Recent editorials of statewide and national interest from New York’s newspapers:
Trump’s order is the wrong move to fight anti-Semitism
Newsday
Dec. 16
Anti-Semitism comes in many forms.
Fighting it will take more than the flourish of a Sharpie from a president who has given voice to anti-Semitic stereotypes, often regarding money or loyalty to Israel, and a pedestal to those who support such ugliness.
Just this month, two swastikas were painted near the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center in Glen Cove, a verbal tirade was directed at Jewish customers in a Costco in Lawrence, and a synagogue was vandalized in Beverly Hills, California. Two assailants stormed a kosher grocery store in Jersey City last week, killing three civilians and a police officer. One gunman had posted anti-Semitic rants on social media and was affiliated with the Black Hebrew Israelites, a group that espouses anti-Semitic rhetoric.
Anti-Semitism is on the rise, with a more visible, virulent presence, from chants of “Jews will not replace us!” in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, to the tragic synagogue shooting deaths of 11 Jews last year in Pittsburgh.
So, on first blush, it would seem any federal action to combat anti-Semitism should be welcomed.
But President Donald Trump’s executive order that includes Jews under the protection of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is not a simple act of fighting anti-Semitism. Title VI prohibits discrimination based on race, color and national origin. Trump is attempting to amend the law by an order that seems to label Judaism as a race or nationality.
Supporters note that Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush sought to reinterpret the law to include discrimination on the basis of group identity or ethnic characteristics. But Trump’s change comes with a troubled history. In 1930s Germany, Jews were seen as a different race or as a foreign threat. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union labeled Judaism as an individual’s nationality.
More recently, Trump has talked often of American Jews’ loyalty to Israel, buying into a problematic trope. The executive order is partly based on concerns over anti-Semitism emerging from the boycott, divest, sanctions movement known as BDS, a Palestinian-driven effort that encourages boycotting Israel and Israeli products.
But the order risks marginalizing Jews in disturbing ways, and providing a path for others to question Jews’ patriotism. American Jews are American. Their loyalty shouldn’t be questioned.
Trump signed the executive order flanked by Pastor Robert Jeffress, who has said Jews were going to hell, and John Hagee, who said the Holocaust was part of God’s plan to create the state of Israel. Just days before, in speaking to the Israeli-American Council, a nonprofit organization that advocates for Israeli American Jews, Trump used stereotypical language, saying his audience had “no choice” but to vote for him because otherwise its members would lose money to a wealth tax, adding that some Jews “don’t love Israel enough.”
To fight this resurgence of anti-Semitism, Trump must go beyond a ceremony filled with men in red yarmulkes stamped with “Make America Great Again.” He must condemn every symbol of hate and find better ways to stop such despicable acts.
Online: https://nwsdy.li/2PYg7OL
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De Blasio’s new homeless plan is just more of the same
New York Post
Dec. 17
Mayor Bill de Blasio says he will end long-term street homelessness … over the next five years, which means he’ll be out of office when his failure is indisputable.
Which it will be, since his plan amounts to more of the same: more beds to transition street homeless to a better life, more outreach, more “supportive housing,” more treatment, more technology. More of the all-carrots approach that ignores too many grim truths about the hard-core homeless.
The plan also guarantees a never-ending influx of new “unsheltered individuals”: It even offers housing to people who’ve never spent time in a city shelter.
And it will expand “low expectations” shelters that don’t require you to stay off alcohol and drugs, or even to meet curfew, to keep your bed. This may mean fewer people sleeping on the streets, especially in the cold months - but it does little to address the issues that led them to become homeless.
Most important: All the efforts at persuading people - especially the severely mentally ill and the hardest-core drug abusers - to accept help would work better if de Blasio were willing to use a few sticks.
Yet the city will only forcibly remove someone who’s sleeping on the street if an outreach team with mental-health professionals determines he’s a risk to himself or others.
Given how regularly troubled homeless wind up assaulting other New Yorkers, those teams plainly fail to identify a lot of “risks to others.”
City policy has long been based on the same philosophy as the Ninth Circuit ruling the Supreme Court just let stand: Stopping people from sleeping on the streets amounts to “cruel and unusual punishment” - no matter that it has “spawned crime and violence, incubated disease” and threatened “the lives and well-being both of those living on the streets and the public at large,” as the city of Boise noted in its appeal to the Supremes.
New York does everything for the homeless that the progressive Ninth Circuit judges would want; under this mayor, it has more than doubled spending on such services to well over $3 billion a year. Now de Blasio pretends that another $100 million a year for his new plan will work miracles.
What does it take for progressives to admit their “solutions” don’t work?
Online: https://bit.ly/2S7A880
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Scrutiny Needed Before Incentives Handed Out For Development Projects
The Post-Journal
Dec. 17
The sudden closing of Castelli America’s plant in Blockville last week is bad news for nearly 100 Amish families who sold their milk to the cheese plant.
It’s also yet another troubling sign for companies that try to do business in New York state.
New York state and Chautauqua County combined to throw roughly $8 million at Castelli America as well as roughly $600,000 at Empire Specialty Cheese, Castelli’s predecessor in the former Fairbank Farms building, in 2013. Despite that massive investment, 67 people find themselves out of a job three weeks before Christmas while the aforementioned Amish families face uncertainty as well.
What happened?
A combination of production issues and the loss of a couple of big customers made the Blockville plant unprofitable, and the Italy-based Reggio Emilia, Castelli’s parent company, decided it wasn’t in a position to keep the Blockville plant afloat.
An economic development strategy that focuses on throwing money at companies to get them to locate in New York state is an absolute crapshoot for taxpayers. New York state and Chautauqua County economic development officials have thrown heaping piles of money at two companies to fill the Blockville location. Empire Specialty Cheese ran out of money despite millions of dollars of investment. More free money didn’t keep Castelli America in business, either.
It turns out, according to NPR, that there is a glut of cheese in the United States. NPR reported earlier this year that there is 900,000 cubic yards of cheese in storage - enough to wrap around the U.S. Capitol building. The stockpile started to build several years ago, in large part because the pace of milk production began to exceed the rates of consumption, says Andrew Novakovic, professor of agricultural economics at Cornell University. Over the past 10 years, milk production has increased by 13 percent because of high prices. But what dairy farmers failed to realize was that Americans are drinking less milk. According to data from the USDA, Americans drank just 149 pounds of milk per capita in 2017, down from 247 pounds in 1975.
“What has changed - and changed fairly noticeably and fairly recently - is people are turning away from processed cheese,” Andrew Novakovic, a professor of agricultural economics at Cornell University, told NPR. “It’s also the case that we’re seeing increased sales of kind of more exotic, specialty, European-style cheeses. Some of those are made in the U.S. A lot of them aren’t.”
Why, then, have New York state and Chautauqua County thrown money at two cheese companies? Smaller, craft-type operations stand a chance. Processed cheese makers seemingly do not. Rather than throw money around like a drunken sailor, perhaps our economic development officials need to do a bit of research before approving loans and incentives.
That isn’t to say that no incentives are needed to get companies to locate in both New York and, more specifically, Chautauqua County. They will be. It’s the unfortunate nature of the beast. Development officials can be much more discerning before giving your money away. It may not have been known in 2016 that processed cheese consumption was going to decrease precipitously, but it was likely known in 2018, when New York state grants were given to Castelli to help the company expand. Simply granting money at that point was probably a bad investment of state tax dollars. A simple phone call to Cornell University officials likely could have predicted the grants were a shaky bet - if anyone had thought to ask.
Online: https://bit.ly/34w0zXL
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Auburn school security is too important to shortchange
The Auburn Citizen
Dec. 18
As the Auburn Police Department adjusts the number of officers assigned to buildings in the city school district, we urge everyone involved to find a way to lessen the impact on schools as much as possible.
Under its current contract with the Auburn Enlarged City School District, the APD has two officers assigned to Auburn High School, one in the junior high and another rotating time between the five elementary schools. But faced with an ongoing overall police staffing shortage combined with one of those assigned school officers going out on leave, the APD temporarily is down to three officers devoted to the SRO program, rather than four.
The change is meant to be a short-term reduction, with the the hope that the APD will have adequate staffing before the start of the 2020 school year to again fully staff the SRO program. School Superintendent Jeff Pirozzolo appears to be in agreement that the reduction is necessary, but the unions representing Auburn teachers and police officers have expressed concerns about student safety and the department’s obligation to the school district.
And while we understand that spending plans are subject to change, taxpayers have every right to question the move, as well, having voted in favor of a school district budget that supports the cost of four SROs.
The APD activity report for October notes that the SRO program “handled 195 incidents in and around school buildings which required intervention by school officers. The incidents included criminal cases, fighting, bullying and other disruptive behavior.”
To be fair, the report of 2,617 overall calls for service includes nine burglaries, nine assaults, nine sex offenses, 14 drug investigations, 100 reports of domestic violence and 120 car accidents. The APD currently has 10 vacancies and two members out with injuries, so we understand that staffing schools isn’t as easy as pulling someone off the daily patrol ranks, but there may be a better solution than a unilateral 25% reduction in the number of officers in school buildings.
We wonder, for example, if Sgt. Greg Dann, who oversees the SRO program, could work out of an office at Auburn High School on a consistent schedule, making him readily available to help the remaining SRO there should a problem arise.
That’s just one possibility. But the goal should be to come up with some alternatives to a significant, albeit temporary, cut the dramatically reduced coverage for the school buildings.
The Auburn school board should listen to the district’s employees, parents and taxpayers and talk with school administrators and APD management about exploring a compromise solution to maintaining the highest level of police coverage for schools.
Online: https://bit.ly/2PYyGlF
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Lawmakers mustn’t let governor change elections without them
Adirondack Daily Enterprise
Dec. 18
The state Legislature has a little more than a week to decide to hold a special session if it wants to make any changes to the Public Campaign Finance Commission’s recommendations.
Legislative leadership should do so.
Many will always view the Public Campaign Finance Commission’s work as illegitimate because the commission was created as part of a state budget deal to perform work the Legislature should be doing. Because legislators can’t come together on a good system, Gov. Andrew Cuomo circumvented the Legislature and created a hand-picked commission to do his bidding.
In this case, the bidding of the governor and state Democrats is bad for the state.
Housing the public financing program within the state Board of Elections is problematic. In 2013, the governor’s own Moreland Commission to Investigate Public Corruption wrote in its report, “Our investigation reveals that the state Board of Elections lacks the structural independence, the resources, and the will to enforce election and campaign finance laws.” That’s exactly the agency that should be overseeing this cockamamie program.
We note the Fair Elections for New York Campaign’s criticism that contribution limits to campaigns are, in its opinion, still too high while the commission’s recommendations don’t do enough to tighten restrictions on campaign war chests and “doing business” restrictions.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, is the increase in the number of votes it will take for a minor party to receive statewide ballot access. It made little sense for the commission to even take up the issue of minor parties since it has absolutely nothing to do with campaign finance. It’s clearly a move to protect the big two parties, Democratic and Republican. Suspiciously, the limits were set at exactly a spot where it would exclude left-side parties such as Working Families - which can at times compete with Democrats - but would include the somewhat larger Conservative Party, letting that party continue to split the right.
Democrats and Republicans already hold too much dominance. Libertarians, Greens and other smaller parties bring ideas into the public sphere that might not have been heard otherwise. New York state should do more to create avenues to the ballot, not restrict them.
There is one final criticism of the commission’s work that should doom it to the dustbin of history. Too much of its work was done behind closed doors with no opportunity for public input. It’s fine if state legislators want to use the commission’s recommendations as a starting point for meaningful legislative changes, but in no way should the commission’s work become law as it is. The public deserves to have the shape of its election system molded by the legislative process with legislators held accountable by their constituents for their votes.
Return to Albany, state legislators, and do the work you were elected to do. The clock is ticking.
Online: https://bit.ly/2PAB9nu
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