Month: November 2016

Almost four hundred years ago the first immigrants arrived off the shore of Massachusetts to settle in America.

They were a shipload of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants on board the ship, Mayflower.

They remained on board the ship throughout the first winter and by spring, half of the one-hundred and two aboard had died from exposure, scurvy and other contagious diseases.

During the year 1621 the surviving passengers were saved by members of the Native American tribes living in the area, including one who had been kidnapped by a British sea captain and sold into slavery but had escaped and managed to return.

The Pilgrims, as they have come to be called, were taught by the Native-Americans how to grow corn, fish in the streams and draw sap from the maple trees.

In November 1621 their survival was celebrated by a joint feast with the Native American tribal members who had saved them and was the first Thanksgiving.

In the next four centuries scores of immigrants would come to America both voluntarily and involuntarily.

During the two decades following the first Thanksgiving, 20,000 more Puritans arrived from England establishing colonies in New England and upstate New York.

During this period, New York was colonized by the Dutch and the middle colonies of New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware were populated by immigrants of Scotch-Irish, German and Swedish descent.

The South saw the emergence of large plantations owned by British settlers who imported African-American slaves who comprised thirty-eight percent of the population while the British and Germans comprised sixty-two percent.

The Irish began arriving in the latter part of that century and into the 1700’s often as indentured servants bound to the masters as another form of economic slavery.

Never missing an opportunity to exploit, Britain exiled sixty-thousand convicts its colony in Georgia.

By 1790 eighty-percent of the population was of British ancestry.

Our first experience with anti-immigration Nativism was embodied in the Know-Nothing Party whose anti-Irish and anti-German platform was their principal ideology. The pary’s efforts were thwarted by the influx of Irish immigrants forced to leave Ireland during the potato famine along with other European immigrants fleeing the various failed revolutions in 1848.

The end of the Mexican war saw instant citizenship conferred on the people living in the territories of New Mexico and California.

Immigrants from all over the world flocked to California during the Gold Rush commencing the following year.

The end of the Civil War brought about the emancipation of the slaves forcibly brought here, although it did not grant them equality or comparable legal status. Despite this hypocrisy, the Government of France bestowed the gift of the Statute of Liberty rising in New York Harbor with a plaque on which is inscribed the sonnet New Colossus by Emma Lazarus and its verse, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free.”

This was the sight that future immigrants, Italians, Poles, Lebanese, Syrians and Jews fleeing the pogroms of the Russian Empire first saw as the ships bringing them docked at Ellis Island in the harbor.

Ultimately, Congress began to pass quota laws which favored Europeans. The laws were vigorously enforced even preventing a shipload of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution from entering the United States and forcing it to return to Germany resulting in all aboard it perishing in the Holocaust.

During the same period, American citizens of Japanese descent were interned and their homes and businesses forfeited throughout the duration of World War II.

We have now just completed the most divisive Presidential campaign in my lifetime.

We have a President-Elect who campaigned on deporting undocumented immigrants, some of whom were brought here as infants and know no other home.

He has vowed to build a wall on the Mexican border to keep people fleeing violence in Central America and drug cartels in Mexico from entering.

He campaigned on the promise of banning all Muslims seeking to enter the United States and now proposes a registry for them.

We now have a Chief White House strategist from the alt-right world. A world that celebrates white supremacy and counts among its members Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members.

I have to wonder how we got to this place.

At this writing, the members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota have had water cannons, rubber bullets, percussion grenades, pepper spray and tear gas used on them as the protest the construction of an oil pipeline that endangers their water supply and burial grounds.

The CEO of the company Energy Transfers Partners, that is building the pipeline, Kelcey Warren, has donated over $ 100,000 to Donald Trump’s campaign.

I’m sure he doesn’t expect anything in return.

I also wonder, if the Native-Americans who saved the first immigrants in 1620 knew then, what we all know now, would they have saved them?

Happy Thanksgiving.

This past Tuesday the Joint Salary Commission appointed by the Governor, Legislative leaders and the Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals arrived at its deadline for action without recommending salary increases for the legislators.

The Legislature has not had a salary increase since 1999.

The three members appointed by the Governor and the Judiciary voted to abstain on any recommendation for an increase, while the two members appointed by the Legislative leaders voted to recommend an increase.

The reason for the abstention was simple.

The Legislature would not enact any meaningful ethics reform.

In the past fourteen years, twenty-two members of the New York State Legislature have been convicted of political corruption felonies while serving in that body. Four of them were majority leaders of the State Senate and one was Speaker of the Assembly. Yet, when badly needed ethics reforms are proposed, they fall on deaf ears.

During the nineteen years that I sat as a County Court Judge we received two salary increases.

The first was in 1999 when we received one along with the Legislature.

We then went thirteen years without one.

Why?

The reason was that the Legislature tied any judicial salary increase to its own legislative salary increase.

Never mind that our two salary considerations are entirely different.

The state legislative positions are viewed as part-time and legislators are free to engage in any occupation or profession that they desire without any limit on the amount they can earn.

Judges are full-time positions and are prohibited from engaging in any other profession or occupation to supplement our income.

To make matters worse, the Legislators lacked the intestinal fortitude to raise their own salaries or our salaries during the regular legislative session. Fearing that such an increase of their own salaries would be so unpopular that it might jeopardize their re-election, they would only consider raises during the lame duck session between Election Day and the start of a new session.

Since it is more likely that a legislator will die or be convicted of a crime than an incumbent be defeated, it’s hard to see how this delusion took hold.

Another stumbling block was that the Governor would condition his approval of the raises on passage of an unrelated issue he championed, like ethics reform, which the Legislature was unwilling to pass.

As a result for thirteen years, judicial salary increases died with the legislative ones.

In 2012, after the first Commission formed to review salary increases for both branches of government made a recommendation for judicial salary increases that was binding, judges received their second increase during my career. The Governor demanded ethics reform from the legislators and when they balked he refused to consider an increase for them.

The Governor’s latest insistence on ethics reform as a condition of a legislative salary increase seems to be an obvious attempt at a deflection from his own problems.

Since his premature and ill-considered dissolution of the Moreland Commission and the convictions of Sheldon Silver and Dean Skelos which ensued from that, he now finds himself mired in his own political corruption probe. His closest aide, indeed one he characterized as his brother, and others have been charged with bribery, extortion and bid rigging involving his signature economic development programs.

Cuomo, being the King of Hare Brained Ideas, has now vowed that neither his campaign and the Democratic State Committee will accept donations from companies that have responded to state request for proposals (RFPs) until six months after the winning company has been announced.

He hasn’t said anything about the silent handshakes, winks and nods that usually accompany the letting of RFPs during the awarding process.

Against that backdrop, his pious insistence on ethics reform is reminiscent of the children’s fairy tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

I have friends who serve in the Legislature, whom I know to be hardworking, honest public servants.

Still, given the rampant history of corruption and the current scandals unfolding, ethics reform with the outside income restrictions it includes, would not only make good sense but would be a small price to pay for their long desired salary increase.

The definition of insanity is said to be doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

The day after the election I decided that I needed to focus on a less violent sport, so I decided to attend the University of Tennessee-Kentucky football game that Saturday.

I am a 1971 graduate of U-T and have often told people that you really can’t appreciate the pageantry of college football until you attend a Southeastern Conference game.

I managed to interest my brother, Chuck, and a good friend that I graduated from Syracuse Law School with, Pat Doyle, in traveling to Knoxville, Tennessee with me. I bought tickets over the phone and made hotel reservations on line for that weekend.

Chuck and I decided to take two days and drive to Knoxville and Pat would fly in from his home outside of Washington, D.C. where he is a very successful attorney.

Chuck and I set out on Thursday morning. My plan was to cover as many miles as possible the first day and get as close to Knoxville as possible, so we could spend Friday on campus and pick Pat up when he flew in.

The drive to Knoxville is basically a straight shot down Interstate 81 until you reach I-40 west, which takes you into Knoxville. It is slightly less than eight-hundred miles and takes approximately twelve hours according to google maps.

It is safe to say that google maps has never driven route 81 through Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Construction crews have been working on Interstate 81 in Scranton since I graduated from U-T without any prospect of finishing it. Terri and I drove this portion of 81 in August and I am happy to report that since then, they have completed approximately three feet of the repairs. I never cease to be amazed at the strategy that involves closing one lane of the highway for fifty miles so that they can repair a couple of feet of it.

We drove all day Thursday and made it to Wytheville, Virginia which is approximately six-hundred miles and should take about nine hours. We made it in eleven.

The following day we arrived in Knoxville at noon. We picked Pat up at the airport and I proceeded to give Chuck and Pat a tour of the campus.

One of the great features of the University of Tennessee is that the State of Tennessee will spare no expense in improving it and offering a first rate education. When I was a Political Science major there, almost all of the faculty had their degrees from Ivy League schools and the campus was always being expanded and improved. The same held true as we walked the campus that Friday. There were new dormitories, academic buildings and a state of the art student union was under construction which would double the size of the existing one.

Pat and Chuck wanted to see my old neighborhood but, alas, it had been bulldozed. They immediately jumped to the conclusion that it had been bulldozed because I had lived there. That may have, in some part, been true but the ostensible reason was that it was the location of the 1982 Knoxville World’s Fair.

I was amazed at the changes in the Knoxville area.

When I was a student, if you left campus and went downtown you were left with the same sensation that a Peace Corp volunteer must experience when arriving at their duty station.

In the forty-five years that have elapsed since I graduated, Knoxville has changed dramatically. At its center is the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame which sits on Pat Summitt Drive, named after the legendary U-T women’s basketball coach and the winningest Division I basketball coach in history. Downtown also boasts an “Old Town” section filled with shops and restaurants similar to what we have in the Armory. Greater metropolitan Knoxville has expanded to include first class medical facilities, medical practices and other innovative technologies.

That night we had dinner with a couple that I went to U-T with and remained fast friends. We have arrived at that age where we talked of children and grandchildren rather than the volatile issues that had consumed us in the seventies or even the election that had just concluded.

The following day the three of us went to the football game.

Neyland Stadium holds over one-hundred and two thousand fans and was nearly filled to capacity as the temperature rose into the seventies on a sundrenched afternoon.

In this post 9/11 era we all had to pass through metal detectors which I set off because of my artificial knee. When I explained it to the police officer, he replied, “Well you couldn’t have left that at home. Enjoy the game.”

The Tennessee Volunteers didn’t disappoint. They led Kentucky throughout the game, winning 49 to 36. The half-time show was devoted to celebrating the indigenous tribes of Tennessee and North Carolina and honoring the service of Native-American military veterans. It was a truly impressive ceremony that the fans loved.

That night we went to dinner in the “Old Town” section of Knoxville and at nine o’ clock called it a night. Age, not maturity, does that to you.

The following day, we dropped Pat at the airport and started our journey home. We stayed overnight in Winchester, Va. and arrived home on Monday afternoon.

The trip was the perfect respite from the turmoil that culminated in the election last Tuesday.

Thomas Wolfe wrote, “You Can’t Go Home Again.”

He was wrong.

You can.

I’ll have to do it again next year.

In August of 2003 following the liberation of Baghdad, the Iraqi National Museum was looted by crowds and Iraq’s most valuable antiquities were stolen for sale on the black market.

Asked to comment on this event, Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, observed, “Freedom is untidy.”

Well, I guess we learned that lesson again this year.

In forty-eight hours, mercifully, this presidential election will be over.

It can’t come soon enough for me.

Although I am a self-confessed political junkie, who thought that I was immune to being offended by a candidate’s behavior and tactics, I found that even I was still capable of being shocked and offended.

At the end of September, I was challenged by a reader to make a case for Hillary Clinton.

I tried my best to do so, laying out their policy differences as clearly as I could. I think she is far superior to Trump as a prospective President and Commander-in-Chief in every important area. Nevertheless, I want to revisit them both again on the issues of character and they ways in which they have comported themselves during this campaign.

I am not enthused about the choices this year.

I have never been a fan of the Clintons.

Bill Clinton lost me when he flew home to Little Rock, Arkansas during the 1992 New York Democratic Presidential primary in which the death penalty was an issue, so he could preside over the execution of a brain damaged death row inmate named Ricky Ray Rector who saved the dessert from his last meal so he could eat it after the execution.

If I had been Monica Lewinsky’s father, he would have needed dental work.

I thought Hillary was a creditable First Lady and admired the way she tried to push universal health care in that role.

I thought she was an effective Senator from New York but I still don’t understand why she didn’t read the classified National Security analysis about whether Iraq actually possessed weapons of mass destruction before casting a vote to go to war with that country.

To be fair to her, apparently only a handful of the members of Congress did read it which I still find appalling.

The e-mail server is a festering wound that could have been avoided, particularly if you know that you’re going to be a candidate for President and you suffer on the issue of transparency.

When the news broke about the server in March 2015, I predicted it would haunt her campaign for the Presidency and it continued to hang over her like the Sword of Damocles as we go to the polls on Tuesday.

Only on this day at this hour has the FBI Director again affirmed that she committed no crimes in using it.

The Clinton Foundation is another self-inflicted, unforced error. If, as Secretary of State, you proclaim that you’re going to put a Chinese wall between the Department of State and the Foundation, there has to be a real wall. That would seem to be especially important if you know that you’re going to be a candidate for President.

Her penchant for secrecy is understandable, given the number of times her husband has been indiscrete, but it could still prove to be her undoing.

All of this, however, pales in comparison to Donald Trump.

Transparent is not a word that anyone would put in a sentence that starts with the words “Donald Trump.”

In 2015 he pledged to release his tax returns, the same as every candidate for President in the last half century. Since then he has refused to disclose them, hiding behind the bogus claim that he is prevented from doing so because he is being audited by the Internal Revenue Service.

Likewise he promised that his wife, Melania, would hold a press conference to address all questions that have arisen about her path to citizenship. That has not occurred.

Trump University has been exposed as a scam that dupes people, anxious to learn whatever secrets to success that Trump claims to know, out of thousands of dollars in “tuition fees.”

The Trump Foundation has been revealed to be a scheme that involves Trump seeking donations from others that he donates to charitable organizations while charging them exorbitant fees to host their charitable functions at his Florida country club.

Trump has also used the Foundation money to settle legal claims made against him and to purchase paintings of himself at “charity auctions”, which now grace the walls in his country club.

Trump has shown himself to be a racist, misogynistic, uninformed narcissist who revels in the adulation of the neo-Nazi, white supremacist, alt-right universe that have been drawn by his appeals to their darkest impulses, like moths to the flame.

There is no group that is safe from his bullying and vitriol.

Mexicans and Latinos are “rapists.”

Latina beauty queens are to be characterized as “eating machines” and called “Miss Housekeeping,” an apparent reference to the Latina accent.

Veterans who were taken prisoner during war, while fighting for this country and were tortured are not heroes, because they “were captured.”

Women are “disgusting pigs” who exist solely for his uninvited, unrequited sexual gratification.

The disabled exist to be mocked and made sport of, if they have written something that displeases him.

Immigrants are to be rounded up and deported, whether or not they were brought here as infants and have lived productive lives and contributed to this nation.

Muslims are to be banned from this country regardless of whether they or loved ones have given their lives for it in the service.

The legitimacy of first African-American President is attacked by spreading the racist lie that he was not born here.

In his opinion, Saddam Hussein and the KGB thug, Vladimir Putin are to be admired and emulated.

It is why the Cincinnati Enquirer endorsed the first Democratic candidate for President in almost a century.

It is why the Dallas Morning News has endorsed a Democrat for President after seventy-five years.

It is no wonder that no living Republican President will endorse him.

It is no wonder that any living past Republican candidate for President will defend, campaign or appear with him.

It is no wonder that former Secretary of State, the General, Colin Powell and the vast majority of Republican diplomats and national security experts condemns him.

This Tuesday, you have to make a choice.

If you vote for Donald Trump because “you don’t like her” and he wins, you have to take ownership of that.

If you vote for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein “because you don’t like her” and Donald Trump wins, you have to take ownership of that too.

During the 1920 Presidential campaign, almost a century ago, H.L. Mencken observed,
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president, represents more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

We have never come this close to fulfilling that prophecy as we are today.

Don’t do it.