONS more info there too!]

[join 90+ Dutchess folks signed to my zero-waste petition: http://www.petitiononline.com/zeroyes ...Joel]

Energy tax incentives should go to cleanest

9:57 PM, Dec. 3, 2011 |

http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/article/20111116/NEWS/311160025/Green-groups-oppose-trash-burn-subsidies

The question is fairly straightforward: Should companies building trash-burning power plants be eligible for taxpayer-funded incentives that were clearly intended to entice the creation of more solar, wind and other forms of alternative energy to New York?

The answer is even more straightforward: Absolutely not.

Yet, for reasons passing understanding, a state panel is balking.

The New Jersey-based Covanta Energy Corp. - which operates the Dutchess County Resource Recovery Facility and about half dozen other trash-burning plants in New York - has petitioned to be eligible for the funding.

The state Public Service Commission should resoundingly reject the effort.

Covanta's request would not affect the Dutchess plant but rather would make the company eligible for funds for new projects. Specifically, it wants to benefit from the state's Renewable Portfolio Standard, a program begun in 2004 with a goal of generating 30 percent of the state's power with renewable resources by 2015.

The state Department of Environmental Conversation's own website says the standard was designed "to promote the research, development and use of alternative energy. Renewable energy resources include wind, hydroelectric, solar and biofuels."

The DEC further touts wind farms and other initiatives as ways to move the state's electricity consumption from dirty power plants over time.

Dutchess County's trash-burning incinerator releases more than 3,500 tons of global warming carbon dioxide, along with 333 tons of soot, sulfur compounds and other pollutants each year, according to environmental reports.

What's more, the DEC has found emissions from waste-to-energy plants still can outpace those from coal-burning plants, regarded as one of the dirtiest fossil fuels.

At a recent meeting, the PSC had questions for an administrative law judge about how the emissions from the garbage-burning plants stack up against those from biomass and landfill gas plants, which also are in the renewable program.

Those are legitimate questions.

The state should be setting the bar high for these tax incentives, ensuring it is getting the cleanest viable energy sources. This ultimately will reduce the state's dependency on traditional, dirtier sources of energy and create a healthier environment.

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Green groups oppose trash-burn subsidies
N.J. company seeks funds for new facilities
10:54 PM, Nov. 15, 2011 |

Written by
Jon Campbell | Albany Bureau

http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/article/20111204/OPINION01/312040008/Energy-tax-incentives-should-go-cleanest

ALBANY - Environmentalists spoke out Tuesday against a request from a New Jersey-based company to make trash-burning power plants eligible for renewable energy subsidies in New York.
The state Public Service Commission is set to vote Thursday on the petition from Covanta Energy Corp., which owns five plants in New York and operates two others, including the Dutchess County Resource Recovery Facility in Poughkeepsie.

The company contends the trash-burning operations should be covered under the state's Renewable Portfolio Standard, which is financed by a charge on utility bills and doles out about $250 million each year to renewable energy projects.

During a news conference in Albany on Tuesday, a handful of environmentalists spoke out against the company's request, saying it is trying to "game the system" by asking to be made eligible for funds reserved for environmentally friendly energy sources.

The groups cited Department of Environmental Conservation statistics that show trash-burning plants give off more emissions than coal-burning operations per megawatt hour.

"Coal is the dirtiest of the fossil fuels, and incinerators are even dirtier," said Ross Gould, program director for Environmental Advocates of New York.

In all, there are 10 trash-burning power plants across the state, including one in Peekskill, Westchester County, owned by New Hampshire-based Wheelabrator Technologies.

As it stands, the state program provides funding for 13 different types of large-scale renewable energy projects, including those using wind, hydro and solar power...

Environmentalists say the New York program - which was launched in 2004 with a goal of generating 30 percent of the state's power with renewable resources by 2015 - is meant for "environmentally preferable" projects.

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From http://www.CECToxic.org ...

Citizens' Environmental Coalition is New York's leading environmental health organization. CEC was founded in 1983 by community leaders organizing to clean up toxic sites. Find out more

CEC News
-----------------------------

More recycling will create 1.5 million new U.S. jobs

November 14, 2011

More Jobs, Less Pollution: Growing the Recycling Economy in the U.S. shows how a stronger recycling economy would create 1.5 million new jobs in manufacturing, collection, and other careers. If done right, recycling jobs can be quality jobs with family-supporting wages.

Click Here to read the report's key findings: http://www.RecyclingWorksCampaign.org .

Click Here to download the full report: http://www.cectoxic.org/Recycling_Jobs_Full_Report_1_.pdf .

Burning Public Money for Dirty Energy

CEC co-released the report, Burning Public Money for Dirty Energy, produced by GAIA, the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives. The report exposes why the Incinerator Industry has been working so hard to paint themselves as Green, which has included deliberately misrepresenting the benefits and drawbacks of this technology. They have a strong motivation-- they want to obtain huge subsidies, millions of dollars of green cash. This is a particularly important time for the public to be asking what kind of a future we want to have, when public officials seek to remove funding from essential programs, while providing extraordinary subsidies to those dirty industries that produce pollution and harm public health. The report also provides case studies of a few incinerators that have caused serious financial harm to local communities.

Click here to read the report: http://www.no-burn.org/burning-public-money-for-dirty-energy

GARBAGE INCINERATION IS EXPENSIVE AND POLLUTIVE

What is the most costly way to produce electricity? Garbage Incineration! At $8232/kW for capital costs it is more costly than other ways of generating electricity by a very wide margin. Operating costs are the highest too.

Click here for EIA Report on Electricity Costs:

http://www.eia.gov/oiaf/beck_plantcosts/pdf/updatedplantcosts.pdf

The Story of Broke

The United States isn't broke; we're the richest country on the planet and a country in which the richest among us are doing exceptionally well. But the truth is, our economy is broken, producing more pollution, greenhouse gasses and garbage than any other country. In these and so many other ways, it just isn't working. But rather than invest in something better, we continue to keep this 'dinosaur economy' on life support with hundreds of billions of dollars of our tax money. The Story of Broke calls for a shift in government spending toward investments in clean, green solutions-renewable energy, safer chemicals and materials, zero waste and more-that can deliver jobs AND a healthier environment. It's time to rebuild the American Dream; but this time, let's build it better.

Click here to watch The Story of Broke: http://www.storyofstuff.org/movies-all/story-of-broke/

#############################################

From http://dutchessdemocracy.blogspot.com/2011/10/rally-for-zero-waste-oct-27th-save.html ...

Monday, October 10, 2011

Rally for Zero Waste Oct. 27th-- Save $$$, Create 10x More Jobs, Clean Air!...

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[recall last blog post here from yours truly on this-- still quite pertinent!]

From
http://dutchessdemocracy.blogspot.com/2011/05/rragop-for-new-55-million-incinerator.html
...

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

RRA/GOP for new $55 million incinerator boiler, $30 million ash landfill(!)...

First-- Page 3 of Mid-Atlantic Solid Waste
Consultants' Executive Summary of their analysis
of our county Resource Recovery Agency's Solid
Waste Management Plan boldly shares with us all
this(!):

"Capital Costs of New Publicly-Owned Facilities
Recomm.'d in Local Solid Waste Management Plan"

-- "$55 million to add a new 250-ton-per-day
boiler" [MSWC deserves credit for exposing RRA on
this]

-- "$30 million to build a local ash landfill"
[recall: sadly, even Comptroller Coughlan
suggested this(!)]

-- "$3 to $7 million to upgrade existing Resource
Recovery Facility [incinerator] turbine "

[that's right folks-- read what's just above over
again one more time 'til it truly seeps in--
incredible!]

[not outraged?...you're not payin' attention
folks; email all 25 of us:
countylegislators@co.dutchess.ny.us!]

Second-- MSWC's criticisms of DCRRA's original
Solid Waste Management Plan are largely
accurate-- but MSWC don't go nearly far enough in
pushing for same green-jobs, cost-saving
85%-recycling-rate-by-2020 rate that Clearwater,
Sierra Club, NYPIRG, EANY, Citizens Environmental
Coalition, and so many of you across our county
have embraced for Dutchess/NYS; no excuse on
this...
[see: http://www.cectoxic.org/ZeroWaste.html ]

Third, a recurring point that MSWC make
repeatedly is this erroneous one-- that "In the
opinion of MSWC, the decision of waste disposal
is between retaining the waste-to-energy system
that exists currently or converting to a waste
export system." [false choice!!!]

This blithe assertion ignores these 3 key facts
on how Dutchess could/should move towards zero
waste:

Fact #1: Dutchess County now incinerates or sends
to landfills $15 million worth of materials and
resources that could be recycled, including plant
debris, food waste, paper, wood, ceramics, soils,
metals, glass, polymers, textiles, chemicals, and
various items for reuse (Richard Anthony
Associates).
[see:
http://ccgovernment.carr.org/ccg/pubworks/sw-future/docs/resource-assessment.pdf
MD like NYS!]

Fact #2: Ten times more jobs could be created by
moving towards a zero-waste approach to resource
recovery compared to incineration/landfilling,
according to the Institute for Local
Self-Reliance; locally this means 500 new jobs
could be created right here in Dutchess County if
those materials were recycled instead of burned
or buried, according to the Institute for Local
Self-Reliance/Rick Anthony.
[see: http://www.ilsr.org/recycling/recyclingmeansbusiness.html ]

Fact #3: The city of Springfield, Mass. has saved
$75,000 in just the first half of this year alone
by expanding recycling to one-third of the city;
it expects to save $450,000 a year through greatly
expanded recycling. ["Springfield Municipal
Recycling Initiative To Expand" (WAMC's Paul
Tuthill 7/10)
http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wamc/news.newsmain/article/0/0/1679516/news/Municipal.Recycling.Initative.To.Expand
]

And let's not forget these 2 other facts either
(recall: ALANY just rated Dutchess air "F" third
yr. in row!):

Fact: The Poughkeepsie Journal reported March 7th
that emissions from our county incinerator of
particulate matter, volatile organic compounds,
and nitrogen oxide have all increased over the
last decade-- along with the fact that, on an
annual basis, our county incinerator also creates
50,000 tons of toxic ash-- and spews 29 pounds of
heavy metals (mercury/arsenic/lead/cadmium), 37
tons of sulfur dioxide, 22 tons of hydrogen
chloride/hydrogen fluoride, and 3700 tons of
carbon dioxide.
http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/article/20100307/NEWS01/3070350/Burn-plants-seem-cleaner-but-facts-debated

Fact: Dutchess County incinerator in Poughkeepsie
spews 3700 tons of carbon emissions yearly.
[ http://www.CARMA.org ;
http://www.StopTrashingtheClimate.org ; recall
http://www.350.org !]

[NY = MD; see
http://ccgovernment.carr.org/ccg/pubworks/sw-future/docs/resource-assessment.pdf
]

Fact: "The Dutchess County trash-burning plant
needs millions from taxpayers to break even each
year, costs 46 percent more to operate than 13
other plants in New York and Connecticut and has
debts
stretching beyond all of them." [Poughkeepsie Journal 5/10/09]
http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/article/20090510/NEWS01/905100344/Dutchess-County-Resource-Recovery-Agency-Inefficient-expensive-in-debt

Recall this, too, buried on p. 2 in the B
(Mid-Hudson) section of Oct. 11th Poughkeepsie
Journal from last year: "The DCRRA's deficit, the
amount that must be shouldered by county
taxpayers, rose from $850,000 a decade ago to
more than $6 million last year."
http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/article/20101011/REPOSITORY/10110335/Conners-quits-RRA-waste-plan-hearing-is-today

Fact: The cost of disposing of the Dutchess
County Incinerator's 50,000 tons of toxic ash
annually has doubled in recent years to three
million dollars a year, according to Dutchess
County Resource
Recovery Agency Board Chair William Conners in a
statement he made in Co. Leg. chambers in 2010.
[see:
http://www.no-burn.org/why-incineration-is-a-very-bad-idea-in-the-twenty-first-century (Paul Connett)]

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Recall...

From Institute for Local Self-Reliance President Neil Seldman: "these are the zero waste/resource
management plans ILSR has assisted with in the
US.:
http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/sws/zerowaste_masterplan.htm
-- zero waste plan Austin, TX
http://compostingconsultant.com/images2/hawaii-zero-waste-plan.pdf
-- zero waste plan for Hawaii Co.
http://www.calrecycle.ca.gov/LGCentral/Library/infoCycling/2001/Winter/DelNorte.htm
-- zero DelNorte
http://www.ilsr.org/recycling/delaware-resource-management.pdf
: Resource Management in Delaware.

[also see:
http://www.ilsr.org/recycling/links.html ;
http://www.ilsr.org/pubs/2010yearendreport.pdf ;
Neil S."Wasted Energy: Debunking Waste-to-Energy
Scheme" http://www.emagazine.com/view/?4315 ]

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Fact: Shabazz for years now has taken all of the
food waste from Vassar, Marist, and SUNY New
Paltz and mixed it with yard waste-- and just
over the past year has gotten the
Poughkeepsie Town Board (including Town Supervisor
there Pat Myers) to vote unanimously to allow
Shabazz to expand food-waste composting operation
he's run for years at Vassar Farms to 70 acres on
DeGarmo Road(!).
[this is clear example for Rhinebeck and all of
our municipalities; organics make up half
wastestream]

[see "Case for Composting" 3/22/10 Boston Globe
http://www.greenchange.org/article.php?id=5692 !]

Fact: The woody waste and other yard waste
(leaves/grass) sitting in piles at the Rhinebeck
Town Dump (on Stone Church Rd.) is the PERFECT
material that Shabazz has proven can be mixed
with food waste to make valuable compost and
biofiltration soils to spec!...(Shabazz and I
have seen this).

[here in Dutchess, Royal Carting tried 177-home
food-waste collection pilot program in Beacon]

[see below-- Massachusetts Municipal Association
( http://www.MMA.org ) Associate Editor Mitch
Evich last May 5th ran an article about the
successful curbside collection of food waste in
the towns of Hamilton and Wenham-- referring to
how "organic waste accounts for roughly 40
percent of the solid waste that the typical
household generates (about 10-12 pounds out of 27
pounds per week)": savings!]

Recall the front-page article about Shabazz in
the Poughkeepsie Journal April 3, 2008 on great
food-waste composting operation in Poughkeepsie
using materials from Vassar and Marist to produce
extremely valuable compost in high demand at
non-odor facility (Vassar Farm); see:
http://groups.google.com/group/planputnam/msg/bb0dd1fd8ca9441a
; http://greenwayny.com/beta/about/?id=bio ;
http://www.recycle.net/trade/aa945288.html ;
http://www.grn.com/trade/aa945288.html ; http://nysawg.org/news.php?id=40 .

Remember, too-- even back in '09 I succeeded in
convincing Northern Dutchess Hospital, Baptist
Home at Brookmeade, and folks from Fairgrounds
and the Rhinebeck Central School District to all
endorse the notion of moving Rhinebeck towards
zero waste-- saving $$$ with food waste
collection (remember Northern Dutchess News
article on all this from summer of '09; other
local media ignored this-- why?)...
[see:
http://www.elementalimpact.org/ZWZDowntownAtlanta
-- Atlanta is great example for Dutchess; many
restaurants, entertainment and convention centers
there saving money separating food waste!]

The City of Toronto has proven for years now that
it actually saves tax dollars to have businesses
and homeowners separate their food waste for
weekly curbside collection-- because now, as a
result of this, they only have to have their
garbage collected once every other week(!)...why
can't we do this here?...
[see: http://www.toronto.ca/greenbin/card.htm ]

Fact: Incinerator folks don't even want food
waste; it's highly inefficient to burn (over 70%
water; see http://www.Cool2012.com ).

Fact: Ithaca, Portland, Seattle, Boulder,
Cambridge, and communities across Vermont, North
Carolina, Minnesota, Michigan, California have
smartly moved towards zero waste with food-waste
composting
[ http://www.cool2012.com/community/collection/
http://www.jgpress.com/archives/_free/000525.html
;
http://www.recycletompkins.org/editorstree/view/177
; http://ccetompkins.org/compost/index.html ]

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From
http://www.DCRRA.org/reports/LSWMP_12-4-10.pdf
...(from DCRRA's own website)...

[read below, folks-- proof right here that DCRRA
STILL bent on prolonging/expanding incineration!]

County of Dutchess
and
Dutchess County Resource Recovery Agency
LOCAL SOLID WASTE
MANAGEMENT PLAN

November 29, 2010
_______________________________________
Germano & Cahill, P.C. Gerhardt, LLC
Michael J. Cahill, Esq. Hans G. Arnold

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From page 5...

"Optimize Waste-to-Energy - The Agency should
commission a thorough study of the condition and
life expectancy of the RRF in anticipation of a
competitive procurement for a new contract
for operation of the RRF and possible capital
improvements after the expiration of the
current operating agreement in June 2014."

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From page 59...

"The current Service Agreement with Covanta
Energy (which concluded a stock purchase of the
assets of Montenay Dutchess in August 2009) will
expire in June 2014, and prior to that date, the
DCRRA
will have to procure a new operating contract for
the Facility, through competitive
bidding under General Municipal Law §120-w. In
preparation for that procurement, the
DCRRA should undertake a full engineering
assessment of the condition of the Facility,
and prepare an estimate of the major components and equipment which will need
refurbishment or replacement to assure continued
reliable operation for the ensuing 20
to 25 years. Such an assessment will allow the DCRRA to provide for capital
improvements when needed, and will provide
prospective bidders for the post-2014
Service Agreement with technical information necessary to submit an informed
proposal."

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From page 76...

"The following summarizes the basis for the projections in Table 13:

2010 the Resource Recovery Facility (RRF)
[Dutchess County Incinerator] at 92% capacity

2015 the existing RRF at 100% capacity.

2020 the RRF expanded with a third boiler for a
total capacity of 199,000 tons per year."

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From page 80...

"The O'Connor rotary waterwall combustor is no
longer being manufactured. However
replacement parts for continuous maintenance are
available and have been obtained
without difficulty by the facility operator. A
review of the performance and condition of
the RRF by HDR Engineers in 2007 found that with
appropriate maintenance, the RRF
has a useful life expectancy of more than 20 years.

The O'Connor design has limitations in both power generation and combustion
efficiency when compared to other designs in use
in the United States and in Europe.
As noted, the RRF has consistently provided
approximately 315 KWh/ton of electric power for
export. Other boiler designs in use today can
combust larger quantities of MSW and generate up
to 650 KWh/ton with optimal MSW feedstock in
terms of BTU value and consistency."

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From page 84...

"The RRF has not been expanded as originally
planned for, and continues to process
only about two-thirds of the non-recyclable
fraction of the municipal waste stream.

In 2009 the Agency received 150,641 tons of MSW for processing at the RRF. This
means that approximately 99,359 tons of MSW generated in Dutchess County was
taken to disposal facilities outside the County for disposal.

Similarly, the MRF is undersized and processes
only a portion of the County's recyclables...the
Agency should consider an increase in the
capacity of the RRF to reduce the amount of
material transported to
distant landfills."

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From page 93...

"In order to extend the useful life of the
waste-to-energy facility through 2030 and
beyond, a detailed analysis of the facility and
an estimate of the capital expenditures
that would be needed at various points over the
next 20 years of operations in order to
continue satisfactory performance should be performed."

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From page 94...

"Some immediate and long term improvements to the RRF can be made in
order to increase efficiency without increasing
the Facility's current throughput.
Currently, WTE Facility expansions are being
planned or constructed at Lee County,
Florida; Hillsborough County, Florida; Honolulu,
Hawaii; York, Pennsylvania; Olmsted,
Minnesota; Hempstead, New York; Islip, New York
and Harford County, Maryland. The
size and costs of these expansions vary.
Comparisons of costs per ton of new capacity
reveal a wide range of variation, reflecting
differences in design, site restrictions and
other local conditions. In general, the costs are
significant. Examples are $193,000.00
per design ton at Lee County, Florida to
$233,000.00 per design ton at Hillsborough
County Florida, both of which are approximately
700 tpd expansions currently under
construction. In New York, neither Covanta Energy
Hempstead nor the Islip Resource
Recovery Agency has publicly announced costs for
the expansions of their respective
facilities. Studies performed for the Montgomery-Otsego-Schoharie Solid Waste
Authority (MOSA) have estimated costs at $225,000.00 per design/ton. We have no
reason to believe that costs for an expansion of
the Dutchess RRF would be different.
The absence of a local ash landfill owned by the DCRRA means that the County
continues to depend on competitive bids for the
transport and disposal of ash residue at
landfills outside the County, and in fact, at
significant distance from the County."

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[...and let's not forget this from page 95--
"Ideally, the County would have its own ash
landfill. Although it might be equal in cost to
the current cost of export, it would stabilize
costs over the long term and eliminate the risk
of price hikes due to fuel increases and a
constriction in disposal capacity..."(!)...]

#################################################

[recall blog post from yours truly on this Apr.
27th to http://www.DutchessDemocracy.blogspot.com
]

CEC Ex. Dir. Barbara Warren outraged re: Dutchess
RRA, GOP, DEC-- wake up, folks!...

[recent letter here from Citizens Environmental
Coalition Executive Director Barbara Warren to
myself and area environmentalists from Orange and
Dutchess counties and beyond-- most
interesting!...(letters to editor needed on all
this to local newspapers, folks!)...and emails to
25 of us at countylegislators@co.dutchess.ny.us!]

[recall-- Barbara is also the leader beyond the
New York State Zero Waste Alliance!]
http://www.cectoxic.org/ZeroWaste.html -- check
out this just in to us from Barbara-- "Guess what
is the most costly way to make electricity?
Garbage Incineration! At $8232/kW for capital
costs it is more costly than other ways of
generating electricity by a very wide margin.
Operating costs are the highest too; see:
http://www.eia.gov/oiaf/beck_plantcosts/pdf/updatedplantcosts.pdf
!"]

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From: Barbara Warren (warrenba@msn.com)

To: Katherine Bourbeau, Glen Silver, Linda Ochs,
Michael Edelstein, Joel Tyner, James Travers, Tom
Ellis

Subject: Urgent Alert & Action Needed Re: Solid
Waste Planning for Local Planning Units

Date: April 7, 2011

Hi All,

Many planning units are required to update their
solid waste plans in the near future.
Unfortunately I have received recent indications
that specific requirements related to public
involvement and comment on solid waste plans is
being given little attention. I am attempting to
better clarify this situation.

However, at this time we know of at least one
County [Dutchess] where the solid waste plan has
been submitted and no public involvement has yet
occurred. At a forum yesterday a DEC
representative [DEC Region 3 Recycling
Coordinator Theresa Laibach] described a process
whereby DEC first determines a plan is approvable
and then sends it back to the planning unit for
final approval. What this allows is no PUBLIC
INVOLVEMENT in the planning process. Please see
especially item p) below. If DEC is receiving a
plan for review it should contain a section that
describes the full public process and the
comments and views of the public. If that is not
in the submitted plan, DEC should not be acting
on it.

In the case of Dutchess County the DEC described
a situation where the County had turned over
planning to the Resource Recovery Agency -- the
ones in charge of running the incinerator. The
public is concerned that this could mean a plan
for incinerator expansion.

In the case of Orange County, we believe the plan
will direct garbage to the new planned
gasification facility.
DEC Solid Waste Regulations are in Part 360.

Subpart 360-15: Comprehensive Solid Waste Management Planning
Section 9 Plan Contents

(o) a description of the measures used to secure
participation of neighboring jurisdictions, any
limitations which the plan's implementation would
impose on the neighboring jurisdictions' solid
waste management programs, and the effects of
including the jurisdiction in the plan, including
additional viable alternatives; and

(p) an accounting, to the maximum extent
practicable, for the comments and views expressed
by concerned governmental, environmental,
commercial, and industrial interests, the public,
and neighboring jurisdictions.

ACTION Needed.

We need a Sign On Letter of all interested
individuals and groups within each planning unit
indicating 1) their views on how materials and
solid waste should be managed, and 2) that the
plan must increase diversion from disposal to be
consistent with state law and 3) citing the
regulatory requirement that plans must adequately
address the views of the people in the planning
unit.

More Info Soon !

Barbara J. Warren
Executive Director
Citizens' Environmental Coalition
33 Central Ave.
Albany, NY 12210
518-462-5527/ 845-754-7951 H
warrenba@msn.com
www.cectoxic.org

Molinaro/GOP push jobs for GOP cronies-- as 22 county employees laid off...(why?)...

2012-01-19T12:29:00.001-08:00

Hi all...

Just wondering what you all think of Molinaro/GOP plans during Co. Leg. Committee Day today to force county taxpayers to pay for Marc's newly suggested position of Deputy County Executive...

[curiously, Molinaro never mentioned this during his campaign for County Executive; one wonders why;
also see just below: attempt to do end-run around current DCEDC leadership?...wake up; again-- why?]

Feel free to come out and share your thoughts with all of us on these two at the beginning of these two committee meetings-- today on 6th floor of County Office Building at 22 Market St. in Poughkeepsie:

See below-- from http://www.co.dutchess.ny.us/CountyGov/Departments/Legislature/CLagenda.htm ...

4:30 PM Dutchess County Legislature Government Services and Administration Committee Meeting

2012017 LOCAL LAW NO. OF 2012. A LOCAL LAW AMENDING ARTICLE III (EXECUTIVE BRANCH) OF THE DUTCHESS COUNTY CHARTER BY CREATING THE POSITION OF DEPUTY COUNTY EXECUTIVE(S) AND AMENDING THE ORDER OF SUCCESSION FOR THE OFFICE OF COUNTY EXECUTIVE
[text-- http://www.dutchessny.gov/CountyGov/Departments/Legislature/ResolutionsPDF/2012017.pdf ]

5:15 PM Dutchess County Legislature Budget, Finance, and Personnel Committee Meeting

2012022 ALLOCATING THE POSITION OF DEPUTY COMMISSIONER FOR STRATEGIC PLANNING AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
[text-- http://www.dutchessny.gov/CountyGov/Departments/Legislature/ResolutionsPDF/2012022.pdf ]

Curious, isn't it-- Molinaro/GOP priorities (ushering cronies into county government)-- as opposed to making sure law is followed and county contract with 22 county Dept. of Mental Hygiene employees honored; recall 500+ signed on to http://www.change.org/petitions/stop-the-layoffs ; layoffs by Mar./Apr...

Recall-- "The County will not exercise its right to contract work out if the result of contracting out is the layoff or discharge of then existing employees"... [recall efforts from Shaun Chesley, Liz Piraino]
[from page 25 of Dutchess County's contract (1/1/05-12/31/09) with CSEA-- still in effect now, folks;
http://www.dutchessdemocracy.blogspot.com/2011/12/emergency-candlelight-vigil-mon-630-pm.html ]

Can't make it to join us today?...Email all 25 of us on these-- at countylegislators@co.dutchess.ny.us...

[...and don't forget-- if GOP Co. Leg. majority rubber-stamps these two during Committee Day today, you'll still have opportunity to speak out on these at beginning of Co. Leg. full board mtg. Mon. at 7 pm!]

If you're not outraged you're not paying attention folks...it gets better...(as the worm turns, if you will)..

Here, word for word, is what King Molinaro actually had the gall to email out last night at 10 pm to hundreds of us on Dr. Peter Rostenberg's Hudson Valley Environment list serv re: resolution 2012021:

"I can only tell you that this proposal appropriately empowers the Executive Branch of county government to act as solid waste planning unit."

Fact: Several different reliable sources have told us over the last few years that it's actually BOTH the Legislative AND Executive branches of our county government that have to approve the Solid Waste Management Plan for the county-- Terry Laibach (DEC Region 3 Recycling Coordinator) has told us this, Barbara Warren (Ex. Dir. for Citizens Environmental Coalition) has told us this, and David Sears, citing DEC law/website, has told us this as well.
[see http://www.dec.ny.gov/chemical/71265.html ; http://www.CECToxic.org ; recall-- re: discussion of
http://www.dutchessny.gov/CountyGov/Departments/Legislature/ResolutionsPDF/2012021.pdf ]

Can you say "GOP power grab for new King Molinaro"?.....I knew you could...

[all hail the King]

Joel
845-444-0599/876-2488
joeltyner@earthlink.net
http://www.JoelforCongress.org

[thx to many from http://www.OccupyPoughkeepsie.org : came out to speak out in Dec. vs. CSEA layoffs]

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From http://www.dutchessny.gov/CountyGov/Departments/Legislature/ResolutionsPDF/2012017.pdf ...

Laid on desks by mail and placed in legislators boxes 1-10-12
Government Services & Administration Committee

RESOLUTION NO. 2012017

Legislators ROLISON and COOPER offer the following and move its adoption:

LOCAL LAW NO. ____ of 2012

RE: LOCAL LAW NO. OF 2012. A LOCAL LAW
AMENDING ARTICLE III (EXECUTIVE BRANCH) OF THE DUTCHESS
COUNTY CHARTER BY CREATING THE POSITION OF DEPUTY
COUNTY EXECUTIVE(S) AND AMENDING THE ORDER OF
SUCCESSION FOR THE OFFICE OF COUNTY EXECUTIVE

BE IT ENACTED by the County Legislature of the County of Dutchess, State of New
York as follows:

SECTION 1. LEGISLATIVE INTENT. The County Legislature hereby determines
that it is in the best interest of the County to provide for the appointment of a Deputy County
Executive(s).

SECTION 2. AMENDMENT OF THE DUTCHESS COUNTY CHARTER. Upon
adoption of this Local Law, the existing Section 3.05 (Acting County Executive; How
Designated, Powers and Duties) shall be amended and re-designated as Section 3.06 and a new
Section 3.05 (Deputy County Executive(s); How Designated, Powers and Duties) shall be added.
Both Sections shall read as follows:

Section 3.05. Deputy County Executive(s); How Designated; Powers and Duties.
The County Executive may appoint such Deputy County Executive(s) as may be deemed
proper, in writing, each subject to confirmation by the County Legislature. The
appointment shall designate, in the event of the appointment of more than one (1)
Deputy, their order of succession which the County Executive may change from time to
time. Each Deputy County Executive shall serve at the pleasure of the County Executive
during the term(s) of Office of the County Executive. After confirmation, such
appointment(s) shall be filed with the County Clerk and the Clerk of the County
Legislature. The designated successor Deputy County Executive shall have all of the
powers and perform all of the duties of the County Executive in the event of the County
Executive's absence from the County or inability to perform and exercise the powers and
duties of the Office of County Executive. Each Deputy County Executive shall also
have such powers as delegated by the County Executive consistent with the powers of
this Charter. If no Deputy County Executive has been appointed or in the event that the
County Executive and the Deputy County Executive(s) are absent from the County or
unable to perform and exercise the powers and duties of their Offices, the provisions of
Section 3.06 shall control.

Section 3.06. Acting County Executive; How Designated; Powers and Duties.
The County Executive shall designate in writing, and in order of succession, the
department heads who shall be Acting County Executive in the event the County
Executive and the Deputy County Executive(s) are absent from the County or unable to
perform and exercise the powers and duties of their Offices. Such designation shall be
filed with the County Clerk and the Clerk of the County Legislature and may be revoked
at any time by the County Executive filing a new written designation and order of
succession. In the absence of such written designation and order of succession, and in
the event of the absence of the County Executive and Deputy County Executive(s) from
the County or inability to perform and exercise the powers and duties of their Offices, the
County Legislature shall appoint a department head as Acting County Executive. The
Acting County Executive shall have all the powers and perform all the duties of the
County Executive.

SECTION 3. RE-DESIGNATING SECTION 3.06, ENTITLED "REMOVAL OF
COUNTY EXECUTIVE". Upon adoption of this Local Law the existing Section 3.06,
Removal of County Executive, shall be re-designated as Section 3.07.

SECTION 4. EFFECTIVE DATE. This local law shall take effect immediately upon
full compliance with all the requisite statutes and laws applicable to its adoption and
promulgation.

###################################################

[recall below originally sent out to this list Dec. 5th]

Residents sound off on county budget hearing
8:52 PM, Dec. 1, 2011 |

http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/article/20111201/NEWS01/111201006/Watch-county-budget-hearing-live-tonight

About 100 Dutchess County residents showed up Thursday night at the Bardavon 1869 Opera House in Poughkeepsie to sound off on the proposed county budget, and few speakers asked the Legislature to make further cuts to the $411-million spending plan.

Several employees of the county Department of Mental Hygiene asked the Legislature to reject a plan submitted by County Executive William Steinhaus to lay off 22 mental health workers and replace them with employees of a private firm. One mental hygiene employee, Sean Chesley, noted Steinhaus had rejected an offer by the state Office of Mental Health to pay the county $1.5 million to compensate the county for the closing of Hudson River Psychiatric Center. That money would more than offset the $1.2 million salaries and benefits for the employees slated for layoffs, Chesley said.

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From: Tracey Osetek

Subject: 2012 Proposed Budget

Dear County Legislators,

My name is Tracey Osetek. I am a Dutchess County Department of Mental Hygiene employee working as a Recreation Therapy Aide for Millbrook Continuing Treatment Center. I came into this position 8 years ago simply looking for a job but found my calling in servicing those who are inflicted with mental illness. I have finally decided to pursue a career as a psychiatric nurse. Unfortunately, I will be unable to do that if the 2012 proposed budget is passed. This budget has called for the elimination of 22 DMH positions, mine included.

I have a 3 year old and a 17 year old to support. My 3 year old has a sensory processing disorder which requires a structured program and services to help him. I will not be able to continue to pay for this if I am laid off. My 17 year old is diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder. He is doing well but he needs his medication to maintain the stability of his symptoms. I will not be able to provide his medication without my insurance.

This proposal does not only effect myself, my children, my coworkers, my friends, but it severely effects our main purpose, the clients we serve. The closing of Hudson River Psychiatric Center has already displaced many patients and with the closing of our three Continuing Treatment Center's these patients will be left with minimal services available to them.

A private organization is slated to take over all three of our Continuing Treatment Center's but they will only be able to serve the higher functioning patients since they operate under PROS, Personalized Recovery Oriented Services. This system is designed to encourage recovery which consist of symptom management, education, independence, job training and reintroduction into the community and work force. This is a great plan for those who are at the capacity to achieve those goals.

What about the large portion whose illness is severe and persistent? Where will they end up? Jail? On the street? There is no room at the hospitals due to Hudson River's closing. I work as a per diem Pt Care Tech on the 5th floor at St Francis Hospital and have witnessed first hand the cycle that occurs. St Francis is overflowing and patients have been sent as far as Glenn Falls because there are no beds.

I ask that you restore and fund these positions so that DMH employees can continue to provide the services this population so desperately needs and continue to try and formulate a more cost effective plan to operate Mental Hygiene.

Sincerely,

Tracey Osetek

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Again-- I received a call recently from one county employee (of 49) from Dutchess Co. Dept. of Mental Hygience to be laid off; they've been working with mentally ill folks unemployed who have turned to alcohol/substance abuse-- this county employee pointed out to us the irony of GOP creating more depressed unemployed who may well turn to alcohol or drug abuse after being laid off-- insanity...

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Dutchess County Dept. of Mental Hygiene's Shaun Chesley statement on all this:

"Almost two years ago, CSEA was informed of the transition plans of contracting out the services of the Continuing Treatment centers of the Department of Mental Hygiene to Occupations Inc.

CSEA was told that this transition would take place using attrition, meaning that if employees found other positions or retired, those positions were to be back-filled by Occupations Inc. employees. This plan is fair, and it has been done in the past. It means no layoffs, and it allows for all parties to transition painlessly while maintaining services to the residents of Dutchess County.

On November 1st we were surprised to learn that the County Executive suggests in his 2012 Tentative Budget to not only break the agreement of the Transition plans and our past practices, but to go against our Collective Bargaining agreement by contracting out services and laying off existing employees.

This is not only wrong; it is illegal, and we ask that you reject this proposal and return to the past practice of the agreed-upon transition plans."

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From: Shaun Chesley

Please consider the appeal for your help below. If you could consider this and or sending it out to your contact listings it would be appreciated..we are at a critical point.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

You may already know that the Dutchess County Executive has released his Tentative 2012 Budget to the Legislature. A budget that calls for the Layoff of 22 employees in the Department of Mental Hygiene and ending services to Dutchess Counties most vulnerable population, the mentally ill. As employees we are trying to save our jobs as well as represent the population of Dutchess County that we Serve. They have no Union, no voice or representation but us.

Please help us to get the attention of the Dutchess County Legislature to STOP THE LAYOFFS and continue the services, by taking a moment to sign our petition at the link below. Each signature will automatically send an email to the general Legislative email account. When you are done signing would you also consider forwarding this note to any of your friends you think might also help.

http://www.change.org/petitions/stop-the-layoffs

Thank you for your time and helping save Jobs and Services.
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Five facts to send now-- to countylegislators@co.dutchess.ny.us, countyexec@co.dutchessny.us(!):

Fact #1: It would have only "cost" $1,200,000 to keep 22 county employees doing the valuable work they now do in our county Department of Mental Hygiene's Continuing Day Treatment program.

Fact #2: As it is right now already, Dutchess County taxpayers unfairly subsidize privatization through poverty wages-- $3 to 10 million annually for Medicaid, Family Health Plus, and Child Health Plus for members of working families (when folks have jobs but can't afford to pay for health care for families).
[study-- http://www.petitiononline.com/duhealth ; http://clawback.org/category/hidden-taxpayer-costs/ ]

Fact #3: As it is already right now, "Dutchess County taxes its residents 23% less per capita and spends 26% less per capita than the statewide average, ranking us among the lowest of all 57 New York counties for spending and taxes per resident."
[Steinhaus: http://www.co.dutchess.ny.us/CountyGov/Departments/CountyExecutive/20604.htm ]

Fact #4: GOP Co. Leg. leaders are going around telling people our county's Finance Commissioner Pam Barrack has stated true current fund balance is actually $52 million (far more than Steinhaus est.).

Fact #5: The Daily Freeman reported Sept. 29th that "In a memo released Wednesday...by Dutchess County Budget Director Valerie Sommerville and Finance Commissioner Pamela Barrack...the county's fund balance currently stands at $30.9 million, a number that is significantly above the $17.5 million fund balance the county ended 2010 with." [Poughkeepsie Journal and MidHudsonNews.com = same]
[ http://www.dailyfreeman.com/articles/2011/09/30/news/doc4e8519aa68730023971139.txt ]

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From: Shaun Chesley

Subject: Figures for the 22 positions

Date: Nov 29, 2011 2:23 PM

After review of the Budget and knowing your intentions to save the 22 positions for entire year, please consider the following:

In the budget:

Page 303 top right corner of the page shows a figure of $419,315 to fund the 22 employees for the 1st Quarter. This figure includes fringe.

I simply multiplied that figure by 3 to come up with an additional figure of $1,257,945 (this is what is needed to fund the end of the year, this number also includes fringe.)

If the 1.5 million refused by the County Executive were accepted we could actually fund all 22 positions until the end of the year and still have monies left over, nearly $300,000 that could be used to further offset the County Tax Levy or used for other issues.
[re: $1.5 million-- http://www.co.dutchess.ny.us/CountyGov/Departments/CountyExecutive/20604.htm ]

Plus...

The number includes fringe, which does not need to be considered for Tax Levy .... an Additional Savings.

Plus...

This will cover all 22 positions.

Plus...

Shared staffing would even mean more monies coming back to the County.

Thank you again,

Shaun Chesley

Valentine's Day Rally-- Have a Heart, NYS-- at Saland/Miller's Feb. 14th 12:30 pm...come out!...

2012-01-18T11:50:00.000-08:00

From Facebook event link: http://www.facebook.com/#!/events/343275875690673/ ...

Valentine's Day Have a Heart Rally-- Fully Fund Schools, Tax Rich, Close Loopholes!

...AND SAVE HYDE PARK ELEMENTARY SCHOOL FROM BEING SHUT DOWN(!)...

[join 360+ already on board on Facebook-- at "Keep Hyde Park Schools Open"(!):
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Keep-Hyde-Park-Schools-Open/365200926830603 ]

Public Event · By Joel Tyner
o
When
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
o
Time
12:30pm until 1:30pm

Fact: Hyde Park Elementary School may close soon; LaGrange Elementary in Arlington and Smith Elmentary in Poughkeepsie have already shut their doors. $2.7 billion has been cut in state aid to our schools over past two years; there are 30,000 less teachers/educational staff (11,000 cut last year alone).

Fact: The 67 billionaires who call New York home have a combined net worth of over $234.9 billion, while the rest of us are paying for their bailouts with drastic cuts to public services and over 100,000 middle-class job cuts in public sector. Deep poverty and income inequality are at an all-time high in NY.

Fact: NY’s millionaires tax used to bring in $4.9 billion in revenue annually; because of December’s tax scheme/deal, it now only brings in $1.9 billion in revenue.

In this economy, it’s crazy for Albany to give $1 billion a year in corporate tax loopholes to wealthy special interests and a $3 billion tax cut to the richest New Yorkers-- while leaving our state and local government services woefully underfunded. We should instead reinvest this money to save our schools and services, and create jobs (FiscalPolicy.org).

[note-- much of the text and many of the facts here come directly from http://www.99PercentNY.org/ -- a broad, statewide coalition made up of groups like 1199SEIU, Center for Working Families, Citizen Action NY, Communications Workers of America, Hunger Action Network of New York, Move On, NAACP, New Deal for NY. New York Students Rising, New York Communities for Change, Strong Economy for All Coalition, VOCAL-NY, Working Families Party; see http://www.ABetterChoiceforNY.org/ and http://www.FiscalPolicy.org/ for much more on all this!]

[call Cuomo/state legislators now: (877) 255-9417!)]

Sponsored by the Real Majority Project

Information: joeltyner@earthlink.net 845-444-0599

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From: Ronald Deutsch

Subject: New Yorkers for Fiscal Fairness responds to Executive Budget

Date: Jan 17, 2012 3:26 PM

Budget on Revenues: Smoke Em if You Can Afford Em

Ron Deutsch, Executive Director of New Yorkers for Fiscal Fairness responds to Lack of Corporate Loopholes Closers in Executive Budget Proposal

"The Governor's 'Smoke Em if You Got Em' revenue generating agenda leaves much to be desired. Raising taxes on cigars and loose tobacco fall far short of a substantive loophole closing agenda especially when our current corporate tax law has more holes than swiss cheese."

"Last week, organizations from across New York called upon the Governor to follow three simple principles when it comes to closing corporate loopholes; enforcement, transparency and fairness. New York could and should collect hundreds of million in uncollected tax revenue simply by enforcing current tax law, especially when it comes to unreported gains from Real Estate Partnerships.

"Before we cut one program for needy New Yorkers we should make sure that wealthy real estate moguls are actually paying their taxes. We must also ensure that big multi-national corporations that do business in NYS pay something in corporate taxes. Too many are avoiding paying any taxes to NYS. We need to level the playing field so that small businesses are not left 'holding the bag' while big businesses are allowed to avail themselves of billions of dollars in corporate tax subsidies and loopholes."

Ronald Deutsch
Executive Director
New Yorkers for Fiscal Fairness
212 Great Oaks Blvd
Albany, NY 12203
(518) 452-2130 - office
(518) 469-6769 - cell
(518) 869-8649 - fax
rdeutschnyff@gmail.com or
mkd67@aol.com

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Coalition Wants Corporate Tax Loopholes Closed
WAMC/Dave Lucas (2012-01-10)

http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wamc/news.newsmain/article/1/0/1892051/WAMC.New.York.News/Coalition.Wants.Corporate.Tax.Loopholes.Closed

Progressive groups gathered Monday in Albany to call on Governor Andrew Cuomo and the legislature to close corporate tax loopholes that they say would raise $1 billion for the state budget this year. ..:: WAMC Photo by Dave Lucas ::..
ALBANY, NY (WAMC) - A large coalition of community, labor, student, faith and Occupy organizations gathered at the New York State Capitol on Monday to announce their campaign to bring fairness and transparency to New York's corporate tax system. WAMC's Dave Lucas was there and files this report.

Unified under the "99 per cent New York" banner, the coalition, which includes Citizen Action of New York, the New York State Public Employees Federation, Occupy Albany and others, is calling on Governor Cuomo and the Legislature to close corporate tax loopholes, raising over $1 billion dollars for this year's state budget. They say additional revenue will help New York to create jobs, create a fairer environment for small business, and prevent more devastating budget cuts to services and our safety net and allow for restorations of reduced funding. Occupy Albany's Colin Donnaruma said "The fact that all too often powerful corporations are able to wield political influence to create tax loopholes to avoid paying their fair-share is a paradigmatic example of the broader economic and political inequalities that have motivated the Occupy movement."

The groups produced a list of companies they allege are New York's worst corporate tax dodgers, including Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, Travelers Insurance, Verizon, and Goldman Sachs. PEF President Ken Brynien notes the list highlights the gross inequities in our tax system that hinder small businesses, job creation, and our economy. Angelica Clarke, organizer with New York Students Rising and Save Our SUNY, says students demand Governor Cuomo and the legislature initiate a tuition freeze.

The coalition's plan to reform New York's corporate tax structure is based on three main principles: enforcement, fairness, and transparency. The Governor's office did not immediately return calls for comment.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/18/nyregion/cuomo-offers-budget-with-more-trims-than-deep-cuts.html?ref=nyregion

In Cuomo’s Budget, Nip-and-Tuck Cuts and Big Policy Aims
Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is trying to reduce the cost of running New York State by $1.1 billion. His priorities reflected last year's.

By THOMAS KAPLAN
Published: January 17, 2012

ALBANY — Mr. Cuomo proposed a $132.5 billion state budget for the fiscal year that begins April 1. That would be $225 million less than what the state is spending this year — a cut of 0.2 percent...

He also proposed limiting retirement benefits for newly hired public workers across the state, including in New York City, offering a choice between a pension that is less generous than that for current public employees, or a defined contribution plan, which is similar to a 401(k)...

Seeking to reduce the projected cost of running the state government by more than $1.1 billion, Mr. Cuomo proposed continuing a hiring freeze, combining some offices and agencies, and consolidating procurement and information technology services.

Mr. Cuomo also proposed saving more than $750 million by limiting planned increases on mental health programs and social services, including eliminating an automatic cost-of-living increase for nonprofit providers of services like foster care, adoption and family counseling...

Public employee unions immediately rejected Mr. Cuomo’s proposal to limit pension benefits, the second consecutive year the governor has tried to do so.

Kenneth Brynien, the president of the Public Employees Federation, said that the budget “ignores the fact that state workers have done their share to address the state’s fiscal problems.” And Danny Donohue, the president of the Civil Service Employees Association, called Mr. Cuomo’s pension proposal “an assault on the middle class and a cheap shot at public employees.”

Stephen J. Cassidy, the president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association, invoked the firefighters who died on Sept. 11, 2001, as he criticized the proposal.

“This legislation, if enacted, will throw the widows and children of future firefighters killed in the line of duty under the bus,” Mr. Cassidy said.

Mr. Cuomo’s task this year was considerably easier than last year, when the state faced a $10 billion budget gap, prompting the governor to seek sharp reductions in spending on health care and education, as well as wage and benefit concessions from state workers. This year, Mr. Cuomo needed only nips and tucks rather than huge cuts to address a budget gap of $2 billion.

Outlining several contested policy objectives as part of his annual budget proposal, Mr. Cuomo vowed to withhold a promised increase in state aid to school districts that did not adopt a teacher evaluation system.

forum Weds.-- "15 Ways to Help Local Small Businesses" (Chamber still barring me from speaking)...

2012-01-16T20:03:00.000-08:00

Hi all...

Just wanted to invite you all to come out to a special forum I'll be hosting this Weds., Jan. 18th at 5:30 pm at Rhinebeck Village Hall at 76 E. Market St. there (not at Town Hall-- but at Village Hall, folks)-- on "Fifteen Ways To Help Local Small Businesses"!...

[sadly, Rhinebeck Area Chamber of Commerce still allowing only GOP to speak Thurs. (but not me); see below; again: thx to many of you out there who have expressed support; not to late to send polite emails to them: info@rhinebeckchamber.com; for many years in past I've spoken at their annual dinner; instead, rep from Rhinebeck Chamber actually called our house here threatening to call police on me; last time I checked, this is still America 2012-- thanks to Tom Paine, it's legal to publicize injustices...lol; see:
http://www.dutchessdemocracy.blogspot.com/2012/01/rhinebeck-chamber-of-commerces.html]

For the interactive discussion I'll be hosting Weds. at Rhinebeck Town Hall I'll be drawing heavily on these fifteen:

[frankly, for well over a decade now I've been researching various ways to help small businesses; recall these 2 efforts from me: http://www.PetitionOnline.com/SmallBiz http://www.petitiononline.com/smallbiz ]

1. Business Alliance for Local Living Economies information-- http://www.LivingEconomies.org ;
American Independent Business Alliance information-- http://www.AMIBA.net .

2. Starting a local currency for Rhinebeck area to help support locally owned, independent small businesses (recall RhineBucks effort I launched a few years ago with Bob Miglino; sadly, the Chamber did not seriously support this-- even though I brought nationally known speakers like Paul Glover (Ithaca Hours founder) and Susan Witt (BerkShares founder) to Rhinebeck Town Hall to speak).
[see http://www.IthacaHours.org ; http://www.BerkShares.org -- both have helped local small business!]

3. Gateways to Entrepreneurial Tomorrows http://www.GetHudsonValley.org http://www.MicroBizNY.org
[microenterprise: repeatedly proven to be a much more effective way to do economic development]

4. Fact: "Only 8.9 percent of people with any small business income have incomes over $250,000/year."
[it's high time our federal/state tax policy truly prioritized this-- http://www.PetitionOnline.com/ILikeIke ;
http://www.CBPP.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=2697 : Center on Budget and Policy Priorities]

5. Fact: 70 percent of economy is driven by consumer demand (help middle-class-- to help small biz!).
[ http://www.TheCenterLane.com/?tag=consumer-driven-economy ]

6. Fact: Even small business would do better with single-payer (Medicare for all) system of healthcare;
recall "Single-Payer: Good for Business" http://www.TheNation.com/article/single-payer-good-business -- also see http://www.PNHP.org ; http://www.petitiononline.com/onepayer ; SinglePayerNewYork.org.

7. Fact: Sustainable Hudson Valley Chair David Dell of Poughkeepsie has crunched the numbers and determined that our county could save $1 billion on energy costs over next decade for business owners and homeowners with energy-efficiency/renewables loan fund similar to what GOP-led Town of Bedford in Westchester has put in place-- creating thousands of green jobs and cleaning up our county's air (just ranked "F" for third year in a row by the American Lung Association of NY)-- but Republicans reject this.
[ http://www.dutchessdemocracy.blogspot.com/2009/03/our-bright-idea-growin-brighter-and.html ; http://www.nyserda.org/GreenNY/ ; http://www.energyfinancesolutions.com/main/homeownersnyfour ]
http://www.petitiononline.com/pacehere ; http://www.LIGreenHomes.com ; http://www.NWEAC.org ]

8. Fact: Moving towards zero waste by recycling and composting has been proven to create ten times more jobs than incineration or landfilling. However, Dutchess GOP are wasting another $4 million this year on incineration through our county's Resource Recovery Agency (RRA "service fees")-- instead of saving millions meaningfully moving towards zero waste by properly incentivizing businesses in the private sector to help create an eco-industrial resource recovery park for recycling and composting.
[ http://www.ilsr.org/recycling/recyclingmeansbusiness.html ; Shabazz Jackson: GreenwayNY.com;
[90+ already on board @ http://www.petitiononline.com/zeroyes ; "Zero Waste Dutchess" on Facebook;
http://www.dutchessdemocracy.blogspot.com/2011/10/rally-for-zero-waste-oct-27th-save.html ;
http://www.cectoxic.org/ZeroWaste.html ;
http://ccgovernment.carr.org/ccg/pubworks/sw-future/docs/resource-assessment.pdf ]

9. Fact: Small business owners in Rhinebeck and across the county could benefit from lower taxes; we Democrats in our County Legislature sponsored a resolution for our county government to save $3 million annually for local towns, cities, and villages on the cost of health insurance for municipal employees without cutting benefits-- with a countywide consortium for this as in Tompkins County-- but Republicans shot this down in February 2010 and last fall-- though just this past December (last month), Dutchess County Association of Supervisors/Mayors actually passed resolution on this unanimously.
[ http://whcu870.com/pages/8011398.php?contentType=4&contentId=6717548 ]

10. Fact: Small business owners in Rhinebeck and across our county can ill afford any more tax hikes-- but Dutchess GOP are wasting another $4.2 million in this year's budget on housing out inmates-- instead of investing pro-actively in our youth-- and instead of following the proven, cost-saving, recidivism-cutting re-entry system examples of Brooklyn's ComAlert system and Peter Young. Dutchess also needs to restore funding (recently cut by local GOP) for cost-saving preventive programs for troubled teens like our county Youth Bureau's Project Return program-- at the Mediation Center of Dutchess County as well-- and instituted at truly comprehensive system of re-entry locally to slash recidivism (as Brooklyn's ComAlert program has)-- instead of allowing the GOP County Legislature leadership to continue push to waste tens millions of our tax dollars on an unnecessary jail expansion.
[ http://www.JobsNotJails.weebly.com ; http://www.petitiononline.com/comalert ; http://www.PYHIT.com ;
http://www.BrooklynDA.org ; http://www.FightCrime.org ; http://www.petitiononline.com/comalert ].

11. Fact: It's been proven over and over again that every dollar invested in pre-school special education for children 3-5 and early intervention (for 0-3) saves many tax dollars down the road. However, the current uber-GOP Co. Leg. majority is going along with the County Executive's $1.5 million cut to pre-school special education for children 3-5 and $850,000 cut to early intervention for children 0-3.
[ http://www.fightcrime.org/sites/default/files/reports/Cost-Bft%20Br%20FINAL%204-30-03.pdf ;
http://www.pacca.org/parents.aspx?id=376 ;
http://www.aecf.org/upload/PublicationFiles/ED3622H1409.pdf ;
http://www.greeleytribune.com/article/20060424/READERS/104240090 ]

12. Fact: The vast majority of small business owners in Rhinebeck can't cut $1000 checks to politicians; Dutchess County needs campaign finance reform to clean up county government and end the pay to play-- literally millions of our tax dollars annually in county contracts going to entities making thousand-dollar campaign contributions-- as the Poughkeepsie Journal has editorialized for.
[see: http://www.petitiononline.com/cleangov ; Rockland County has had this in place since 1998;
http://dutchessdemocracy.blogspot.com/2009/08/re-pay-to-play-in-dutchess-county-brand.html ]

13. Fact: Small business owners in Rhinebeck and all across our county would benefit from lower taxes; Schenectady County has smaller number of county employees and retirees than we have here in Dutchess-- yet they save one million dollars a year with a Canadian prescription drug option for county employees and retirees; Rensselaer County does this too (with GOP County Exec Kathy Jimino there); FDA is NOT cracking down on these; see http://www.PetitionOnline.com/SaveOnRx .

14. Fact: Small business owners in Rhinebeck and across the county would benefit if local homeowners had more money to spend. We Democrats in the Co. Leg. sponsored a resolution for Dutchess to save $27 million annually for 110,000 local residents every winter on home heating oil bills with a plan here similar to one already successfully run in Cortlandt, Putnam Valley, Somers, and Peekskill (saving $250 annually for each homeowner there)-- but the Republicans shot it down in February of 2010.
[see: http://dutchessdemocracy.blogspot.com/2011/01/dutchess-gop-wasting-275-million-in.html
[ http://www.townofcortlandt.com/cit-e-access/news/index.cfm?NID=12528&TID=20&jump2=0 ]

15. Fact: Foreclosed homes hurt small business owners and all of us in the community with redirected impact/cost to taxpayers and lower property values; former Dutchess County Executive William Steinhaus sent all of us in Co. Leg. a letter Dec. 15th telling us that "Foreclosure rates in Dutchess County, again our neighbors and friends suffering the anguish and stress of losing their homes, are at record numbers. There are a total of over 4,000 foreclosures in Dutchess over just the last three-year period." This is pertinent because Dutchess County continues to do business with three large irresponsible financial institutions it doesn't have to (with literally $150 million in accounts with Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo ($50 million each)-- all documented to have been involved in mortgage/foreclosure mess. It doesn't have to be this way; Albany County ended a $90 million account last fall with Bank of America, for instance; L.A., Ithaca, Hempstead, Binghamton, and Freeport have all moved in the same direction-- to divest from JPMorgan Chase, et. al.; why can't Dutchess? Recall-- even the Northern Dutchess Alliance's "Blueprint for Economic Development" report calls for holding local financial institutions responsible; see http://www.NorthernDutchess.org for more on this.
[ http://MoveYourMoneyProject.org ; http://www.nycommunities.org/taxonomy/term/2 ;
http://www.bizjournals.com/albany/print-edition/2011/06/10/albany-county-legislators-want-to.html ;
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/06/local/la-me-occupy-city-banking-20111206 ;
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/15/nyregion/patience-grows-thin-for-banks-foreclosure-excuses.html
http://www.forbes.com/sites/halahtouryalai/2011/08/16/eric-schneiderman-is-a-big-thorn-in-bank-of-americas-side/ ; http://www.prweb.com/releases/2011/12/prweb9016844.htm ;
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/nyregion/jpmorgan-chase-got-us-help-but-mortgage-holders-did-not.html ;
http://news.firedoglake.com/2011/07/27/doj-civil-rights-division-investigating-wells-fargo-for-mortgage-fraud/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/20/wells-fargo-settlement-mortgage-abuse_n_905054.html ]

So-- hope to see you all there Weds. 5:30 pm at Rhinebeck Village Hall (76 E. Market St. there-- 12572)!...

[pass it on]

Joel
845-876-2488/444-0599
joeltyner@earthlink.net
JoelforCongress.org

p.s. Update-- one more thing-- check out http://Chamber.350.org too!...(recall-- even 350.org's own Bill McKibben was speaking about this right here in Dutchess County last year-- at Millbrook's Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies-- the fact is that 56 Chambers of Commerce across the country, and 6254 individual businesses as well have signed on to the Chamber.350.org statement-- to this, in effect-- "What does the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have to do with Climate Change? The US Chamber is controlled by a handful of dirty energy companies and opposes every single effort to curb climate pollution"...(why hasn't the Rhinebeck Area Chamber of Commerce done this?)...

##############################################

[recall below sent out to my Rhinebeck e-list last Tues.; thx again tons to many of you for support & positive feedback on this]

http://www.dutchessdemocracy.blogspot.com/2012/01/rhinebeck-chamber-of-commerces.html

New Rhinebeck Chamber annual dinner rule-- no Democratic speakers allowed?...

Hi all...

For literally just about every year now for the last eight years running, I've spoken (along with other local elected officials) at the January State of Rhinebeck Annual Dinners hosted by Rhinebeck Chamber of Commerce at the Beekman Arms...(talk to local Democratic Committee folks on this; they can confirm)...

So I was a bit surprised to read below that I would not be speaking at this year's event (only GOP)!...

Note-- I recently/gently reminded folks at the Chamber that I've spoken at just about all the previous January State of Rhinebeck Annual Dinners hosted by the Rhinebeck Chamber of Commerce, and I asked to be included as part of the program below-- they, for some reason, again told me no on this...

Feel free to ask them why, seemingly, only GOP officials are allowed to speak this time...

Email them (politely) with your thoughts on this (as you wish)-- at info@rhinebeckchamber.com...

Fact: Small business issues are far from foreign to me; I've done quite a bit of research/advocacy on 'em:
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/SmallBiz ; http://www.PetitionOnline.com/smallbiz .

[I've also been advocating for well over a decade now for the county to do more re: microenterprise too: http://www.whvw.net/nyp1/ ; http://www.activistresource.org/calendar/cal_event.php?id=5902 ; http://www.activistresource.org/calendar/cal_event.php?id=6370 .]

[finally, frankly, I've also spent a lot of money over last decade subsidizing various Chamber events!]

Pass it on...

Joel
876-2488/444-0599
Class of 1981 Rhinebeck High School Graduate
Five-Term Dutchess County Legislator (Rhinebeck/Clinton)
[...and yes-- former dishwasher-- way back when-- at Beekman Arms too!]
http://www.DutchessDemocracy.blogspot.com

[if this is payback for local GOP's seeming inability in finding a candidate to beat me (I ran unopposed for fifth term this past Nov.), so be it, but honestly, it doesn't make Chamber look good/fair, or bipartisan]

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

From: Rhinebeck Chamber of Commerce
To: joeltyner@earthlink.net
Subject: State of Rhinebeck Annual Dinner 2012
Date: Jan 9, 2012 8:38 AM

Please rsvp, if you haven't done so. Ads should be submitted by Tuesday, January 10th. Information at bottom of flyer. Thank you for participating in this great annual event!

Event Invitation
State of Rhinebeck Annual Dinner 2012
Annual dinner for elected officials to present to the Rhinebeck Area Chamber of Commerce membership.
Speakers this year will be Mayor Jim Reardon, Deputy Supervisor Bruce Washburn and newly elected County Executive Marc Molinaro.

Program sponsorships of 1/4 and 1/2 pages are available.
Date:

January 19, 2011
Time:

06:00 PM - 09:00 PM
Location:

The Beekman Arms
Wayfarer Room
Contact:

Colleen Cruikshank, 845-876-5904
Email:

info@rhinebeckchamber.com
Date/Time Details:

Thursday, January 19th from 6 to 9 pm.
Fees/Admission:

$55 per member/$65 for non-members.

This email was sent on behalf of Rhinebeck Area Chamber of Commerce by ChamberMaster, 24400 Smiley RD Ste. 4, Nisswa, MN 56468.To unsubscribe click here. If you have questions or comments concerning this email or ChamberMaster services in general, please contact us by email at support@chambermaster.com.

Rhinebeck Chamber of Commerce's definition of "fair"-- only GOP speakers...lol

2012-01-12T13:21:00.000-08:00

Hi all...

The Rhinebeck Area Chamber of Commerce will be holding its yearly State of Rhinebeck Annual Dinner 2012 Thursday, Jan. 19th at 6 pm at the Beekman Arms— in its own words, its “annual dinner for elected officials to present to the Rhinebeck Area Chamber of Commerce membership; speakers this year will be Mayor Jim Reardon, Deputy Supervisor Bruce Washburn & newly elected County Executive Molinaro.” [no Democrats]

The question is this-- why is it that I, though I just got elected to a fifth consecutive term to represent Rhinebeck and Clinton in our County Legislature, and though I've spoken for many years running at this event, am not being allowed to speak?...

[and yes-- believe it or not-- I've also spent quite a bit of my own money subsidizing the Chamber through my attendance at quite a few of their events over the past decade as well]

[also-- check out these two online petition efforts I started years ago on behalf of small businesses; I am no stranger to their issues; see www.PetitionOnline.com/SmallBiz and www.petitiononline.com/smallbiz]

So-- send a polite email to the Chamber asking why-- at info@rhinebeckchamber.com-- and let us know if you’d like to help us form a new, truly bipartisan and nonpartisan Rhinebeck Area Chamber of Commerce as well!...

[will be circulating hard-copy petition over next week on this-- to make it clear that at least ONE Democrat should be allowed to speak at this event; let me know if you'd like a copy and we'll make sure you get one!]

Joel Tyner
Rhinebeck High School Class of 1981
845-876-2488/444-0599
joeltyner@earthlink.net
JoelforCongress.org