PlanetAlbany

Happy days are here again? (updated)

Listening to Gov. Andrew Cuomo now on the Fred Dicker Talk 1300 show, he's bobbing and weaving about today's Wall Street Journal story (Google "Cuomo eyes tax rates by Jacob Gershman" to get around the pay wall) which suggests he is now open to higher tax rates on the wealthy. Cuomo did indicate he's talking about next year's budget, although the current millionaire's tax is scheduled to expire at the end of this year. While it would be preferable not to cut taxes then have to raise them again, Cuomo's move toward a new position still looks like a giant advance toward rational and equitable tax policy -- and Senate Republicans have been sending signals that they are open toward moving in the same direction. Obviously this is driven by a lot more than Occupy Albany, but it's still shaping up as a big victory for the Occupy movement.

Update: Cuomo still yakking, I guess he's taking the full hour without commercials. He confirms he is considering using private-sector union pension funds (i.e. construction trades) to finance construction of a new Tappan Zee Bridge over the Hudson. Since you know any new bridge here will be built by union workers anyway with a project labor agreement, the financing sounds like a reasonable idea. But this all sounds like a big move to the left on economic issues by the governor. OK, gov is off and they've gone to commercials at 10:50.

Bruno bust gone at Albany Airport (Update: It's coming back)

So I was waiting for a plane to come in yesterday (Thanksgiving Day) at Albany "International" Airport, and wandered up to the third floor observation deck. The plinth where Joe Bruno's bust has sat for many years was empty, with no sign indicating where the sculpted head had gone. There was some speculation a couple of years ago, when the former Senate majority leader was convicted on two federal corruption charges (while being acquitted of others) that the bust would go. But it didn't then, and had been there the last time I looked, and I don't see any mention of its removal on the Web. Those convictions were thrown out recently on appeal, but the U.S. attorney's office got the OK to take the case back to another grand jury, which is apparently going to happen, so this could all go on for years.

The current exhibit on the third floor is "LOL --- Art that is seriously funny", which is as lame as it sounds. The last thing the contemporary art world needs is more of an excuse to turn its product into wearily labored, crashingly obvious and feebly ineffectual attempts to make a joke.

Update: Bruno bust to return (h/t All Over Albany).

Progress of the occupation

Lots of state police officers were keeping track of today's Occupy Albany rally, including two who told demonstrator Bill Lauritsen he couldn't have his sign in Lafayette Park because it was hanging from a stick -- I guess because the sharp stick could have been used as a weapon, even though Lauritsen showed no sign of doing that. He complied, moving to the sidewalk on Washington Avenue.

Today's event was heavily sponsored by public sector unions, so the speakers included the president of PEF (Ken Brynien) and in the crowd were a couple of lobbyists connected to NYSUT (Billy Easton and Ron Deutsch); and the rhetoric dwelt on opposition to budget cuts as well as support for keeping the millionaire's tax (which is scheduled to expire Dec. 31). The speakers were in front of a Vietnam War memorial, and for a while a banner saying "No millionaire bailout" hung from the sculpted hand of a dead soldier, until someone wisely removed it.

One familiar figure in the crowd, dressed in a suit and tie was Mark Mahoney, until recently the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer for the Glens Falls Post-Star. He was there ex-officio having wandered over on his lunch break from the 1 Elk St. office of the New York State Bar Association, where he now works, and declined to be drawn into comment.

From the park the few hundred occupiers marched up Washington Avenue to Dove Street, where they handed in a message to the New York State Business Council. Jessica Winseki, campaign director for Citizen Action (whose activists were doing much of the organizing for the march) said the message to the Business Council was along the lines of "Stop buying off our government." Those guys who dress up as stereotypical billionaires, including Saratoga County activists Pete Looker and Joe Seeman, were doing their (amusing) act outside, saying "We are the one percent" and "Let them eat cake."

The chant went up, "Hey you millionaires, pay your fair share," as the march headed down State Street back to the Capitol. "How do you fix the deficit?" went another chant, answering itself: "End the wars, tax the rich." In the Capitol, the demonstrators went first as close as they could get to the office of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, then the nearby "War Room," then upstairs to the state Senate, because the Democratic governor and Republican-led Senate are the prime supporters of letting the millionaire's tax expire and thus lowering tax rates on the wealthiest New Yorkers.

"Come out, come out, and face the people that you left out," they chanted to Cuomo, but he didn't. The governor was in Albany County today, quashing a potential Democratic Party revolt at the Desmond hotel and ensuring no resolutions were passed there favoring extension of the millionaire's tax.

There were a woman rabbi and a young woman minister who spoke, and one of the petitions in support of higher taxes on the wealthy quotes New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Another speaker in the War Room had a more radical agenda, calling for "full equality, right now, right now," "pass GENDA now" (a reference to the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act) and opposition to hydrofracking, and ending with the familiar chant "No justice, no peace." He and other speakers had the crowd repeat their words (i.e. the people's mic), but this guy was not getting a strong response.

Outside the Senate chamber, the young lady rev. said "a strong wind is kicking up the dust ... rattling the buildings of power and privilege, and waking those who have been asleep.The wind can't be silenced or bought." The crowd -- the "people's mic" -- repeated her phrases.

Ducking reality on crime

This Chicago Tribune column by Steve Chapman which I saw on Real Clear Politics yesterday purports to describe "How New York Won the War on Crime" without in fact doing anything of the sort. But one piece of his argument caught my attention because it is so common: denial that prison had anything to do with it.

This line is so common as to have become the conventional academic wisdom as apparently in a book mentioned by Chapman called "The City That Became Safe" by Franklin Zimring.

"While authorities elsewhere were building new prisons and filling them up," Chapman writes, "New York was not. After 1990, notes Zimring, the national incarceration rate rose by 65 percent. In Gotham, it shrank by more than a quarter. If locking up criminals is essential to combating crime, the city should be awash in violence. Instead, the tide went out -- and kept receding."

The obvious point being missed is that New York state's incarceration rate went up mightily in the 1980s, which very likely largely caused the precipitous decline in the New York City crime rate from 1990 -- as pointed out here in 2009. Because New York started building prisons sooner it got the benefit in crime reduction earlier than other states, although upstate has benefited less because some NYC criminals moved operations there. It is the reduction in crime that permitted stabilization and then reduction of the number of inmates.

New York state vs. Troy

Moving 600 state jobs out of Troy is a bad blow to that hard-pressed city. The jobs, in private office space north of downtown, have helped stir restaurants to life in that area along with hope for other development. Their departure is terrible news both for downtown -- where the TU story says the office vacancy rate will likely rise to over 20 percent -- and the crime-ridden north-central district.

Most of the jobs are going to Albany's Corning Tower, which is apparently 25 percent empty. It is obviously bad economics to leave prime state real estate substantially vacant, but that doesn't make this move good policy. It would be a lot easier to attract private-sector tenants to the Corning Tower in Empire State Plaza than it's going to be to bring them to Troy.

Albany has also seen recent departures of state jobs from private office space downtown heading to the Harriman campus, along with other government-subsidized job losses. The Cuomo administration is failing upstate urban policy.

The Troy job losses obviously would not have happened when Joe Bruno represented the city and was Senate Republican leader, even though Bruno's hand-picked successor, Sen. Roy McDonald, still represents Troy and their party still controls the Senate. When McDonald became the first Republican to swtich his position this year and help pass gay marriage in the Senate, at Gov. Andrew Cuomo's behest, there were rumblings from critics that he'd sold his vote. I never believed that, and this news provides evidence that he did not gain anything from the administration to benefit the citizens of Troy. Nor is the alliance between the state Republican Party and the Democratic governor to abolish the millionaire's tax paying off for Troy, where millionaires are not thick on the ground.

GOP snatching at defeat

Today's Doonesbury, written several days before yesterday's election, has an Elizabeth Warren campaign operative (and regular strip character) observing an Occupy Boston protest and saying, "They'll be ready by spring -- I KNOW it." She's probably right.

Republicans in New York have been losing elections forever, and yesterday continued to do so. But it was a bad night for the party across the country, despite an apparently weak Democratic president and high unemployment. President Obama, despite his low poll numbers, is still beating or running neck and neck with potential GOP nominees.

Republicans can make legitimate economic points about how debt, runaway entitlements and unaffordable public-sector benefits could send the U.S. the way of Greece or Italy. Instead, they undermine themselves by devoting most of their energy to defending the interests of the 1 percent and fulfilling Grover Norquist's no-tax-hike pledge -- although I guess that doesn't apply to the bottom 50 percent, who many Republicans say need to pay more taxes. That this is a losing formula should by now be blindingly obvious even to the most ossified members of the GOP.

Andy Rooney

In the fall of 1986 I was a reporter for the Glens Falls Post-Star and covered a speech by Andy Rooney, who shared a place with his sister at Pilot Knob. I think it was a Lake George Association event held at the Lake George Club. I thoroughly enjoyed the speech, in which Rooney said the life of a reporter is much preferable to that of an editor or publisher, who is stuck doing clerical work in an office. I found it flattering, of course, and enjoyed filing the copy, particularly since the paper was engaged in a protracted labor dispute in which I had been active on the side of the workers. I continue to share Rooney's sentiment, which can provide some comfort to reporters less successful than he.

Actually, I assumed this was a swan song for the 67-year-old Rooney, little imagining that he would continue to work another 25 years and outlast me in the business. The Albany native died Friday at 92.

Rooney was a man more to my taste on minor than major matters, but he was right that you gotta KBO (which stands for "keep buggering on", and was the acronym regularly used by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt to sign off their wartime correspondence).

Occupiers settling in (updated)

It's Day 16 of the occupation said a sign at the information tent this afternoon, near the medical tent and the legal tent, which is behind the drummers, and not far from the food tents, the cooking and washing-up facilities, the comfort tent (free clothes and umbrellas), the "people's library," the port-a-potties and the other 50 or so tents (mostly for sleeping) now at Academy Park near the state Capitol.

Bands were playing, with more scheduled tomorrow afternoon (hip-hop, I think). They were set up in front of the statue of Joseph Henry and the graceful old Albany Academy building, now HQ of the school district, and in full view of some nice old buildings on Elk Street which are mostly offices for lobbyists.

Yesterday, they apparently held an interfaith prayer vigil.

There was an anti-hydrofracking tent whose message I don't agree with, and elsewhere an anti-Republican sign I thought a bit one-sided (Governor One-Percent Andrew Cuomo is a Democrat, after all). Some of the rhetoric on stage seemed a bit over the top. No wonder the statue of General Philip Schuyler, a revolutionary but part of the one percent, was looking askance away from the park from his perch in front of City Hall. But I have to admit I am impressed by the progress of Occupy Albany. They could use some stuff, signs said, including flashlights, bags of sand, volunteers.

"Occupy Albany is a drug-free gathering," said one sign. I didn't see any cops around, or any need for them. My favorite banner of the day, carried by some middle-aged regular-looking guy, was this: "I can't afford to buy a politician, so I bought this sign."

Update: The wife (who teaches at Lake George, which explains the first item in the post) has some pics of the occupation on her blog.

Governor Wall Street

A Wall Street Journal editorial this morning slaps New York's new mandates for autism insurance overage. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, it says, "has built a reputation in his first year as Governor as a rational and thoughtful Democrat, but he sometimes undermines that image when politically convenient. His predecessor, David Patterson [sic], vetoed an autism mandate because it was too costly. For the sake of New York, let's hope Mr. Cuomo's reversal isn't becoming a habit."

That looks like a shot across Cuomo's bow warning him not to change course and back an extension of the state's millionaire's tax, which is scheduled to sunset at the end of this year. There's no sign that Cuomo will support extending the tax, despite the obvious need and justification for it. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver says he hopes to change the governor's mind in next year's budget negotiations, but Silver lost his best leverage when he surrendered the issue in the last round of budget talks. Come January, Cuomo can argue it would hurt business to raise taxes. The better argument is to act this year to prevent the tax cut from going through, and pass serious mandate relief at the same time to cut costs for local governments and schools.

This being Albany, though, that's unlikely to happen. Instead, the state's leaders talk about mandate relief while in fact enacting new costly mandates, and talk about representing the people while providing tax relief only for the richest among them. No wonder the governor tried to evict those Occupy Albany protestors.